NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Attorneys representing some of Jeffrey Epstein's victims urged Manhattan federal prosecutors to investigate the financier and his confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in 2016, but they declined to do so, according to a report.
Sources told the Daily News the attorneys met with a top prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in February 2016, but the office didn't move forward with an investigation, citing concerns about Epstein's non-prosecution agreement with the Southern District of Florida in 2007.
"We were saying to anyone who would listen: We've got clients who were abused. Some of them were underage. We have the evidence," David Boies, who represents some of Epstein's victims, told the outlet. "There's a whole record that's been developed. We can establish beyond any reasonable doubt there was a massive sex trafficking ring going on."
Preet Bharara, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney at the time, "was not aware of the meetings," the outlet reported.
"We thought he would have been briefed on a matter of this importance. And we hoped to make progress with the staff, and didn't want it to be seen as going over their head," Boies said. "But in retrospect, we probably should have gone to him directly."
A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment on the Daily News' story.
