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Epstein’s activities—but he tries to sell it to an undercover agent. Rodriguez is sentenced to 18 months in jail on a charge of theft and of withholding evidence (and a further two and half years on a related gun charge). Scott Rothstein, a lawyer whose firm represented additional girls in their suits against Epstein, also goes to jail for recruiting investors to pay for these suits on the fraudulent basis that settlements had already been reached. It’s the largest fraud in Florida history and Rothstein receives a 50-year sentence. Then, Brad Edwards, Rothstein’s former partner, sues the federal government in 2008 for abridging the rights of two of the original complainants under the Crime Victim Rights Act (giving victims the right to be consulted about the disposition of their cases) regarding the Justice Departments agreement not to prosecute in favor of the state action. In 2014, Edwards tries to ad Virginia Roberts, another of the original complainants, who has previously settled with Epstein, to the long-running suit. Roberts who was paid a settlement under the original terms of Epstein’s agreement—that he would pay attorney’s fees and not oppose any law suits against him—is now trying to overturn the agreement under which she was paid, and, with Edwards, further suing Epstein for $50,000,000. As the most vocal of the accusers, Roberts, with the Daily Mail being her prime outlet, emerges now with what is billed as a memoir of her “sex slavery” with Epstein, written ten years after the fact. She names a number of people as being at Epstein’s Island home, including Clinton and Al Gore and his wife, who Epstein’s lawyers insists were never there—proof available through secret service records. The FBI is now arguing that Roberts should not be party to the suit against the government because she refused to cooperate with the government in its investigation in 2007, hence has no standing as a victim. (At the same time, the FBI included her on the list of 40 victims with whom it mandated Epstein reach a settlement.) It is hard to find a more hyperbolic intersection of media and lawyers then in Epstein’s case. Edwards, over the six years of his law suit, tries to depose Clinton, Donald Trump, and Dershowitz—almost all of his targets coming directly from the original Vanity Fair and New York Magazine articles about Epstein. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022724