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Deceased sex pervert Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street financier and Deep Stater found dead in his cell on Saturday at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (shown) in New York, got some special privileges in the forbidding lockup.
He spent time alone with a young woman in the attorney-client meeting room, and otherwise occupied the space for up to eight hours a day to escape the mind-numbing drudgery of his dreary cell.
What he and the young woman were doing, Forbes magazine didn’t report. Nonetheless, whatever went on, Epstein’s money permitted him to game the system before what authorities are calling his suicide.
Epstein, 66, faced a federal sex-trafficking indictment.
Forbes Report
The unidentified young lady visited Epstein the day after authorities removed him from suicide watch, Forbes reported. Its source was another visiting attorney who witnessed the unusual rendezvous.
He “spent at least two hours locked up alone with a young woman,” the magazine reported, “in a private room reserved for inmates and their attorneys, according to an attorney who was visiting the prison that day.”
As well, the young woman carried no files, the visiting attorney told Forbes, and was dressed casually for “Sunday brunch.”
“The optics were startling. Because she was young. And pretty,” said the visiting attorney…. He speculated the woman could be a lawyer — NBC News has reported that Epstein paid members of his team to sit with him in a room for eight hours a day for attorney-client meetings, allowing him to avoid his cell.
The visiting attorney went to the Manhattan Correctional Center on July 30, a day after Epstein was reportedly taken off suicide watch and transferred into the Special Housing Unit (SHU). During the hours the visiting attorney was present, it wasn’t Epstein’s main lawyer, Reid Weingarten, or other named attorneys who visited him.
“If I was him, I would have hired … an old bald guy,” said the lawyer, who said the young woman was in there with Epstein for at least two hours when he was there. He also pointed out that the room is locked when prisoners go in, after their handcuffs are removed, and unlocked only when prisoners leave and handcuffs are put back on.
Weingarten and other attorneys representing Epstein have not responded to requests for comment by Forbes.
Beyond those “bad optics,” however, is this: Epstein’s control “was a sore point for attorneys trying to visit their clients. Instead of waiting 15 minutes for a room, the wait could stretch for two hours, as it was that day.”
The SHU, the complaining lawyer told Forbes, has only two rooms for attorneys to visit clients. “That means Epstein was monopolizing a scarce resource,” the magazine observed. The chief of a nonprofit that represents federal defendants told Forbes that monopolizing the room had another effect: “Eighty percent of all federal defendants are represented by my office, or assigned private attorneys who are paid statutory amounts, and they are sitting there [waiting]. That’s just taxpayers dollars ticking off the clock.”
The visiting attorney also told the magazine that Epstein’s treatment “sounded to me like a replay of the Florida thing where he got to go to the office … and sit around rather than sit in the cell.”
That comfortable arrangement occurred after Epstein struck a plea deal that allowed him to skate away from a federal sex-trafficking charge in 2008 and plead guilty to a lesser state child prostitution rap. During that “sentence,” he wangled a “work release” billet and spent six days a week at his office, the magazine noted.
“It’s understandable why Epstein would want to avoid his cell,” Forbes rightly reported. “Conditions inside MCC are legendarily bad,” and Epstein’s lockup, SHU, is “even harsher. Inmates are housed in their cells 23 hours a day, and there’s only a tiny window letting in a sliver of natural light.
That description comports with what a former inmate described in a letter to the New York Post.
Noting that he didn’t believe Epstein committed suicide, the anonymous author explained how frightening the facility is. Some guards are on a “power trip,” he wrote, and know when an inmate will break psychologically. They do what they can to see that he does:
The damage that unit can do to someone.
It’s like you’re an animal and you’ve been brought into a kennel. A guy like Jeffrey, it’s like, “Holy sh-t.”
I told my parents not to come there. God wasn’t in the building.
I’ve had some heavy incidents in the building. What happened is permanent.
Photo: AP Images