The man who secured Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious sweetheart deal that helped him avoid serious jail time is leaving the legal field.
Jay Lefkowitz, 63, announced on Monday that he will be retiring after three decades as a prominent litigator at Kirkland & Ellis’ New York offices.
The litigator is known for being Epstein’s henchman and the driving force behind the disgraced financier’s 2008 Florida plea deal, which allowed him to escape serious federal charges despite extensive evidence that he had abused and trafficked underage girls.
“Although I believe everyone is entitled to representation no matter how heinous their crimes, knowing what we all know now, I would not have taken on the [Epstein] matter,” Lefkowitz said in a statement announcing his departure, according to Lawfuel.
A spokesperson for Kirkland also told the outlet: “To say the least, we deeply regret the firm’s 2007 representation of Jeffrey Epstein.”
Lefkowitz, a Bush White House alum, has been under scrutiny since the Department of Justice released portions of the so-called “Epstein files,” in which he was named more than a thousand times.
The documents detail the lengths Lefkowitz went to secure Epstein’s freedom—and how he maintained a friendship with the pedophile afterward, including taking flights on Epstein’s private helicopter and inviting him to his son’s bar mitzvah.
Lefkowitz, who recently represented Columbia University after the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding, remains employed as an adjunct law professor at the Ivy League school at the time of publication.
Another file alleges that Lefkowitz—who brokered Epstein’s deal with former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta after a career in George W. Bush’s White House—was the driving force behind the “hideous” sex trafficker’s freedom.
“It is believed that Jay Lefkowitz, a defense lawyer from Kirkland, Ellis’s NY office, played a significant role in this enterprise,” reads a letter addressed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York that was published earlier this year.
Additional documents published by the Justice Department show that Lefkowitz wrote a threatening letter to the Daily Beast in September 2010 at Epstein’s direction.
Lefkowitz tried to smear Conchita Sarnoff, who wrote the first national account of Epstein’s plea deal for the Beast. In the letter, Lefkowitz claimed that Epstein had not been investigated for sex trafficking. He then made the sinister threat: “As I’m sure you are aware, the publication of false allegations of criminal conduct is defamatory per se. The Daily Beast should proceed carefully before publishing or republishing such allegations.”
Lefkowitz wrote to the Beast again in June 2011 after learning of plans to publish more stories about Epstein. “I am very concerned that these forthcoming articles may contain inaccurate and libelous information about Mr. Epstein,” he said, asking again to “check and/or correct any facts about Mr. Epstein in advance of publication.”
He then followed up with an almost verbatim copy of that letter the following month, this time to the general counsel of IAC, the Beast’s parent company. He insisted “there have been no allegations of improper conduct since the fall of 2005,” and that Epstein had since “returned to his life as a philanthropist and financial adviser.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Kirkland & Ellis and Lefkowitz for comment.
