Former Baylor University President Ken Starr’s role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga resurfaced Nov. 12 as the House Oversight Committee released thousands of pages of documents about the disgraced financier and his connections to the nation’s political elite.
That dump included statements by Epstein that President Donald Trump “knew about the girls” and spent “hours at my house with” an unnamed victim. They also document other prominent individuals — including Starr — who offered Epstein support, advice and encouragement as it became clear he was involved in the sexual abuse of minors.
On Feb. 12, 2000, Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, posed with financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
Epstein eventually served time in prison for having sex with girls too young to consent and died — reportedly by suicide — Aug. 10, 2019, at age 66 while being held at Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
Starr came to national attention as the investigator and prosecutor against President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1998. Just 12 years later, Starr was elected president of Baylor, a Baptist school in Waco, Texas. He served there from June 2010 through June 2016 and was forced to resign over mishandling of several sexual assaults at the school, mainly perpetrated by football players.
Four years later, Starr joined Trump’s legal team defending the president during his first impeachment trial. Starr died Sept. 13, 2022.
Among the findings in the new document dump is an email exchange between Epstein and Starr on Aug. 17 through 22, 2018 — two years after Starr ended his term leading Baylor — in which Starr references Epstein’s “unhappy situation.” Starr ends the first email with, “Hugs, Ken.”
In the exchange, Epstein referenced Trump and says in a sentence fragments: “No one above the law.. we began leaving a kingdom. . unlikely to give king like powers to a president. on one above the law. … someone suggested that trump could shoot someone on fifth avenue and not lose a vote. that is true, but would make little sense for him not to suffer an immediate consequence. the allowed civil depo setting precedent for criminal process, is a lawyers outline I might think of dumbing it down, again, and suggesting that you can sue your neighbor, even if you neighbor is the president. makes little sense that the you can be indicted for assaulting him but he cannot if he assaults you. low bar for civil higher bar for criminal.”
To this, Starr replied: “Wise counsel! Thx.”
Starr’s relationship to Epstein is not new information. It was known before Baylor regents elected him university president in 2010. However, it was not until nine years later that Epstein was indicted in New York on federal charges.
Just two years before he was elected to lead Baylor, Starr had been credited with waging a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop sex-trafficking charges against Epstein.
This story is laid out in Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown’s book Perversion of Justice. The Guardian reported in 2021 of the book that Brown “calls Starr a ‘fixer’ who ‘used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case.’”
The Guardian story states: “When Epstein’s lawyers appeared to be failing in their pressure campaign, with senior DOJ officials concluding that Epstein was ripe for federal prosecution, Starr pulled out the stops. Brown discloses that he wrote an eight-page letter to Mark Filip, who had just been confirmed as deputy U.S. attorney general, the second most powerful prosecutor in the country.”
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