Robert W. Sweet

Robert Workman Sweet (October 15, 1922 to March 24, 2019) was a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1978 until his death, appointed by Jimmy Carter after service as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the district and as deputy mayor of New York City under John V. Lindsay. He sentenced Steven Hoffenberg, chief executive of Towers Financial Corporation, to twenty years in 1997, a case in which Hoffenberg later swore prosecutors had offered him a reduced sentence for information about Jeffrey Epstein. From 2015 he presided over Giuffre v. Maxwell, signing the protective order under which its discovery was sealed and denying the requests of Alan Dershowitz, the writer Michael Cernovich and the Miami Herald to unseal it; the Second Circuit reversed him on July 3, 2019, three months after his death.¹²³

Career

Sweet was born in Yonkers and graduated from Yale University in 1944 and Yale Law School in 1948, after service as a lieutenant junior grade in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946. He practiced in New York City from 1948 to 1953, 1955 to 1965 and 1970 to 1978, and was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1953 to 1955. He was counsel to the New York State Interdepartmental Task Force on Youth and Juvenile Delinquency in 1958, executive assistant to Mayor Lindsay in 1966 and deputy mayor from 1966 to 1969, then a consultant to the Association for a Better New York from 1970 to 1975 and a hearing officer for the New York Transit Authority from 1975 to 1977. Carter nominated him on February 17, 1978 to the seat vacated by Inzer B. Wyatt; he was confirmed on April 25 and commissioned on April 28, 1978, took senior status on March 1, 1991, and died in Ketchum, Idaho on March 24, 2019.¹

Hoffenberg and Towers Financial

Hoffenberg was indicted in the Southern District of New York on April 20, 1994 for the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme, and on April 20, 1995 pleaded guilty before Sweet to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice and tax evasion (94 Cr. 213 (RWS), 95 Cr. 321 (RWS)). Sweet issued his sentencing opinion on March 4, 1997 and entered judgment on March 7: twenty years in prison, three years of supervised release, a one million dollar fine and restitution of 475,157,340 dollars, the figure the bankruptcy court had fixed as the valid claims of the noteholders and bondholders. Towers investors later alleged that Hoffenberg had hired Epstein "as a consultant back in 1987"; Epstein was never charged in the matter.²⁴⁵

Hoffenberg swore in 2018 that "during the course of my criminal trial, Prosecutors offered me a reduced sentence in exchange for information about Epstein's role," and that he had refused. His lawyer Gary Baise said Sweet had asked him, "Why did he not give up Epstein?" Epstein's lawyers at Troutman Sanders wrote in 2016 that at a December 2013 conference in the criminal case "Judge Sweet stated he was unaware of Epstein." At that conference, on December 5, 2013, Hoffenberg's counsel told Sweet that "Mr. Epstein is a critical player here." A draft Troutman Sanders memorandum for Epstein and Financial Trust Company, headed "Multiple SDNY Judges Warned the Person Driving This Action Against Such Frivolous Lawsuits," recounted that Sweet had found in 2003 that Hoffenberg "will be enjoined from filing any further litigation ... without prior approval."²³⁵

Giuffre v. Maxwell

Virginia Giuffre sued Ghislaine Maxwell for defamation before Sweet on September 21, 2015. He denied Maxwell's motion to dismiss in February 2016, and on March 17, 2016 signed the protective order (ECF No. 62) under which deposition transcripts and exhibits, including Maxwell's own deposition, were designated confidential and filed under seal. On March 22, 2017 he denied Maxwell's motion for summary judgment in a heavily redacted 76-page opinion; the parties settled on May 24, 2017 on undisclosed terms. Dershowitz, whom Giuffre had accused and who denied her account, moved to intervene on August 11, 2016; Cernovich moved on January 19, 2017 to unseal the summary judgment record; and the Herald and its reporter Julie K. Brown moved on April 6, 2018 to unseal the docket. Sweet denied the requests.⁶⁷

On March 11, 2019 a Second Circuit panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler and Christopher F. Droney ordered the parties to show cause why the summary judgment motion and Sweet's decision should not be unsealed, citing its precedent that documents submitted on summary judgment are "judicial documents to which a strong presumption of access attaches, under both the common law and the First Amendment"; a copy printed from Bloomberg Law at 5:28 p.m. that day is among Epstein's own files. Sweet died thirteen days later. On July 3, 2019, three days before Epstein's arrest in New York, the court ruled in Brown v. Maxwell that the summary judgment materials must be unsealed and the remaining filings reviewed individually, and about 2,000 pages were released on August 9, 2019, the day before Epstein's death. The case passed to Judge Loretta Preska.⁶⁸

In August 2020, after the government had obtained by subpoena nearly 90,000 pages of the Giuffre v. Maxwell discovery for Maxwell's criminal prosecution, her lawyer Jeffrey S. Pagliuca invoked Sweet in a reply brief to Judge Alison Nathan: "Judge Sweet, the same judge who approved the civil protective order upon which Ms. Maxwell relied, held that the defendant's 'continuing need for the confidentiality stipulation's protection outweighs by far the government's need for the deposition transcript,'" citing United States v. Oshatz (1988).⁹