Exposing Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring | 60 Minutes Australia
Title – Exposing Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring | 60 Minutes Australia
Producer – Thea Dikeos and Naomi Shivaraman
Date – November 10, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQOOxOl9l80&t=1s
Brief summary of video – Video on the Epstein case and how he had an internal sex trafficking rings that took a long time to bring down. The video has victims’ stories where they tell you how they got involved in this event.
Jeffrey Epstein Rich Crimes
Summary
This YouTube video goes into one of the most well-known cases of the decade with what led to Jeffery Epstein’s death. The video describes the start of this whole case around 2008 but Epstein’s crimes probably started way before this going unnoticed by authorities. Epstein’s egregious crime was having a child sex trafficking ring around the world for the extremely wealthy. In this documentary it shows some of the victims that became adults and spoke out about what happened to them. This case involved as many as a hundred children from as young as age 12. This documentary is a perfect example to show how much of a problem discrimination is in the criminal justice. This documentary shows the inequality on the spectrum we do not talk about much which is how the super-rich can hide from trouble. The video shows how long officials have known about Epstein’s illegal activities and how long it took before any actions were taken against him. The documentary shows you the benefits Epstein had which helped him run from authorities and hide his crimes in plain sight.
Analyze
In class we mainly looked at how poverty can push people into prisons. For this media blog I wanted to look at the case of Jeffery Epstein and how because of his class he was able to get away with so much more than any normal person should be able to get away with. I would say this video helps confirm the fact that not everyone is treated equal in our country. In our class we discussed how the poor are taken advantage. Specifically in the video I remember them talking about how they paid an underage girl $200 for giving them a “massage” and this shows that they are trying to take advantage of the kids that have nowhere else to go that need money to live. This is just an example of how poor kids can be pushed to do things they normally would not. In Edelman’s (2017) book Not a Crime to be Poor it talked about how many innocent poor people are locked up just because they do not have money for bail, However, in the case of Epstein, when he was first arrested he was let out of jail 12 hours a day 7 days a week to work. In addition, it took authorities 11 years for Epstein to get life in prison after they found out about what he was doing. This disparity in pretrial detention between those that have money and those that done seems massive. I find it interesting that you don’t see poor people getting let out to do work to pay fines, but Epstein gets to leave 12 hours a day for work. The biggest question that was presented in the video was near the end when it talked about Epstein’s death and how virtually none of these powerful people that were also apparently involved in this sex trafficking ring have been incarcerated yet. The question is: Why it is so hard to bring them to prison and hold powerful people accountable? In Epstein’s case it was a mixture of a great legal team and how he was able to hide his business on private islands, private jets, yachts, and his many houses across the world. On top of this Epstein always had blackmail over another person that was involved in this so other people in power would be afraid to do anything.
Personal Reflection and Rational
Implicit Bias is something we read about in Edelman (2017) not a crime to be poor and learned about online at (ProjectImplicit 2011). Implicit bias can be related to here, when most people think about crime they think of poor people but I think it is important to realize that people of every class and race commit crimes so we need to be aware that anyone can commit crime. This video made me think about if people in power should be held more responsible or have greater consequence for breaking the law. The most important thing that I learned from this video was how slow the court systems can be especially if you have good lawyers that know what they are doing. This can make this take a long time before real justice is served. I also thought the craziest part of the documentary is that when Epstein was in prison, he was under 24/7 surveillance with cameras on his room. The cameras malfunctioned and the guards did not see Epstein commit “suicide”. So, it is believed that other wealthy people killed Epstein so he would not talk about them. It will be interesting to see if anything comes about in case in the future since there is still a lot of unknown information to the public. I think this video is great for anyone that wants to look how class and power can help people get away with crimes normal people cannot.
References
Edelman, P. B. (2019). Not a crime to be poor: The criminalization of poverty in America. The New Press.
ProjectImplicit. (n.d.). Retrieved October 09, 2020, from https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Matthew Berezansky