A woman whose allegations of childhood sex abuse against Jeffrey Epstein were key to his indictment last year gave her account to federal prosecutors in Florida more than a decade earlier, ABC reported. The woman, who was 19 when she first spoke with agents, was questioned by the FBI and subpoenaed for testimony by federal prosecutors in Florida in 2008 as part of the initial probe into Epstein’s alleged child sex trafficking. However, she did not testify before a grand jury in West Palm Beach because Epstein reached a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami in which the disgraced financier was allowed to plead guilty to lesser state charges. He was sentenced to 18 months in a county jail. “I certainly think with the FBI’s capabilities, even back then, that they could have unraveled the entire network from New York to Paris to New Mexico,” said Spencer Kuvin, a West Palm Beach attorney who represented three of Epstein’s alleged victims during the initial federal investigation. “[The government] shut this thing down and pled this thing out before going through and talking to probably more than half of the women that were involved in this whole thing.”
The woman, now 30 and identified in last year’s indictment as “Minor-Victim 1,” was contacted again by New York federal prosecutors nearly 11 years after she gave her original account as they opened a new investigation into Epstein. She claimed that she was first recruited in 2002 to provide massages to Epstein—who killed himself in a jail cell last year—and was sexually abused for years.
Read it at ABC News
