Florida under-age sex scandal continues to reverberate

The Tampa Bay Times reports that Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard law professor and member of the legal defense teams in some of the most celebrated legal cases in the last three decades, has accused Roberts of fabricating most or all of her claims, including a story that she saw former president Bill Clinton on Epstein’s island years ago (also see: Alan M. Dershowitz, “A Nightmare of False Accusation That Could Happen to You,” Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2015;Jacob Gershman, “Dershowitz: ‘I’m an Innocent Victim of an Extortion Conspiracy’,” Wall Street Journal, 2 January 2015;Gershman, “Documents Show Earlier Effort to Link Dershowitz to Epstein Scandal,” Wall Street Journal, 9 January 2015); and Gershman, “Dershowitz Decries ‘Kafkaesque World of American Justice’,” Wall Street Journal, 15 January 2015)

Now a thirty-one-year-old wife and mother, Roberts says she wants to hold Epstein and his alleged associates accountable. “These powerful people seem to think that they don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else. That is wrong,” she said in the affidavit. “I hope that by coming forward, I can help expose the problem of sex trafficking and prevent the same sort of abuse and degradation that happened to me from happening to other girls.”

Roberts and the three other alleged victims have requested a federal judge to declassify and revoke the part of Epstein’s plea deal which guaranteed that neither he nor any co-conspirators would face federal charges. Federal prosecutors oppose the request, insisting that the women are not entitled to details of the plea negotiations.

Releasing details of Epstein’s plea deal would place the women in a stronger position to seek damages from the U.S. government, as they claim their rights as victims were violated by the secret plea agreement. In that agreement, Epstein served thirteen months of an 18-month jail sentence for pleading to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Court documents show that Epstein also reached undisclosed financial settlements with dozens of women who accused him of sexually assaulting them.

In the recent case of Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, Roberts claims she met him in London in 2001, and soon had sex with him in the townhome of an Epstein associate. She claims Epstein paid her $15,000. Court documents include a photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around Roberts’s waist while at the townhome. Prince Andrew is alleged to have had sex with Roberts a total of three times. Roberts has claimed she also had sex with Dershowitz at least six times, beginning when she was 16-years-old. Dershowitz has adamantly and publicly denied the allegations. “Never under any circumstances have I ever had sexual contact of any kind, which includes massages or any physical contact whatsoever, with Jane Doe No. 3 (Roberts),” he said in a sworn statement.

Dershowitz has urged Roberts to sue him for calling her a liar, so that she would have to repeat her allegations under oath and be subject to a searching examination (Dershowitz, “A Nightmare of False Accusation That Could Happen to You”).

The Justice Department has yet to announce whether it will release to Roberts and other victims the details of Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. In 2014, a federal appeals court ruled that victims from Epstein’s 2008 case should “have a chance to review the correspondence exchanged between Epstein and prosecutors to learn how exactly the secretive deal was reached while the victims were led to believe a prosecution was underway.”