Survivors' lawyer on DOJ's 'misguided approach' to Epstein files

0:00WBUR Podcasts, Boston. The government has done such a misguided approach at redacting versus not redacting what they should be redacting. The Justice Department unredacts some names in the Epstein files after congressional members accused the department of protecting the convicted sex offenders co-conspirators.

0:32It's Tuesday, February 10th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Chico Théoudi. Today on the show, Haiti is still trying to fight gang violence and organize elections, which it hasn't held in a decade. But now, a temporary governing body intended to help Haiti achieve those goals dissolves. And yes, we're still talking about Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, but forget the big stars. People can't stop talking about the grass props, which were actually people? Sometimes in life, Benito Bad Bunny calls you and says, hey, can you come be grass at the Super Bowl? And you say yes.

1:17But first, the Justice Department unredacted some names in the Epstein files that Republican Thomas Massey and Democrat Ro Khanna have been threatening to name on the House floor. We now know Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Suleyem had been named as the person who sent a video of which Epstein responded, quote, loved the torture video. And the Miami Herald's Julie Brown is reporting that the files also include details of a 2006 phone call between Donald Trump and the Palm Beach sheriff in which Trump said everybody knew what Epstein was doing. Trump has recently said that he knew nothing about Epstein's activities.

1:55Let's hear what Spencer Coven has to say. He's an attorney representing Epstein survivors. Here's his conversation with Robin Young. Your response to just this news that we have overnight, that there were the names of co-conspirators that had been redacted, now unredacted because congressmen were threatening to go on the House floor and name them. Your response? Frankly, I'm not surprised. The government has done such a misguided approach at redacting versus not redacting what they should be redacting. It just proves that ultimately a third-party intermediary should be the one that is reviewing this information because we can't trust the Department of Justice or the FBI, frankly, to do their job and follow the law that Congress passed.

2:41Yeah, well, we know one of your peers, another lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, said that one of her clients, Annie Farmer, had testified at Yilan Maxwell's trial. Her sister, Maria Farmer, in 1996 had called to tell the FBI that Epstein had stolen nude photos of her sister. None of that is in these papers. Are you worried that things that support your clients aren't here either? Yes. And in fact, we know that the government is still sitting on millions of pages of documents and potentially videos and photographs that they haven't released yet. That's why, again, we need to make sure that someone is reviewing the information that the Department of Justice has to make sure that they're actually going to do their job and do it correctly.

3:27Yeah. So your response to Ghislaine Maxwell not answering any questions at the House Oversight Committee yesterday, you know, pleading the fifth, but also her lawyer saying that she would answer questions if she was granted clemency from Donald Trump. I'm not surprised. Both Epstein and Maxwell pled the fifth in the past. She's a convicted liar and a convicted sex trafficker. So I'm not really surprised at her pleas right now to try and get clemency or a pardon from the administration. It's a ploy by her to do what she can to try and get free. Maxwell's attorney also said if she were allowed to speak freely, she could explain that neither President Trump nor former President Bill Clinton were involved in any wrongdoing.

4:13We spoke of President Clinton yesterday. He's expected to testify later in the month. His interactions with Epstein appeared to be before any charges were revealed. What does that mean to you and your clients, whether or not and to what extent a sitting president and a former president were involved? I think the public needs to judge for themselves who they want in politics and leading their countries. We're seeing it play out here in the United States a little differently than it is playing out overseas, for example, in the United Kingdom with respect to associations that were made with Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell.

4:50But at the end of the day, it's about accountability and making sure that the world is aware of what these elites were doing. And it crosses political parties, and it doesn't matter who it is, it should be stopped. Yeah. Talking about the release of the files, while people that Congressman Connors says are co-conspirators had their names protected, now some have been revealed. Some of the survivors, you know, had, you know, pictures released that shouldn't have been. Has that happened to your clients? Yes. In fact, the day after the release of the documents came out, I searched the files and found that they had left unredacted two of my clients' names who were previously never before disclosed, including victim number one, who was the young girl that was 14 and first went to police and started really this entire investigation back in 2006.

5:42You know, this is a young woman who has tried to move on with her life and put the name Epstein behind her. And she is now 20 years past and the federal government is re-traumatizing her by releasing her name into the general public. Now, thankfully, I was able to notify the DOJ immediately, and that document was pulled down. But we don't know who may have downloaded that and who may have that information. So at this point, the cat really, unfortunately, is out of the bag. And lastly, the reporting that in 2006, Donald Trump called the Miami police chief to say Epstein's a terrible guy. This thing he's doing is terrible.

6:16And he said Maxwell was evil. He knew. What he's been saying is that he had no idea. Yeah, Donald Trump all along has known what Jeffrey Epstein was. Now, what is still a question is what extent Donald Trump was involved with Jeffrey Epstein and what he was doing in the early 2000s. But there's no question that Trump knew. I can tell you that in the original litigation, we noticed Donald Trump for deposition in one of the Epstein cases back in 2008. And he was able to secure and avoid that deposition by disclosing information at the time that could assist with the prosecution of those cases. So there is no question in my mind that Donald Trump knew exactly what Epstein was and what Glenn Maxwell was back then.

7:04He's just choosing to forget it now. Spencer Kuvin, attorney representing several Epstein survivors for nearly two decades, including the first to come forward. Spencer, thanks for speaking with us. Thank you.

7:22Coming up next, a presidential council in Haiti has dissolved. What does that mean for the future of the Caribbean nation? Stay with us.

7:36Thank you.

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8:50Haiti is still under the stronghold of gang violence and hasn't been able to hold an election in a decade. It doesn't have a sitting parliament, and the country hasn't had a president since its last one was assassinated five years ago. Two years ago, the U.S. helped put together a temporary governing body that hasn't been able to stop gang violence nor organize elections. And Haitians have come to resent it. The body's members were paid$56 ,000 a month, a stark contrast to what the average Haitian earns, just$3 a year. And just a few days ago, the governing body dissolved, which means Prime Minister Alix de Dizé Fisame now leads the country alone.

9:32Jacqueline Charles has been covering this for the Miami Herald, and she begins her conversation with Indira Lakshmanan by explaining how Haitians feel about the prime minister. Honestly, in the last couple of months, all of the energy they had was focused on this temporary council. And so, you know, what you saw was he benefited from that. But really, now that he is the only guy in charge, he's going to have to earn that support. For now, nobody is saying he has to go, at least in the population. There were politicians and others who wanted to replace him, including members of this temporary council.

10:06But for now, we can say that he relatively has to support. Well, members of this council that's now dissolved, at least four of them wanted to get rid of the prime minister because they said he had failed to crack down on gang violence, which is blamed for killing at least 16 ,000 people in the last four years. So let me ask, why does the U.S. and why do the U.N. support him staying in power? Well, it was actually five of them voted and they wanted to continue to be in charge. So, you know, the reasons why they wanted to get rid of the prime minister really wasn't that genuine. And in fact, they were there before him and they said they would open up the roads and they would do all of these wonderful things.

10:48And they didn't do it. Their responsibility was to hand power over to an elected government. and they did not. And you saw the United States sanctioned five of them, accused them of basically fanning destabilization and also having relations with gang ties, which they have denied. The U.S. wants stability. They basically want this country to go into an election. Now, is this the right route? Not everyone agrees. They think that there should be checks on the prime minister, but we are out of a constitution in Haiti. And the closest thing to the constitution says, well, if there's a void in a presidency, then it should be the prime minister who runs the government in his cabinet that's in charge.

11:25But this remains an issue of debate. What is the real problem here? It seems like there are deep-seated issues that are making it hard to fight the gangs. Are government members getting payoffs? What's going on? Well, you know, there's the gang violence, the rapes, more than 8 ,000. You know, last year, which was a 25 % increase, the trafficking of children into these armed gangs. Haitians are fed up. They are tired. They want security. In fact, while the U.S. is pushing elections, you talk to Haitians, they want to be able to walk out their house. They want to be able to send their kids to school.

11:59They want to be able to go to a hospital. 70 to 80 percent of the hospitals don't function. They've either been burned or shut down because of this gang violence. And at the same time, the feeling is that the people who are in charge, the lack of accountability means that they have been instrumentalizing the gangs in some aspects. We saw an American warship was deployed to Haiti last week. Issues that normally would have gotten Haitians up in arms, right? Gunboat diplomacy. But they are so desperate, so fed up with the status quo. And what we saw in the last couple of weeks, they were just willing to say, you know what?

12:28If it takes a gunboat off the shores to control the gangs, let's just do this. Jacqueline, you were just in Haiti a few months ago reporting. Can you tell us more about what people are experiencing there? I will tell you a conversation I had with a young woman. She says at 12, I was an orphan. At 15, I was a victim of gun violence. And at 19, I am a survivor of rape. Today, I worry that I'm either going to be killed by the gangs or I'm going to be killed by the weaponized drones. One in four individuals in Port-au-Prince live in a gang-controlled neighborhood. That's the reality that Haitians are being subjected to.

13:01And Jackie, you've reported that a million Haitians have been displaced by this violence from their homes. What about the security that is supposed to be in place. There's the Haitian police. There's a multinational force led by Kenya. Now there's a new gang suppression force. Are none of these security forces able to bring down the gang violence that we're talking about? So I will tell you, in the last couple of weeks, since the end of December, there has been some progress in this. This task force that's overseen by Eric Prince, formerly Blackwater, they're using weaponized drones, which in and of itself as controversial, but they blew up the house of barbecue, which is probably the most recognized of these gang leaders.

13:41People were like, wow, you know, they didn't expect that. They've managed to go into neighborhoods the police has not been in since 2018. And just on Saturday, they reopened a police station near the airport that the gangs had basically taken over and shut down. These are small glimmers of hope. But again, the challenges remain, which is that the police and this force have not been able to keep control of neighborhoods when they pushed the gangs back. And those more than 1.4 million who are displaced, they are still dealing with rapes, hunger. You know, we've got more than 5.7 million who are going hungry.

14:17I mean, all those challenges, they continue as a result of this gang violence. Jacqueline Charles, Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Coming up, imagine telling someone you got to perform with Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. They ask, oh, were you a backup dancer? And you say, no, even better, I was a grass prop. We hear from one after the break.

14:52Before the Super Bowl halftime show officially began, fans in the stands got to see the pretty hilarious visuals of hundreds of huge stalks of grass waddling expeditiously across the football field. Just picture it. Tall, grassy stalks with quick, moving feet underneath. The grass played an important role in the performance, portraying sugarcane fields that tell the story of Puerto Rico's colonial past. And while that part of its history is no laughing matter, the human grass props were undeniably entertaining. Andrew Atheus was one of them. He's a content creator from Philadelphia. Here's his conversation with Indira.

15:31So tell us, how did you get this gig to be a bunch of dancing grass? Are you a professional dancer? No, I'm only a professional dancer in my shower in the morning. But sometimes in life, Benito Badboni calls you and says, hey, can you come be grass at the Super Bowl? And you say yes. But no, the true story is that there's an open casting call by a company called Backlit. and they had a position available for, you know, come be in the Bad Bunny halftime show. We didn't know we're going to be grass. We just knew we had to be in between five, seven and six foot, comfortable wearing a 45 pound costume and not claustrophobic and very athletic.

16:12That was it. That's all we knew. And that's all the information we were given. Wow. Okay. So tell us about the costume. What were the instructions you got for dancing? if you're not a professional shaker and mover? Yeah, so it was actually stated very clearly in the application that this is not a dancing position. So that was kind of like, okay, I don't know what I'm gonna be. And I was actually joking that I don't care if I have to be a tree or grass like my third grade play to be in this Bad Bunny halftime show, I'm going. Lo and behold, I need to play the lottery because I hit it right on the head.

16:48The only instructions we were given was that we were told that we were not supposed to move and that we were supposed to be grass. Like, I don't know if you saw the Barbie movie where Ken was like, my job was beach, just beach. Like my job was grass, just grass. But lo and behold, you know, if I didn't know that I was involved in this and if I just watched the Super Bowl halftime show, I would have been like, yeah, that's grass. Because there were so many people in the stadiums filming us coming in and out and off the field. They were like, there's people in the grass suits. Like red alert. There's people in the rest.

17:21It's cool to get recognized for our work a little bit. Okay. Now, I understand you had to pay your own way, but it was still worth it? Yeah. They didn't pay for us to be flown out. I'm just a crazy one that flew from Philadelphia to do this. But they did pay us minimum wage. But I would have did this for free. In the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, standing in grass, being around all the celebrities and actual dancers. and getting to see behind the scenes of a Super Bowl coming to life for two weeks, that's an experience you can't really put a price tag on. Incredible. So how many practices did you participate in?

18:00How many hours did you have to stand there and be grass? The hours, I don't know how to count, but there was probably about seven or eight practices that we did. But overall, two weeks of just learning to be grass. And honestly, we didn't know we were going to be grass until like the second or third rehearsal. So we were just kind of given our positions on the field where we're supposed to stand and not move. And then we're like, oh, by the way, here's the suit you're going to wear. And it's like, oh, my God, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. But yeah, on average, the week of the Super Bowl, we were wearing the costume for about five hours a day.

18:36And now, did you get pretty sweaty? Was it a big green plastic suit? I mean, what I have here is just the things that go on my arms. but there's eight pieces altogether that we had to put on. And it took about two hours to get all of us dressed up. Whoa. Not two hours, like individually. It took like, you know, maybe five minutes for one person, but there was 400 of us. And fortunately in Silicon Valley, San Francisco area, it was like 60, 65 degrees. So a lot of Californians were like, this is cold. And I was like, I just came back from Philadelphia, where it's four degrees and snowing. So I don't want to hear it's cold.

19:12All right. So what was it like to perform at the Super Bowl? And do you get to meet Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, any of your celebrity heroes? So the Super Bowl is one of those like top guarded secrets. I didn't know Lady Gaga was going to be performing until the Wednesday before the Super Bowl. And I didn't know Ricky Martin was performing until the day before the Super Bowl because he was singing at the rehearsals. But like I didn't know it was him because I was on the other side of the field. So in our earpieces, they never said the names of the people. They're just like, yeah, we have a singer who's going to perform this one bit.

19:52And when I was waddling past this one lady in a black hoodie and a microphone, I thought she was just like one of the directors. And then I heard like the song. I was like, this sounds like a Spanish version of a Lady Gaga song. And then lo and behold, it's because it's Lady Gaga. But yeah, where I was standing on the show was the Casa Sita, the pink house in the beginning. And during all the practices, it was just dancers that were like standing on the door. And during the day of the Super Bowl, I was waddling past. I was like, you know, the dancers that are standing there look a little more expensive than the ones that were at the halftime practices all week.

20:30And I didn't pay any mind because my job was just to be grass and not do anything. It wasn't until almost five, six hours after the show that, you know, one of the other people that I was doing the grass with was like, did you know that young Miko and Cardi B and Carol G and Pedro Pascal were all there? And I was like, yeah, I'm sure they were in the stadium somewhere. It's the Bad Bunny house. I was like, no, they were in the house. Yes. I was like, oh, those are the expensive dancers. I didn't realize that's who that was. All right. So did Bad Bunny himself come through and greet all the extras like you?

21:02So he didn't come one by one and like talk to us. But like after one of the rehearsals, we were all just there at the end of the day and he just kind of talked to everybody. So there's like almost 2000 of us involved in the entire production of the show. So he just talked to all of us and thanked us in Spanish. And then what he said in English was like, you know, thank you to the grass people. So, you know, we lost our minds. It's almost like he said our first name. All right. Well, you posted about this on social media. You've gotten hundreds of messages of response. What have people been saying to you?

21:35It's interesting because all of my family and friends, they're like not surprised. They're like, yeah, of course you were on this epic side quest. You know, this is exactly what we thought you would be doing because I had to keep it a secret from all my family and friends. I couldn't tell anybody that I was in the halftime show with Bad Bunny. So they saw me posting on social that like I'm in San Francisco for the last two weeks, but I couldn't tell them why. And they're like, it doesn't make sense why you're at the Super Bowl. Are you going to the Super Bowl? And I was like, I mean, I am, but I don't have a ticket to the game.

22:05They're like, we'll talk after. But all my family and friends are kind of losing their mind right now. It's almost as if the Seahawks didn't win the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny didn't just have the most historic weekend ever. Everybody wants to talk to the grass people. Well, it strikes me that you're probably the most famous extra or background dancer since Katy Perry's Left Shark. So I'm wondering. I hope that at some point I get to meet the left shark, whoever that person was. I would love that. If the two of you could be brought together, I will do the interview. All right. Well, we understand that you're the son of an immigrant.

22:41Your dad is from Jamaica. That was one of the countries in the Americas that Bad Bunny called out. He said Jamaica when he listed American nations and said, God bless America. What did that mean to you personally? You know, as the son of a Jamaican, Jamaica is a very small island, just like Puerto Rico. But there's a lot of Spanish roots in Jamaica. There's a lot of places in Jamaica that are named after Spanish places like Ocho Rios. But being an American and having a dad who immigrated to this country and understanding that the political climate of this country right now, it's incredible that I get to be a part of this historical event.

23:22And hearing Bad Bunny declared Jamaica and Jamaica as part of the Latino and Latina community, it's really about belonging and bringing everybody together. We all may be from different countries and we all may be from different parts of this planet and this little rock that's floating in space. But at the end of the day, we're all people, we're all human, and we're all on this together. So it's really great to just be a part of something where the whole message was just bringing everyone together and all about love. Lovely. So, Andrew, did you have a favorite song from the set? The one that got stuck in my head the most was Por la mañana café, por la tarde ron, Castamuela calle sal de tu balcón, because he remixed it with the beat from El Aparcon.

24:09I can't remember what the name of the song is, but it's just the Por la mañana café, por la tarde ron. Andrew Atheus is a content creator from Philadelphia who got his star turn as Dancing Grass in Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. And I'll be looking forward to our interview with you and Left Shark. I can't wait.