New York Had Everything It Needed to Go After Epstein’s Friends

By Rachel Hurley March 12th, 2026 Updated September 27th, 2026

The FBI made sure it didn’t happen. Here’s what state officials can do now.

Here’s a number worth sitting with: “New York residence” appears 45 times in the federal government’s own 86-page internal memo about Epstein’s potential co-conspirators. Forty-five times.

The Manhattan townhouse was the epicenter. The girls were trafficked there. The men visited there. The abuse happened there. And for more than 20 years, New York’s law enforcement did almost nothing about it - Just Security’s timeline of the case calls it “a long record of institutional failures.”

That’s not entirely an accident.

In the summer of 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal charges brought in New York. Four days after his arrest, a survivor named Jennifer Araoz sat down with Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show and publicly described being recruited into Epstein’s orbit when she was 14.

Survivors were coming forward. The Manhattan DA’s office had an active investigation going. The NYPD’s Special Victims Unit - the people specifically trained to investigate crimes against children - was working the case.

Five days after Epstein’s arrest, the FBI called NYPD brass and told them to shut it down.

The exact language from the July 11, 2019 email: “FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us.”

A separate email flagged the Manhattan DA’s outreach to a victim as, and I want to make sure you read this correctly, “another fire.”

A DA’s investigation into a child sex trafficking ring is a fire that needs to be put out.

One month after that stand-down order, Epstein was dead.

The FBI’s assumption was that once they called off the NYPD, the DA’s office would fall in line too. It’s the same move the feds pulled in New Mexico - the state attorney general there recently confirmed that their Epstein investigation at Zorro Ranch was shut down in 2019 at the direct request of the Southern District of New York. The federal government didn’t just fail to prosecute Epstein’s associates beyond Ghislaine Maxwell. It actively cleared the field of the investigators who might have.

Now, with the Justice Department under this administration having zero interest in accountability, a legal scholar named Ryan Goodman just published a piece laying out exactly what New York can still do on its own.

There are four options.

The New York legislature can form an investigatory committee with subpoena power - similar to what New Mexico just did unanimously. The Governor can convene what’s called a Moreland Commission, which is basically an independent investigative body with strong powers to compel testimony and documents. The Governor can also appoint the Attorney General as a special prosecutor specifically for Epstein-related matters.

Or - and this is the one with real teeth - the Manhattan DA can just open criminal investigations right now, because in New York, several felony sex crimes against children have no statute of limitations. None. The evidence keeps coming. Countries from the UK to France to Latvia have opened their own probes, and what they find could be shared with New York prosecutors. New evidence from the DOJ files keeps surfacing.

The Manhattan DA has already looked at Leon Black, the private equity billionaire, and Jes Staley, the former Barclays CEO. Neither was charged. Maybe there wasn’t enough to charge them. Or maybe the DA was operating in an environment where federal investigators were treating any state-level interest in this case as a problem to be managed rather than a crime to be prosecuted.

People ask why Epstein got away with it for so long. Part of the answer is that he was rich and connected. Another part of the answer is that every time a jurisdiction got close, someone with federal authority made a phone call. New Mexico got that call. New York got that call. The feds made those calls. And it was federal prosecutors in Miami who cut Epstein a deal back in 2007 that even a federal judge later ruled broke the law by keeping his victims in the dark.

The federal government is not going to clean this up. They have had 25 years and they have demonstrated, repeatedly and in writing, that they would rather contain the investigation than complete it.

New York has options it hasn’t used. It has no excuse left.

Sources

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said the Southern District of New York cut Epstein’s Florida deal at the same time it made those calls - federal prosecutors in Miami cut that deal in 2007, twelve years earlier. It quoted an FBI email as saying the DA’s outreach to a victim was a fire that needed to be “put out” - the email called it “another fire,” and “put out” isn’t in it. It said that “fire” was the SVU’s investigation - it was the DA’s. And it said Epstein was arrested in New York - he was arrested at an airport in New Jersey, on federal charges brought in New York.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so and match the sources more closely, on New York’s record, Ghislaine Maxwell’s prosecution, which crimes have no statute of limitations and what the foreign probes could share.