According to a new book by Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown, “Perversion of Justice,” Ken Starr fought a behind-the-scenes battle in 2008 with federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against billionaire Jeffrey Epstein who abused multiple underaged girls, notes The Guardian:
The book says that emails and letters sent by Starr and Epstein’s then criminal defense lawyer Jay Lefkowitz show that the duo were “campaigning to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case”. Starr had been brought into “center stage” of Epstein’s legal team because of his connections in Washington to the Bush administration.
After a few years of defending Epstein, The Guardian notes that Starr was once again on the wrong side of history:
In 2016 he was stripped of the presidency of Baylor University after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.
Despite his sordid past, Starr has been praised by right wing evangelical groups such as CBN, Christian Headlines, Biola University and Focus on the Family’s The Daily Citizen, which called Starr a “distinguished lawyer” in April 2021 to help sell Starr’s book::
That’s the focus of Ken Starr’s latest book Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty. In it the distinguished lawyer, who has argued 36 cases in front of the Supreme Court, presents several examples of successful religious liberty cases that can give Christians a framework to know how to respond when their rights are being infringed.
(Sources: The Guardian, The Daily Citizen, CBN, Christian Headlines, Biola University)