After Jeffrey Epstein died in jail in 2019 and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested and charged with sex-trafficking crimes the following summer, federal prosecutors began mapping out their next steps.
Would they bring further charges against Mr. Epstein’s associates? Against his corporate enablers? Against the wealthy men who paid him hundreds of millions of dollars?
A document that the Justice Department released on Monday offers some tantalizing clues, but no clear answers. It is an email sent ahead of what appeared to be a meeting with the deputy attorney general in November 2020, and it laid out the criminal charges and investigative steps that prosecutors were mulling at the time.
The email is mostly blacked out — including the entirety of a section under the heading “anticipated charges and investigative steps.” The heavy redactions are likely to provoke additional frustration among critics who have faulted the Trump administration for not being adequately transparent in the release of the Epstein files.
But the 2020 email, written by someone whose name is redacted, notes that prosecutors at the time were in negotiations with a lawyer for one of Mr. Epstein’s longtime acquaintances over a possible plea deal. The email described the associate as having “scheduled hundreds of sexual massages with minors for Epstein,” though it noted that she “was also a victim of his sexual abuse.”
The person in question, who the email said was considering pleading guilty to an obstruction-of-justice charge, appeared to be Sarah Kellen, based on the description in the email.
Ms. Kellen, who was in her early 20s when she met Mr. Epstein, was one of the potential co-conspirators named in an agreement that Mr. Epstein reached in 2007 with Florida federal prosecutors. The agreement assured that neither he nor other co-conspirators would be charged with federal crimes. In return, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty the following year to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor — a deal that has long been criticized for its leniency.
Ms. Kellen, who lives in Florida, could not be reached for comment. Brad Edwards, who has represented dozens of Mr. Epstein’s victims, currently represents Ms. Kellen and declined to comment.
Susan Necheles, who was Ms. Kellen’s lawyer at the time, said her client “never did anything wrong and never had any intention of pleading to anything.
“She was a victim of Epstein.” Ms. Necheles added. “We told them that repeatedly.”
Manhattan federal prosecutors didn’t charge Ms. Kellen.
Another document released on Monday offered additional clues as to how investigators were thinking about the case after Mr. Epstein’s August 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell. In the May 2020 message, a federal prosecutor hinted not only at the possibility of criminal charges against Mr. Epstein’s associates and enablers, but also referred to a 13-page “corporate prosecution memo.”
It was unclear which companies the Justice Department might have contemplated prosecuting, and the underlying memo didn’t appear to be included in the nearly 30,000 pages of files the Justice Department released on Monday. The May 2020 email noted that the corporate prosecution memo was “never discussed.”
David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.
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