Palm Beach, Florida
November 2004
Jane Doe No. 2
Michelle Licata climbed a narrow, winding staircase, past walls covered with photographs of naked girls. At the top of the stairwell was a vast master bed and bath, with cream-colored shag carpeting and a hot pink and mint green sofa.
The room was dimly lit and very cold.
There was a vanity, a massage table and a timer.
A silver-haired man wearing nothing but a white towel came into the room. He lay facedown on a massage table, and while talking on a phone, directed Licata to rub his back, legs and feet.
After he hung up, the man turned over and dropped his towel, exposing himself. He told Licata to get comfortable and then, in a firm voice, told her to take off her clothes.
At 16, Licata had never before been fully naked in front of anyone. Shaking and panicked, she mechanically pulled off her jeans and stripped down to her underwear. He set the timer for 30 minutes and then reached over and unsnapped her bra. He then began touching her with one hand and masturbating himself with the other.
"I kept looking at the timer because I didn't want to have this mental image of what he was doing," she remembered of the massage. "He kept trying to put his fingers inside me and told me to pinch his nipples. He was mostly saying 'just do that, harder, harder and do this. ... '"
After he ejaculated, he stood up and walked to the shower, dismissing her as if she had been in history class.
It wasn't long before a lot of Licata's fellow students at Royal Palm Beach High School had heard about "a creepy old guy" named Jeffrey who lived in a pink waterfront mansion and was paying girls $200 to $300 to give him massages that quickly turned sexual.
Eventually, the Palm Beach police, and then the FBI, came knocking on Licata's door. In the police report, Licata was referred to as a Jane Doe 2 in order to protect her identity as a minor.
There would be many more Jane Does to follow: Jane Doe No. 3, Jane Doe No. 4, Jane Does 5, 6, 7, 8 _ and as the years went by _ Jane Does 102 and 103.
Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women's movement about sexual assault _ and a decade before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and U.S. Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar _ there was Jeffrey Edward Epstein.
Epstein, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager whose friends included a constellation of entertainers, politicians, business titans and royalty, for years lured teenage girls to his Palm Beach mansion as part of a cult-like sex pyramid scheme, police in the town of Palm Beach found.
The girls arrived, sometimes by taxi, for trysts at all hours of the day and night. Few were told much more than that they would be paid to give an old man a massage _ and that he might ask them to strip down to their underwear or get naked. But what began as a massage often led to masturbation, oral sex, intercourse and other sex acts, police and court records show. The alleged abuse dates back to 2001 and went on for years.
In 2007, despite ample physical evidence and multiple witnesses corroborating the girls' stories, federal prosecutors and Epstein's lawyers quietly put together a remarkable deal for Epstein, then 54. He agreed to plead guilty to two felony prostitution charges in state court, and in exchange, he and his accomplices received immunity from federal sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life.
He served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade. His alleged co-conspirators, who helped schedule his sex sessions, were never prosecuted.
The deal, called a federal non-prosecution agreement, was sealed so that no one _ not even his victims _ could know the full scope of Epstein's crimes and who else was involved. The U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, was personally involved in the negotiations, records, letters and emails show.
Acosta is now a member of President Donald Trump's Cabinet. As U.S. secretary of labor, he has oversight over international child labor laws and human trafficking.
The Miami Herald analyzed thousands of pages of court records and lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents, and also tracked down more than 80 women who say they were victimized, scattered around the country and abroad. Until now, those victims _ today in their late 20s and early 30s _ have never spoken publicly about how they felt shamed, silenced and betrayed by the very people in the criminal justice system who were supposed to hold Epstein accountable.
"How come people who don't have money get sent to jail _ and can't even make bail _ and they have to do their time and sit there and think about what they did wrong? He had no repercussions and doesn't even believe he did anything wrong," said Licata, now 30.
Licata is among 36 women who were officially identified by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office as victims of Epstein, now 65. But after the FBI case was closed in 2008, witnesses and alleged victims testified in civil court that there were hundreds of girls who were brought to Epstein's homes, including girls from Europe, Latin America and former Soviet Republic countries.
But Acosta and Epstein's armada of attorneys _ Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz, Gerald Lefcourt, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, Guy Lewis and former Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr _ reached a consensus: Epstein would never serve time in a federal or state prison.
