DOJ-OGR-00021346.jpg

Case 22-1426, Document OND 3536038, Page17/4 of 258 Case 1:20-cr-00330-AJN Document 204-3 Filed 04/16/21 Page 172 of 348 record, no restitution, no sex offender status, publication at a trial of the names of certain victims that didn’t want their names revealed and the general difficulties of a trial for the victims and their families. Although his emails showed that, at the time, he advocated for prosecution of Epstein, Lourie told OPR it was also his general recollection that “everybody at the USAO working on the matter had expressed concerns at various times about the long-term viability of a federal prosecution of Epstein due to certain factual and legal hurdles, as well as issues with the cooperation and desires of the victims.” Similarly, Menchel—who had experience prosecuting sexual assault crimes—recalled understanding that many of the victims were unwilling to go forward and would have experienced additional trauma as a result of a trial, and some had made statements exonerating Epstein. Menchel told OPR he believed that if the USAO had filed the proposed charges against Epstein, Epstein would have elected to go to trial. In Menchel’s view, the USAO therefore had to weigh the risk of losing at trial, and thereby re-traumatizing the victims, against the benefits gained through a negotiated result, which ensured that Epstein served time in jail, registered as a sexual offender, and made restitution to his victims. Sloman also recalled witness challenges and concerns about the viability of the government’s legal theories. He told OPR: [I]t seemed to me you had a tranche of witnesses who were not going to be reliable. You had a tranche [of] witnesses who were going to be severely impeached. People who loved Jeffrey Epstein who thought he was a Svengali .. . who were going to say I told him I was 18 years old. You had witnesses who were scared to death of the public light being shown on them because their parents didn’t even know -- had very vulnerable victims. You had all of these concerns. Acosta told OPR that he recalled discussions with his senior managers about the victims’ general credibility and reluctance to testify and the evidentiary strength of the case, all of which factored into the resolution. He acknowledged that his understanding of the facts was not “oranular” and did not encompass a detailed understanding of each victim’s expected testimony, but he trusted that his “team” had already “done the diligence necessary” to make recommendations about the evidentiary strength of the case. Acosta recalled discussing the facts with Sloman and Menchel, and possibly Lourie, none of whom had as detailed an understanding of the facts as Villafafia. Nevertheless, OPR credits Acosta’s statement that he reasonably believed, based on his conversations with others who expressed this view, that a trial would pose significant evidentiary challenges. Other witnesses corroborated the subjects’ testimony regarding witness challenges, including the FBI co-case agent, who recalled during his OPR interview that some of the victims had expressed concern for their safety and “a lot of them d[id]n’t want to take the stand, and 146 DOJ-OGR-00021346