Paul Cassell

Paul G. Cassell (born 1959, in Orange, California) is an American law professor at the University of Utah College of Law, a former Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Department of Justice, and a former judge of the United States District Court for the District of Utah, appointed by George W. Bush, who resigned from the bench in November 2007. He then became co-counsel with Bradley Edwards for victims of Jeffrey Epstein in Doe v. United States, the Crime Victims' Rights Act case over the Epstein non-prosecution agreement, and in related civil litigation, and was sued for defamation by Alan Dershowitz after a December 2014 filing in that case.¹²³

Career

Cassell graduated from Stanford University in 1979 and from Stanford Law School in 1984. He clerked for Judge Antonin Scalia on the D.C. Circuit from 1984 to 1985 and for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1985 to 1986. He was an Associate Deputy Attorney General from 1986 to 1988 and an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia from 1988 to 1991, and taught at the University of Utah from 1992 to 2002. Bush nominated him to the federal bench on June 19, 2001, without Senate action, and again on September 4, 2001, to the seat vacated by David Sam; he was confirmed on May 13, 2002 and commissioned on May 15, 2002. His service ended by resignation on November 5, 2007, and he returned to the Utah faculty.¹

Doe v. United States

On July 7, 2008 Edwards filed the emergency petition of the victim then known as Jane Doe 1, later identified as Courtney Wild, to enforce her rights under 18 U.S.C. 3771, before Judge Kenneth Marra in West Palm Beach. On July 28, 2008, three weeks after the filing and less than nine months after leaving the bench, Cassell moved for a limited appearance for the petitioners, which Marra granted the next day; the Jacksonville lawyer Jay Howell followed on August 8. Edwards litigated the case without fee for more than ten years. Marra held in 2011 that the Act's rights attach before formal charges and in 2013 that it authorizes rescission of a prosecutorial agreement reached in violation of the conferral right. On February 21, 2019 he granted partial summary judgment, finding that "[p]articularly problematic was the Government's decision to conceal the existence of the NPA and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," and on September 16, 2019, after Epstein's death, he denied every remedy the petitioners sought. On April 15, 2021 the en banc Eleventh Circuit held seven to four that the Act gave Wild no freestanding pre-charge action, and on February 22, 2022 the Supreme Court denied certiorari.²⁴⁵

The Jane Doe 3 Filing and the Dershowitz Litigation

In December 2014 Edwards and Cassell moved in the Crime Victims' Rights Act case to add a client identified as Jane Doe 3, later publicly identified as Virginia Giuffre, alleging that Epstein had trafficked her as a minor to Dershowitz, among others. Dershowitz said he had never met her, called the accusation fabricated, and said the two lawyers should be disbarred. In April 2015 Marra struck the allegations as "immaterial and impertinent" to the case without ruling on their truth. Edwards and Cassell sued Dershowitz for defamation, and he countersued.³⁶

The suits settled on April 8, 2016. In a joint statement issued through the mediator, "Edwards and Cassell acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz," and Dershowitz withdrew his accusations that they had acted unethically. The statement said the dispute concerned the lawyers' due diligence and "not whether the acts of alleged misconduct in fact occurred," and that the withdrawal was not an acknowledgment that Giuffre's allegations were mistaken; Giuffre, 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."³⁶

Epstein v. Rothstein

In the Palm Beach County suit Epstein brought in 2009 against Scott Rothstein and Edwards, which became Edwards's counterclaim for malicious prosecution, Cassell and Howell appeared as limited intervenor co-counsel for three of Epstein's victims. On November 9, 2018 Epstein, through counsel including Jack Goldberger, moved for in camera inspection of 302 emails that the other side had withheld on a 1,607-entry, 159-page privilege log. The motion argued that only 19 entries were communications with a client, that "the majority of the documents are e-mails among attorneys and staff" and "with media sources," and that Cassell and his co-counsel had "very significant personal and professional reas[ons]" for not wanting the emails "to see the light of the courtroom," quoting the line that sunlight "is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." Epstein settled the counterclaim in December 2018 with a written apology to Edwards.⁷⁸

On May 2, 2023 Judge Jed Rakoff admitted Cassell pro hac vice in Jane Doe 1's class suit against JPMorgan Chase in the Southern District of New York, consolidated for pretrial purposes with Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank; JPMorgan settled the class claims in June 2023 for 290 million dollars.⁹¹⁰

On February 25, 2018 Epstein had written to Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House Counsel, about an "email trail" involving Rothstein's lawyer and prosecutors: "now the issue is how to use, it, CVRA? marie? Bar. USA[?]. . . . Judge marra, cvra.? press? move f[o]r sanctions? strategy time." Ruemmler replied the next morning: "How did you discover it? Let's discuss in the a.m."¹¹