Ann Marie Villafana

A. Marie Villafaña, styled Ann C. Villafaña in the Justice Department's own records, is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida who opened the office's 2006 investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, wrote an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a draft federal indictment in 2007, and was then overruled by her supervisors in favor of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement, which she negotiated with Epstein's lawyers and signed on the office's behalf on September 24, 2007. She monitored Epstein's compliance with the agreement through his Florida jail term and home detention, served as co-counsel defending the government in the victims' suit under the Crime Victims' Rights Act until the office was recused in February 2019, and left the office in August 2019 while the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility was investigating her and four supervisors. That office found in November 2020 that none of the five had committed professional misconduct.¹²

Career in Miami and West Palm Beach

Villafaña joined the office in September 2001 as a line prosecutor in the Major Crimes Section in Miami and transferred in January 2004 to the branch office in West Palm Beach, where she handled the majority of the branch's child exploitation cases. In 2006 U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta designated her the office's first coordinator for Project Safe Childhood, a Justice Department initiative launched that May against technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation. The office's own chart of the period places her under a West Palm Beach supervisor, then the branch's managing attorney Andrew Lourie, then Criminal Division chief Matthew Menchel, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sloman and Acosta.¹³

Opening Operation Leap Year

In May 2006 the lead detective of the Palm Beach Police Department met Villafaña and an FBI case agent with whom she worked child exploitation cases and summarized the state investigation. According to Villafaña, the detective said that "pressure had been brought to bear on . . . Krischer by Epstein's attorneys," that the defense had hired private investigators to trail him and Chief Michael Reiter, and that the defense had engineered the removal of the first Assistant State Attorney on the case by hiring a lawyer whose relationship with her created a conflict. Neither Villafaña nor the agent had heard of Epstein before the meeting. She opened a federal case file on May 23, 2006 and named the investigation "Operation Leap Year," after the approximately 29 girls identified as victims in the state case. She told the Office of Professional Responsibility that the case implicated federal interests including the use of telephones and airports, the number of victims, the possibility of child pornography suggested by computer equipment removed from Epstein's house before the police search, and "the possibility that improper political pressure had affected the State Attorney Office's handling of the case."³

Having learned that Epstein "took a scorched earth approach" to litigation, she arranged a meeting with Acosta and Sloman in Miami on July 14, 2006 without first telling Lourie, then her second-line supervisor. She told OPR it was the first time she had asked to brief "executive management" on opening a case, and that she regarded Sloman as a friend.³

The Charging Memo and the Supervisors

Villafaña submitted her prosecution memorandum on May 1, 2007. Lourie wrote to her on May 10 that "Epstein's att[orneys] are scared of the victims they don't know," proposing that the first indictment name only the victims "they have nothing on at all," and that "for the first strike we should make all their nightmare[]s come true." On May 14, when Epstein was flying from the Virgin Islands to New Jersey, she asked Lourie and Menchel whether she could file charges the next day. Menchel answered that "[y]ou will not have approval to go forward tomorrow" and that he had "trouble understanding" her "rush" "given how long this case has been pending." She later told OPR that "child sex offenders don't stop until they're behind bars." In their OPR interviews Acosta called her "very hard charging" and her timeline "really, really fast," and Menchel described her as "out over her skis a little bit" and "ahead of Acosta in terms of his analysis of the case." On May 15 she asked Sloman whether "pestering Alex will not do any good," and he answered "Yes"; on May 21 she asked Sloman and Menchel for "a sense of the direction where we are headed," and Sloman answered "Taken care of." Her immediate supervisor told OPR that it appeared "Miami didn't want the case prosecuted."⁴

The office's privileged investigation chronology records that on May 23, 2007 she drafted an email disagreeing "with promising to have a meeting with Lefcourt or any of Epstein's other attorneys," on the ground that an earlier meeting had "disclosed prosecution strategy," and stating that if one were held she "will ask to have the case reassigned." OPR recorded that she "vehemently opposed meeting with Epstein's attorneys and voiced her concerns to her supervisors, but was overruled by them." She told OPR that she believed Acosta "was influenced by the stature of Epstein's attorneys," and that "the ability of Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr and Jay Lefkowitz to convince Alex Acosta that I didn't know what I was talking [about] also, all came into play."⁵⁶

Negotiating the Agreement

Acosta decided in mid-2007 to resolve the case through a state plea, and Villafaña became the office's principal negotiator and drafter of the agreement, under supervisors who, in OPR's words, "left the USAO, were transitioning to other jobs, or were absent at critical junctures": Menchel left in August 2007, and Lourie moved to a Washington detail in September. The court in the later victims' suit quoted her September 2007 emails to Lefkowitz: an offer to file a federal charge in Miami rather than West Palm Beach "[o]n an 'avoid the press' note," advice relayed from Lourie that "some of the timing issues be addressed only in the state agreement, so that it isn't obvious to the judge that we are trying to create federal jurisdiction for prison purposes," a statement that she "would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all of the other persons that we could charge," and an offer to meet "off campus." On September 17 she asked Lefkowitz to send material to her home email address.²⁷⁸

Villafaña gave OPR her own account of each line. She said the "off campus" offer meant a "neutral" location with "all the necessary decision makers present or 'on call'" to finish negotiations that "had dragged on for some time"; that the Miami filing was meant to let victims attend a plea hearing "without their faces being splashed all over the newspaper"; that she used her home account because negotiations ran "at nights, on weekend[s]" when remote email access was limited, which OPR found her supervisors knew; and that the co-conspirator clause was understood to cover the four women named in it because "we considered Epstein to be the top of the food chain, and we wouldn't have been interested in prosecuting anyone else." OPR found that she did not consider that Epstein might be shielding other, unnamed people, and that no one, including the FBI case agents, raised that concern.⁸⁹

The attorney Villafaña first recommended as the victims' representative under the agreement's damages mechanism was, according to OPR, "a friend of another AUSA whom Villafaña was then dating, but had no professional relationship with either Villafaña or the other AUSA." Epstein's lawyers objected to the choice, and while she was on sick leave Sloman negotiated the October 2007 addendum that changed the selection process.¹¹⁰

Holding Epstein to the Terms

After the signing Villafaña kept preparing a federal case. On February 14, 2008 she wrote to the FBI case agents that she had not yet sent the indictment and "was just asking for input on who to include and who to exclude." On May 16, 2008, after the Criminal Division rejected Epstein's appeal, Sloman wrote to her, "We got approved," adding, "Alex called to tell me. He said the ltr needs to be tweaked which we'll do on Monday. I wouldn't call the FBI yet."¹¹¹²

The day after Epstein's June 30, 2008 state plea, she and her immediate supervisor met an official of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, who told them that Epstein "would be eligible for work release and will be placed on work release." She told the official that the Florida Science Foundation, where Epstein had told the plea court he worked "every day," did not exist until November 2007 and that the address he gave for it was the office of his lawyer Jack Goldberger. When she learned in mid-November 2008 that Epstein was on work release, she emailed Acosta, Sloman and the Criminal Division chief: "Can I indict him now?" On November 24 she wrote to Roy Black that Epstein had breached the agreement by "failing to remain incarcerated twenty-four hours a day." On December 3 she wrote to Sloman and Criminal Division chief Robert Senior that "since Day 1, Goldberger and Krisher [sic] . . . have been scheming to get Epstein out on work release," and that Epstein was paying off-duty deputies "between $3000 and $4100 per week" for "protection." Her December 11 letter to the sheriff's Corrections Division, itemizing inaccuracies in his work release application, went unanswered.¹³

In the summer of 2009, when the New York Post reported that Epstein had been released early for cooperating in a federal case against Bear Stearns, Villafaña called the prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, who told her they "had never heard of Epstein." In 2011 she wrote to senior colleagues that "this is urban myth. The FBI and I looked into this and do not believe that any of it is true." OPR reported finding no evidence that Epstein was a cooperating witness or "intelligence asset," or that any of the five subjects believed so.¹³¹⁴

The Victims' Suit, the 2018 Email and OPR

From July 2008 Villafaña was co-counsel for the government in Doe v. United States, the Crime Victims' Rights Act suit filed by two victims, and she maintained the office's case records throughout it. In December 2018, after the Miami Herald series by Julie K. Brown, she wrote in an internal email that she had once asked Sloman where the two-year plea figure came from and that "[h]e said that Lily [sic] Ann (attorney for Epstein) asked Mr. Menchel to 'do her a solid' and convince Mr. Acosta to offer two years." Questioned by OPR, she could not recall whether Sloman had said "Lilly asked Matt to do her a solid, and he did it," or "I always figured Matt just wanted ... to do her a solid," and said she knew of nothing that "expressly [indicated] that there was any sort of exchange of . . . a favor in either direction." Sloman did not recall the remark and called the idea "the furthest thing from my recollection." OPR found no evidence supporting it.¹⁶

OPR noted that she alone among the five subjects had remained in the office with continuous access to the documentary record. It concluded that the September 2007 emails did "not themselves establish that Villafaña (or any other subject) acted to improperly benefit Epstein," and that "the evidence shows that Villafaña, in particular, cared deeply about Epstein's victims." Sloman told OPR that reports she "was soft on Epstein . . . couldn't have been further from the truth." Lourie said that on reading the 2019 opinion quoting her emails he was "surprised to see how nice she was to them. And she winds up taking it on the chin for being so nice to them. When I know the whole time she was the one who wanted to go after him the most."²⁹

Resignation

Villafaña submitted her resignation to the Justice Department in August 2019. Her attorney, Jonathan Biran, said that she had long planned a transition to a career in health care and planned to join the Department of Health and Human Services. OPR's report records only that she left "to join another federal government agency." In testimony to the House Oversight Committee on September 19, 2025, Acosta did not recall reading her recommendation that Epstein be charged with sex trafficking in a 60-count indictment.¹¹⁵¹⁶