Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested for trafficking dozens of young girls for sex

Days after an appeals court panel ordered the unsealing of thousands of pages of documents from one of the civil suits arising from billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's secret sweetheart plea bargain that allowed him to escape any serious penalties for years of alleged trafficking and raping of young teens, he has been arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force and now faces charges related to dozens of sex offenses against young girls.

The billionaire traded evidence in an undisclosed crime (thought to be the financial frauds of Bear-Sterns, where he had worked, and who later lost a reported $57 million of his fortune during their collapse) for a light sentence in a minimum-security prison, which he was able to leave most days on a work-release program. The deal was kept secret from Epstein's victims, which is itself illegal. The prosecutor who brokered the deal, Alexander Acosta, is now Trump's labor secretary.

Epstein faces up to 45 years in prison. As The Daily Beast reports, "The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district's human-trafficking officials and the FBI." Details of the case are expected to be unsealed on Monday.

Epstein is connected to many powerful people, some of whom, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, got rides on the private jet Epstein is accused of using as part of an international sex-trafficking conspiracy. One of Epstein's lawyers is Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman who says she was trafficked by Epstein when she was a teenager. Read the rest