Another Miami Herald Bombshell Spotlights Epstein’s Extreme Privileges in Florida Lockup

Why was he allowed to buy small women’s panties from the jail?

Jeffrey Epstein appears in court in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2008.Uma Sanghvi/Palm Beach Post/AP/File

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Women’s underwear. Twenty-two tubes of toothpaste. And lots and lots of coffee. These were among the commissary purchases that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein made about a decade ago while serving a 13-month stint in a Palm Beach jail for soliciting a minor for sex, according to thousands of pages of sheriff’s records obtained by the Miami Herald. The trove sheds new light on the multimillionaire’s habits and immense privileges in the Florida lockup in 2008 and 2009.
 
The records were released Friday, nearly a week after Epstein, 66, was found dead in a federal jail cell in New York, where he was awaiting trial for new sex trafficking charges. A medical examiner officially ruled his death a suicide by hanging, on Friday, and federal investigators are trying to work out why guards had left the hedge fund manager, a former friend of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, unmonitored for such a long time.
 
The documents from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office show that Epstein purchased two pairs of small women’s underwear at the Florida jail, which held both male and female inmates in separate areas, even though he was serving time for a sex offense with a minor.
 
He bought more than 800 single-serve cups of coffee in just over a year, and used nearly two tubes of toothpaste every month. Another odd detail: Confiscated from his possession at the time was a book his paralegal brought him called Face Exercises That Prevent Premature Aging.
 
The special treatment Epstein received a decade ago was already the subject of an internal investigation, after it was revealed that he could walk in and out of his cell at will and leave the facility 12 hours a day, six days a week, for a work-release program, an arrangement that allegedly allowed him to have sexual contact with at least one young woman.
 
In an email on the day he was admitted to the jail, one official said Epstein’s cell door could remain unlocked, and that he was allowed “liberal access” to a television. The official reasoned Epstein could be vulnerable to manipulation by other inmates because of his wealth, and the fact he was “poorly versed in jail routine.” 
 
The new sheriff’s department records add fresh details about the cushy arrangement. Eventually, Epstein’s work release schedule was expanded from six to seven days a week, and he was allowed to spend as many as 16 hours a day outside the jail, including time at his home. Off-duty deputies wearing business suits provided Epstein “security”, according to the records, sometimes guarding doors from the outside, rather than watching over him up close.

Records referred to him not as an inmate, but as a “client.”

 
These privileges did not sit well with then-Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña, according to the Herald, who wrote a letter to the sheriff’s office at the time arguing that the facility’s policies on work release barred someone with Epstein’s conviction from participating in the program. She wrote that allowing him to spend time in a private office “making telephone calls, web-surfing, and having food delivered to him is probably not in accordance with the objectives of imprisonment.” (Villafaña, who had approved a controversial nonprosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to plead to lesser charges, recently resigned.)
 
What’s more, according to the records, Villafaña said that although Epstein was supposed to work at a West Palm Beach charity he created just before being jailed, he rarely spent time there. “The foundation, its offices, and Mr. Epstein’s purported job schedule were all created on the eve of Mr. Epstein’s incarceration in order to provide him with a basis for seeking work release,” Villafaña wrote. The charity was dissolved the year Epstein was released, according to the Herald.

Bradley Edwards, an attorney for some of the women who have accused Epstein of sex offenses, previously alleged that the work release schedule allowed Epstein to have sexual encounters with at least one female visitor. A log of who visited him was destroyed.

Epstein’s ability to use his wealth to obtain special treatment in lockup is now under even greater scrutiny following his suicide in New York. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that in order to escape the dismal conditions of his New York jail cell, Epstein paid multiple attorneys to visit the facility for as many as 12 hours a day so that he could sit with them in a private meeting room, where he could buy snacks and drinks from the vending machines. “It was shift work, all designed by someone who had infinite resources to try and get as much comfort as possible,” a lawyer who visited other clients in the jail told the Times.

Still, the circumstances of his incarceration were far less cushy than in Florida. In New York, he was allotted just one hour of recreation per day and could shower only every two or three days. The facility was infested with rodents and cockroaches, and the inmates dealt with pools of urine and water on the floor because of bad plumbing. “It is impossible to know why a person takes his own life,” the Times reporters wrote. “But an examination of Mr. Epstein’s last days by the New York Times, gathered from dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, Bureau of Prisons employees, lawyers and others, suggests that Mr. Epstein’s death came after he started to realize the limits of his ability to deploy his wealth and privilege in the legal system.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate