Scores of accusers to speak at hearing after Epstein’s death

NEW YORK (AP) — Up to 30 women are expected to take a judge up on his invitation to speak at a hearing after financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself before facing sex trafficking charges.

The hearing Tuesday morning was scheduled last week by US District Judge Richard Berman, who presided over the case prosecutors brought against Epstein after the 66-year-old convicted felon was arrested July 6 after he arrived at a New Jersey airport from Paris.

A New York City coroner has formally classified the death a suicide. Epstein died August 10.

The judge set the hearing after prosecutors asked that he scrap charges against Epstein since the defendant is dead. Berman said he would give prosecutors, Epstein’s lawyers and any victims a chance to speak.

Since the hearing was scheduled, it was revealed that Epstein signed a will just two days before his suicide putting over $577 million in assets into a trust fund. The will, filed in the Virgin Islands where Epstein maintained a residence, was expected to make it more difficult for dozens of accusers to collect damages.

Epstein had pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges and was held without bail, accused of sexually abusing women in the early 2000s at mansions in Manhattan and Florida.

Since his death, an angry Attorney General William Barr has vowed that anyone who aided Epstein in sex trafficking will be pursued in a continuing investigation.

He also removed the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons from his position, placed two guards who were supposed to be watching Epstein the morning he died on administrative leave and temporarily reassigned the warden to the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Barr has said officials had uncovered “serious irregularities” and was angry that staff members at the federal lockup had failed to “adequately secure this prisoner.”

At the time of his death, Epstein was preparing though his lawyers to argue in court papers due in September that he could not be prosecuted because he signed a no-prosecution deal with prosecutors a dozen years ago in Florida. Prosecutors in New York said that deal did not prevent the new charges. Epstein signed it before he pleaded guilty to Florida state charges in 2008, admitting sexual relations with teenage girls under the age of consent.

The suicide happened despite a warning in late July when Epstein was found on the floor of his cell with bruises to his neck. After Epstein died, Berman asked the jail’s warden for answers about that episode, saying it had never been “definitively explained.”

Epstein spent a few days under suicide watch but then was transferred back to a cell in a Special Housing Unit where he had a cellmate. Eventually, though, the cellmate was taken out and he was left alone.

Last week, France opened up its own investigation into the alleged rape of minors and a raft of other charges linked to the Jeffrey Epstein case, broadening the search to uncover potential victims and accomplices of the financier two weeks after he killed himself.

Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said the decision to open a preliminary investigation was based on “elements transmitted” to his office and “exchanges with American authorities, competent in the so-called Epstein affair.”