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CHAPTER 50 secution agreement, a fifty-three- sderal prosecutors had prepared —one that claimed he'd abused iever was filed. mting Epstein’s victims were con- ims were not consulted about the ~ ! is inexcusable. The “government ; ‘in the dark’ so that it could enter q ned to prevent the victims from ~ i ould argue, in documents filed on a onths, the lawyers claimed, from q signed, on September 24, 2007, © in’s bidding, [had] concealed the ” and continued to do so until the Firtay Ricw moment that Epstein had to plead guilty in court, which he finally did June 30, 2008. . In the interim, according to their lawyers, Epstein’s victims were only told, “This case is currently under investigation.” A lawsuit that Bradley Edwards, a victims’ rights attorney in Fort Lauderdale, filed in July of 2008 cited the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, or CVRA (title 18, section 3771, of the US Code), which states that “victims of federal crimes have rights, includ- ing the right to be heard in court, and most particularly, not to be precluded from court proceedings, and the right to be treated fairly.” According to him, prosecutors had violated the CVRA rights of the victims. Edwards, who said he was working pro bono, knew that this suit against the government would not allow for monetary recovery of any sort (including lawyers’ fees). But he also knew that if the government, urged by Jeffrey Epstein, had entered into a contract that improperly or illegally violated the rights of Epstein’s victims, then that contract, by nature, would have been improper in and of itself—in which case, the only remedy would have been to have the contract invalidated. And while it is difficult to know what, exactly, would happen if the contract is overturned, one possibility is that the government could prosecute Epstein for crimes against his victims, if the | statute of limitations on those crimes has not expired. At the time of this writing, that case is winding its way | through the courts. It has all the earmarks of a modern-day | Bleak House—the Charles Dickens novel about a legal case that "is so massive and so complex that it drags on forever and drags “fveryone involved into the mire. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010532