TTERSON

FILTHY RICH

earances, he could afford it: sev- 1, which had offices in Florida, t Rothstein's millions actually scheme he'd been running since

dwards joined Rothstein's firm.
s along, and Rothstein showed
potential investors. In exchange
ein said, investors would receive
ter, which Epstein would pay in

I say that Edwards had no knowl- scheme. (Prosecutors, and the t as soon as he caught wind of the But the few months he spent in howitz the opening he needed to usations.

ce, Dershowitz would say, as well
Roberts added Dershowitz's name
ad abused her.

e'd been pulled into a billion-dollar tched. And for Edwards and Cas- y benefit: Dershowitz had helped ntial non-prosecution agreement licating him directly in Epstein's ershowitz claimed, Edwards and p" that agreement. 1 Mary pass on the part of Alan

wn internal logic.

* * *

The idea that Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell were trying to blackmail Leslie Wexner-blackmail him for one billion dollars, no less-sounds highly improbable. But we do know for a fact that Edwards had worked with Rothstein-a man who'd been running his own billion-dollar con.

Edwards may not have known that Rothstein was taking his files on Jeffrey Epstein and showing them to investors. But Edwards's proximity to Rothstein didn't look good. It may not have been as damaging as Dershowitz's close friendship with Epstein, but it was damaging nonetheless. It gave Dershowitz the opening he needed to make his argument. And the genius of Dershowitz's argument was that it wasn't necessarily predicated on an actual plot to blackmail Wexner. Maybe the thing Edwards was really after was the idea that a lawyer who helped work out Epstein's non-prosecution agreement was also having sex with Virginia Rob- erts. That would give Edwards leverage in trying to crack the agreement open. And in that case, was it so hard to imagine him pressuring Virginia Roberts to add Dershowitz's name to the list?

Perhaps it wasn't, in this scenario. Virginia would have still felt reluctant to mention Dershowitz. If she was, there was the matter of the three hundred million dollars, and then some, that she would stand to gain. And the three hundred million or so that goes to set up a charity for battered women? If the scenario Dershowitz had thrown out was true, that would have been a genius move on Edwards's part-the sort of detail that helps the whole psychological picture fall into place. If Virginia felt guilty for lying about Dershowitz, she could think of the thousands of battered women she'd end up helping.

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{"people":["jeffrey epstein","alan dershowitz","virginia giuffre","bradley edwards","paul g. cassell","les wexner","scott rothstein"]}