A lot of bad ideas come from the Legislature in Albany, but state Sen. Zellnor Myrie has a very good one. This week, as chairman of the Senate Code Committee, he held a hearing with survivors of late pedophile trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, including some of them testifying publicly for the first time.
The survivors were throwing their support behind measures sponsored by Myrie and his colleagues that would cumulatively allow victims of sex traffickers to try to recoup damages from the estates of perpetrators who are dead, expand criminal penalties from people that participated or benefited from sexual trafficking and create a one-year look-back period for survivors to file suit against perpetrators and estates past the statute of limitations. The package of bills has now been passed by the committee.
Epstein lived and died in New York and clearly committed many of his crimes here, but the state is being forced to act at least in part because it’s become clear that the federal government will not. Despite bipartisan legislation in Congress mandating the release of all of the Department of Justice’s Epstein investigative materials, DOJ has not fully complied, let alone taken concrete action to criminally or civilly pursue those who took part in Epstein’s depraved schemes.
Existing limitations on civil action are intended to prevent people from just going after the broader families of people who may have engaged in misconduct against them and to limit punitive damages to the actual person who committed the harm, who obviously must be alive for the penalties to punish them.
However, Epstein’s vast trafficking operation shows that such crimes are not possible without at minimum buy-in of people who at the very least turned a blind eye or participated directly, and the survivors deserve at least some compensation even if Epstein himself is no longer around.
The survivors have already been failed by pretty much every system imaginable, many of them facing lifelong consequences for abuse at the hands of a man who was never held accountable, even after he had already been convicted of engaging in sex crimes against a minor. It took almost no time at all from Epstein finishing that stint — which he barely spent time inside jail at all — to returning to New York high society, where his influential friends welcomed him right back into their milieu.
Legislators and survivors know that they’re working against the clock as the Epstein estate fortune quickly dwindles, a result of constant legal proceedings and upkeep, as well as the fact that, as he felt the walls closing in, Epstein himself tried to structure his riches so that it would be hard for the authorities to siphon them off. If the estate dwindles down to zero, it forecloses the possibility of survivors to get even a small amount of remuneration even if Myrie’s bill is signed into law.
The Legislature should act on these measures now. We’ve not seen much in the way of specific objections to the bills’ provisions, but there seems to be a sort of general queasiness about broadly expanding the ability of survivors to seek civil or criminal penalties, similar to some of the jitters that proceeded the Legislature’s earlier lookbacks like the Child Victims Act and Adult Survivors Act.
Yet those laws took effect and the sky didn’t fall; all that happened was that more survivors, who often spend decades feeling like they can’t speak up or pursue justice, have an avenue to file claims that must still be substantiated by a full court proceeding.