Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, MA in 1984.
Rick Friedman|Corbis News|Getty Images
The estate of departed sex transgressor Jeffrey Epstein and associated entities accepted pay the U.S. Virgin Islands more than $105 million as part of a settlement in a sex trafficking and kid exploitation case, the area’s attorney general of the United States stated Wednesday.
The settlement likewise needed the accuseds to pay the Virgin Islands half the profits from the sale of LittleSt James, the personal island that was owned by Epstein and was presumably a significant center for his yearslong criminal sex trafficking business, stated the Virgin Islands Department of Justice.
The estate will likewise pay $450,000 to resolve damages around a different island Epstein owned, where the firm stated it discovered that he “razed the remains of centuries’-old historical structures of enslaved workers to make room for his development.”
And the Virgin Islands will recover more than $80 million in financial advancement tax advantages “that Epstein and his co-defendants fraudulently obtained to fuel his criminal enterprise,” the firm stated in a press release.
The payments will be made over the duration of no greater than one year, the press release stated. The settlement does not consist of admissions of misdeed by the estate, its co-executors, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, or the other accuseds.
“This settlement restores the faith of the People of the Virgin Islands that its laws will be enforced, without fear or favor, against those who break them,” Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George stated in the news release. “We are sending a clear message that the Virgin Islands will not serve as a haven for human trafficking.”
Daniel Weiner, a lawyer for the Epstein estate, kept in mind in a declaration to NBC News that the settlement “does not include any admission or concession of liability or fault by the Estate or any other parties, and the Co-Executors deny any allegations of wrongdoing on their part.”
“The Co-Executors ultimately concluded that the settlement is in the best interests of the Estate, including its creditors and claimants, to avoid the time, expense and inherent uncertainties of protracted litigation,” Weiner stated. “The settlement is consistent with the Co-Executors’ stated intent and practice since their appointments to those roles — to resolve claims related to any misconduct by Jeffrey Epstein in a manner sensitive to those who suffered harm.”
Weiner’s declaration likewise kept in mind that a fund to compensate Epstein’s victims has actually paid over $121 million to 136 individuals, which the estate means to “wind down its remaining activities” in the Virgin Islands “as soon as practicable.”
Epstein, the previously rich and well-connected investor who was pals with previous Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, eliminated himself in a Manhattan prison one month after his arrest in 2019 on criminal sex trafficking charges.
The Virgin Islands brought civil claims versus Epstein’s estate in 2020 under a law comparable to the federal RICO Act, which intends to fight the mob.
The case declared that Epstein masterminded a criminal business through which numerous “young women and female children have been sex trafficked, raped, sexually assaulted and held captive” at LittleSt James, the island Epstein purchased in1998 Some of those ladies were as young as 13 years of ages, the claim declared.
The statement Wednesday night kept in mind that profits from the sale of Epstein’s island will approach a trust devoted to moneying efforts to assist victims of sex trafficking and sexual assault.
Last year, a jury founded guilty Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s close partner and his implicated procurer of girls, on several felony counts. A federal judge in April rejected Maxwell’s ask for a brand-new trial.
