Bradley Edwards

Bradley J. Edwards is an American lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who has represented victims of Jeffrey Epstein since June 2008. As counsel for the victim who filed as Jane Doe 1, later identified as Courtney Wild, he brought the Crime Victims' Rights Act petition that forced the government to disclose the Epstein non-prosecution agreement and produced the 2019 ruling that prosecutors had violated the statute. Epstein sued him in 2009 as a participant in Scott Rothstein's Ponzi scheme, dropped the suit in 2012, and in December 2018 settled Edwards's malicious prosecution counterclaim with a written apology.¹²³

Background

Edwards began his legal career in 2002 as an assistant state attorney in the Broward County State Attorney's Office. He later founded his own firm, which became Edwards Pottinger and then Edwards Henderson, practicing on behalf of crime and trafficking victims. With Brittany Henderson he wrote Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, published by Simon & Schuster in 2020.²⁴

Learning of the Agreement

In mid-June 2008 Edwards called the federal line prosecutor A. Marie Villafaña to say he represented Jane Doe 1 and, later, Jane Doe 2, and asked to meet to provide information about Epstein's federal crimes. The prosecutor discussed the possibility of future federal charges and asked him to send material for the office to consider; the stipulated record states that he was "led to believe federal charges could still be filed, with no mention whatsoever of the existence of the NPA." The agreement had been signed nine months earlier. On or about June 27, 2008 the office called him to say that Epstein would plead guilty in state court to solicitation; Edwards said he was not told that the plea would resolve the federal case, while the prosecutor said she told him his clients could address the state court.¹

On July 3, 2008, three days after Epstein's plea and at the office's direction, Edwards wrote urging "the Attorney General and our United States Attorney to consider the fundamental import of the vigorous enforcement of our Federal laws" and "to move forward with the traditional indictments and criminal prosecution commensurate with the crimes Mr. Epstein has committed." On July 7 he filed the emergency petition that opened Doe v. United States before Judge Kenneth Marra. He saw the first reference to the non-prosecution agreement on July 9, 2008, in the government's response.¹

The Crime Victims' Rights Act Case

Edwards moved to compel production of the agreement, which Marra ordered in August 2008 under a protective order, and moved to unseal it, which Marra denied in February 2009. The government's own prosecutor told Epstein's counsel by email that the court had "ordered us to make the Agreement available to the plaintiffs." Jane Doe 2 did not learn the agreement's contents until August 28, 2008, when a copy was given to Edwards. He litigated the case without fee for more than ten years, joined by the law professor and former federal judge Paul Cassell. On February 21, 2019 Marra held that the government had violated the victims' conferral right; after Epstein's death he denied all remedies, and in April 2021 the en banc Eleventh Circuit held that the Act gave Wild no pre-charge judicial remedy.¹²⁵

Edwards also alleged, after Epstein's 2019 arrest, that Epstein had engaged in improper sexual contact while on work release at the Florida Science Foundation, the entity through which Epstein spent his days out of the county jail in 2008 and 2009.⁶

Epstein v. Rothstein and Edwards

In 2009 Edwards worked briefly at Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, the Fort Lauderdale firm of Scott Rothstein, who was later convicted of running a Ponzi scheme that sold investors fabricated legal settlements. Epstein sued Rothstein and Edwards in 2009 for civil racketeering and fraud, alleging that Edwards had fabricated claims and helped Rothstein market bogus settlement rights involving the sex abuse claims against Epstein. Edwards was not implicated in Rothstein's fraud. Epstein dropped the claims against Edwards in August 2012, and Edwards counterclaimed for malicious prosecution, alleging that the suit was designed to intimidate him and his clients into abandoning their cases.³⁷

The counterclaim was set for trial in December 2018, with at least seven of Epstein's accusers expected to testify. On December 4, 2018, as jury selection was to begin, Epstein settled on confidential terms and issued an apology, which Edwards read: "The truth is that his aggressive investigation and litigation style was highly effective and therefore troublesome for me. The lawsuit I filed was my unreasonable attempt to damage his business reputation and stop Mr. Edwards from pursuing cases against me. It did not work." The settlement meant the accusers did not testify publicly. Edwards's lawyer Jack Scarola said the case "focused on [Edwards'] personal vindication" and that the victims' cause remained in the Crime Victims' Rights Act case.³⁷

The Dershowitz Litigation

In December 2014 Edwards and Cassell filed a motion in the Crime Victims' Rights Act case to add a victim then identified as Jane Doe 3, later publicly identified as Virginia Giuffre, alleging that Epstein had trafficked her as a minor to Alan Dershowitz among others. Dershowitz denied the allegations and called for Edwards and Cassell to be disbarred; Marra struck the allegations in April 2015 as "immaterial and impertinent" to the case. Edwards and Cassell sued Dershowitz for defamation and Dershowitz countersued.⁸

On April 8, 2016 the parties settled. A joint statement issued by the mediator said that "Edwards and Cassell acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz," that the accusations in the public filings were withdrawn, and that Dershowitz withdrew his accusations that they had acted unethically. The statement specified that the dispute concerned due diligence rather than "whether the acts of alleged misconduct in fact occurred," and that the withdrawal was not an acknowledgment that Giuffre's allegations were mistaken; Giuffre, who was not a party, stood by them at the time. Dershowitz required that the financial terms remain confidential. Giuffre withdrew her allegation against Dershowitz in a separate 2022 settlement, saying she "may have made a mistake."⁸⁹

The Bank Cases

Edwards and David Boies represented Epstein survivors in the 2023 class actions against JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, which alleged that the banks had knowingly benefited from Epstein's trafficking; JPMorgan agreed to pay 290 million dollars and Deutsche Bank 75 million dollars, both without admitting wrongdoing.¹⁰