60 Counts, Zero Prison Time: Inside the Draft Indictment the DOJ Killed to Protect Jeffrey Epstein
In 2007, federal prosecutors prepared a 56-page indictment charging Epstein with sex trafficking and conspiracy. Then Alex Acosta's office intervened, and 17 victims were told their case had been resolved with two state prostitution counts.
In the spring of 2006, Detective Joseph Recarey of the Palm Beach Police Department had a problem.
He had spent more than a year investigating complaints that Jeffrey Epstein was sexually abusing underage girls at his waterfront mansion on El Brillo Way. He had identified 17 victims, four of them adults, 13 of them minors. He had conducted dozens of investigative interviews. He had a cooperating household employee, Alfredo Rodriguez, who was willing to testify about what he had seen inside the house. He had enough evidence to build what his chief called the strongest case the department had ever assembled.
And the Palm Beach State Attorney's office had just told him they would not take it to a grand jury.
The refusal of Palm Beach County prosecutors to pursue the case in 2006 was the first in a series of institutional failures that would allow Epstein's operation to continue for 13 more years. At each stage, the pattern was the same: sufficient evidence to prosecute, insufficient institutional will to follow through.
Recarey did something unusual for a local detective. He went over the state attorney's head and contacted the FBI.
What happened next, according to the newly released DOJ files, is one of the most detailed records of prosecutorial failure in modern American legal history.
The Case the FBI Built
The FBI's Palm Beach field office opened a federal investigation in mid-2006. Over the following year, agents and prosecutors assembled what participants later described as an overwhelming case.
The evidence included:
Victim testimony from 17 identified victims. Multiple girls, some as young as 14 at the time of the abuse, provided detailed, corroborated accounts of being recruited to provide "massages" at Epstein's Palm Beach home. The massages invariably escalated to sexual contact. Many victims described being recruited by other girls, creating a pyramid-style network that expanded Epstein's access to minors.
Cooperating witnesses. Rodriguez, Epstein's former house manager, provided information about Epstein's daily operations, including schedules, guest lists, and the movement of young women through the property. Rodriguez would later be convicted of obstruction for concealing a copy of Epstein's phone book that he attempted to sell, but his initial cooperation gave investigators crucial access to the internal workings of Epstein's household.
Financial records. Bank statements and wire transfer records documented payments from Epstein to victims and recruiters, establishing the transactional nature of the abuse.
Physical evidence. A search of Epstein's Palm Beach home yielded photographs, message pads, and other materials that corroborated victim accounts.
The FBI's Miami field office, working with the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of Florida, prepared a draft federal indictment. The document ran to 56 pages. It contained approximately 60 counts.
The charges included sex trafficking of minors, enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity, and conspiracy. If convicted on all counts, Epstein faced the possibility of life in federal prison.
The 56 Pages That Never Became an Indictment
The draft indictment is one of the most significant documents in the newly released files. It represents the case that federal prosecutors believed they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
The charges named not only Epstein but also members of his inner circle. Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, and Lesley Groff, all identified as personal assistants who facilitated the recruitment and scheduling of victims, were named as potential co-defendants.
The conspiracy charges were structured to capture the organized nature of the operation. This was not a case about a single predator acting alone. It was a case about a trafficking enterprise with defined roles: recruiters who identified victims, schedulers who arranged encounters, a house manager who maintained the physical infrastructure, and a principal who directed and financed the entire operation.
A 60-count federal indictment, if pursued, would have placed Epstein's case in the federal system with its significantly longer sentences, mandatory minimums, and no possibility of state-level parole. It would have required cooperating witnesses to testify in open court. It would have generated a public trial record. And it would have exposed the full scope of the operation more than a decade before the DOJ's 2026 file release.
Instead, the indictment was shelved.
The Acosta Intervention
In the summer of 2007, U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta entered negotiations with Epstein's defense team. What followed has been exhaustively documented in the DOJ's own Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report and in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the victims' case.
The key elements of the deal:
The federal case was dropped entirely. All 60 counts in the draft indictment were abandoned. No federal charges were filed.
Epstein pleaded guilty to two state counts. Instead of federal sex trafficking charges, Epstein entered a guilty plea to two Florida state charges: one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of procurement of a minor for prostitution. The framing of the crimes as "prostitution" rather than trafficking or sexual abuse was itself a concession that recharacterized the victims as participants rather than targets.
The sentence was 18 months in county jail. Epstein served approximately 13 months, much of it on work release that allowed him to leave the jail for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week. He spent his work-release hours at a private office in downtown West Palm Beach. The conditions of his confinement bore little resemblance to incarceration.
Co-conspirators received non-prosecution agreements. Kellen, Marcinkova, Groff, and other named co-conspirators received federal non-prosecution agreements (NPAs) that immunized them from federal charges. These agreements have been one of the most significant barriers to subsequent prosecution.
Victims were not informed. In violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act, the U.S. Attorney's office did not notify Epstein's victims before finalizing the plea agreement. The victims learned about the deal after it was done.
"A National Disgrace"
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling on a lawsuit brought by victims represented by attorney Bradley Edwards, used language rarely seen in federal judicial opinions.
The court found that the U.S. Attorney's office had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing the plea negotiations from victims. It called the handling of the case "a national disgrace."
The DOJ's own Office of Professional Responsibility, in a review completed in 2020, concluded that Acosta exercised "poor judgment" in approving the non-prosecution agreement. The OPR stopped short of finding professional misconduct, a distinction that allowed Acosta to continue practicing law but that satisfied virtually no one who had followed the case.
Acosta resigned as Secretary of Labor in July 2019, days after Epstein's arrest on new federal charges in New York. At his resignation press conference, Acosta defended the 2008 agreement, arguing that the state plea deal was better than the risk of acquittal at a federal trial. This claim has been disputed by the prosecutors who built the case and by the judge who reviewed the evidence.
What the Victims Were Told
The Crime Victims' Rights Act requires federal prosecutors to notify victims of plea negotiations and to consider their views before finalizing agreements. In the Epstein case, this did not happen.
According to court filings and the OPR report, the U.S. Attorney's office told victims and their attorneys that the investigation was ongoing while simultaneously negotiating the final terms of the deal with Epstein's lawyers. The victims were led to believe that a prosecution was still being pursued.
When the plea agreement was announced, victims described feeling betrayed, not just by Epstein, but by the justice system that was supposed to protect them.
The 2008 non-prosecution agreements remain legally significant today. When the SDNY brought new charges against Epstein in 2019, the defense argued that the NPAs barred further prosecution. Judge Richard Berman rejected that argument, but the NPAs granted to co-conspirators have continued to complicate efforts to hold other members of Epstein's inner circle accountable. The agreements are still being litigated.
The Florida corrections reports in our database, including the 537-page Florida Cases file, document what followed: a probation period marked by Epstein's continued contact with young women, travel approvals to New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and repeated violations of the terms of his release. His probation officer documented that Epstein appeared at a victim's deposition, stared and smirked at her, and was accused of intimidation. Witness tampering was reported on at least one occasion.
The system that was supposed to monitor Epstein after his plea deal failed at that too.
The 2019 Case: What Changed and What Did Not
When the Southern District of New York arrested Epstein on July 6, 2019, the new indictment charged sex trafficking and conspiracy. The case was built on many of the same underlying facts as the abandoned 2007 indictment, supplemented by additional victims who came forward in the intervening years.
Epstein died in federal custody on August 10, 2019, before the case reached trial.
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 and convicted in December 2021. She is serving 20 years.
No other co-conspirators have been charged.
The co-conspirator investigation, run out of the SDNY, was transferred to DOJ headquarters in January 2025. It was closed in July 2025 without explanation and without additional indictments.
Why This Document Matters
The 56-page draft indictment matters because it proves that the federal government had the evidence and the legal framework to dismantle Epstein's operation in 2007. The decision not to pursue the case was a choice, not a necessity.
That choice allowed the operation to continue for 12 more years. During those 12 years, Epstein continued to traffic minors, continued to use tuition payments and financial leverage to control victims and associates, and continued to build the international network of political and financial influence documented throughout the released files.
Every connection in our network graph that post-dates 2008, every flight in our flight logs after the plea deal, every email in our archive from 2009 onward, represents activity that occurred because the justice system failed to act when it had the chance.
The draft indictment is not just a historical document. It is a record of the cost of institutional failure. Sixty counts. Seventeen victims. Fifty-six pages of evidence. And a decision, made by identifiable people in identifiable offices, to set it all aside.
What Comes Next
Representative Ro Khanna has flagged that the FBI 302 victim interview statements and the original prosecution memorandum from 2007 remain withheld from the public release. These documents would provide the most granular available record of what investigators knew and when, and of the specific evidence that supported each of the 60 draft counts.
Their continued withholding, nearly two decades after the investigation and seven years after Epstein's death, raises the same question that has defined the case from the beginning: who is being protected, and why?
Browse the full case files yourself. Search the document archive for plea-related records. Review the Florida corrections reports. Cross-reference the persons named in the 2007 investigation against their appearances elsewhere in the files.
The draft indictment exists. The evidence exists. The victims exist. What does not exist, and has never existed, is the political will to follow through.
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