![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-11-at-12.38.45-PM.png?resize=1080%2C693&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a>I\u2019m shocked\u2026 SHOCKED\u2026 that the man who worked with Brett Kavanaugh<\/a> to prosecute Bill Clinton would exhibit such moral flexibility.<\/p>\n Lest anyone tries to convince themselves that Starr might not have known about Epstein\u2019s 2008 child prostitution plea \u2014 or the much more horrific contemporaneous allegations<\/a> that were buried by Epstein\u2019s Non-Prosecution Agreement \u2014 remember that Ken Starr represented<\/em> Epstein in that deal<\/a>. He didn\u2019t just know about the facts of the charge Epstein would plea to, but everything about the case. All the allegations that the career prosecutor on the case kept begging her supervisors, especially future Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, to consider:<\/p>\n Julie K. Brown, the journalist who did the most to bring Epstein\u2019s crimes to light, reported in Perversion of Justice<\/em>, that Starr was the \u201cmost powerful force\u201d behind Epstein\u2019s 2008 plea deal, leading a \u201cscorched-earth\u201d legal campaign to keep Epstein out of federal prison. Epstein ultimately took a year of county jail with 12-hour daily work release. <\/p>\n Zealously representing a criminal defendant does not require being their buddy. But Starr was calling Epstein his friend and brother years after the fact. While at Baylor, Starr arranged for Epstein to come to Waco and rolled out the red carpet. Starr signed off his emails to Epstein with \u201chugs\u201d and \u201clove,\u201d<\/a> because nothing says \u201cappropriate professional boundaries\u201d quite like sending mash notes to a registered sex offender. Starr expressed interest in visiting Epstein in New York and Florida and the two chatted about current events like old college buddies catching up. <\/p>\n In 2016, after Starr was ousted from Baylor over the sexual assault cover-up \u2014 oh, right! Remember how Starr\u2019s tenure as Baylor\u2019s president ended after it came out that his office looked the other way amidst a series of sexual assault claims?<\/a> Claims that the university didn\u2019t address because the football team was nationally relevant? According to the Baylor Lariat, Starr apparently complained to Epstein about a Texas Monthly<\/em> article detailing the scandal, calling it an \u201cattack\u201d on the \u201cturbo-charged leadership\u201d of football coach Art Briles.<\/p>\n This continued correspondence wasn\u2019t legal work. Lawyers don\u2019t have to keep up with former clients socially. And when your work revealed that those clients credibly ran a child sex ring, you definitely don\u2019t have to keep them on the Christmas card list. <\/p>\n Starr\u2019s access to more evidence about Epstein\u2019s 2008 plea makes his correspondence more disturbing than the emails involving other lawyers, but the same depressing question dominates over all of Epstein\u2019s stable of lawyer pen pals: didn\u2019t anyone ever bother to ask why a guy with a child prostitution conviction wanted to be their best friend?<\/p>\n Epstein was a groomer and part of that process involved cultivating relationships with the rich and powerful. He built a shield of legitimacy by association and all of his lawyer buddies became bricks in that wall. Epstein brought credentialed, respectable people into his orbit so people could point to his dinner companions and ask themselves \u201cwell, would all these important people hang out with a predator?\u201d The answer, obviously, was yes \u2014 but most folks naively thought it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n And look, people can deserve second-chances. But lawyers are professionally expected to exercise some healthy skepticism. Someone who served their time for a drunken bar fight 10 years ago probably isn\u2019t using their relationship with a lawyer as part of ongoing exploitation. Someone guilty of sexually exploiting children should raise some red flags. It\u2019s not so much that these lawyers responded to Epstein\u2019s emails, it\u2019s that they seemed to do so with reckless credulity. <\/p>\n For Starr \u2014 who knew back in 2008 that the government had reason to accuse Epstein of running a \u201ccult-like\u201d organization \u2014 it requires gobsmacking levels of obliviousness not to take a second to ask if maybe you\u2019ve become the mark once you\u2019re sending a sex offender \u201chugs\u201d and \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n Or maybe it was just cynicism. As we noted when Starr died in 2022<\/a>, this was a guy who dragged the country through scandal for naked political gain. A guy who abdicated his role in protecting Baylor students to maintain a winning football program. Why would anyone expect any sort of moral pause when it came to a charming rich man with a lot of friends who just happened to traffic children? <\/p>\n Ken Starr made a career out of arguing that character counts and that private conduct reflects upon public fitness. It\u2019s a shame he never took his own advice.<\/p>\n The post Ken Starr Writing To \u2018My Friend, My Brother\u2019 Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ken Starr spent the 90s and millions of taxpayer dollars investigating a real estate deal that turned up nothing before pivoting to criminalizing an affair between consenting adults. To be clear, Bill Clinton\u2019s relationship with Monica Lewinsky raised the sort of serious power imbalance issues that HR departments exist to prevent, but the Starr investigation wasn\u2019t designed to spark a nuanced conversation about sexual harassment, it was an effort to translate quasi-puritanical moral panic into cheap political points. <\/p>\n Apparently, the moral scold of the Clinton era didn\u2019t have the same hang ups when a convicted child sex offender came calling.<\/p>\n Emails included in the DOJs latest Esptein files dump show Starr \u2014 while serving as president of Baylor University \u2014 personally corresponded with and hosted Jeffrey Epstein on the Baylor campus<\/a>. In 2012. Four years after Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. <\/p>\n I\u2019m shocked\u2026 SHOCKED\u2026 that the man who worked with Brett Kavanaugh<\/a> to prosecute Bill Clinton would exhibit such moral flexibility.<\/p>\n Lest anyone tries to convince themselves that Starr might not have known about Epstein\u2019s 2008 child prostitution plea \u2014 or the much more horrific contemporaneous allegations<\/a> that were buried by Epstein\u2019s Non-Prosecution Agreement \u2014 remember that Ken Starr represented<\/em> Epstein in that deal<\/a>. He didn\u2019t just know about the facts of the charge Epstein would plea to, but everything about the case. All the allegations that the career prosecutor on the case kept begging her supervisors, especially future Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, to consider:<\/p>\n Julie K. Brown, the journalist who did the most to bring Epstein\u2019s crimes to light, reported in Perversion of Justice<\/em>, that Starr was the \u201cmost powerful force\u201d behind Epstein\u2019s 2008 plea deal, leading a \u201cscorched-earth\u201d legal campaign to keep Epstein out of federal prison. Epstein ultimately took a year of county jail with 12-hour daily work release. <\/p>\n Zealously representing a criminal defendant does not require being their buddy. But Starr was calling Epstein his friend and brother years after the fact. While at Baylor, Starr arranged for Epstein to come to Waco and rolled out the red carpet. Starr signed off his emails to Epstein with \u201chugs\u201d and \u201clove,\u201d<\/a> because nothing says \u201cappropriate professional boundaries\u201d quite like sending mash notes to a registered sex offender. Starr expressed interest in visiting Epstein in New York and Florida and the two chatted about current events like old college buddies catching up. <\/p>\n In 2016, after Starr was ousted from Baylor over the sexual assault cover-up \u2014 oh, right! Remember how Starr\u2019s tenure as Baylor\u2019s president ended after it came out that his office looked the other way amidst a series of sexual assault claims?<\/a> Claims that the university didn\u2019t address because the football team was nationally relevant? According to the Baylor Lariat, Starr apparently complained to Epstein about a Texas Monthly<\/em> article detailing the scandal, calling it an \u201cattack\u201d on the \u201cturbo-charged leadership\u201d of football coach Art Briles.<\/p>\n This continued correspondence wasn\u2019t legal work. Lawyers don\u2019t have to keep up with former clients socially. And when your work revealed that those clients credibly ran a child sex ring, you definitely don\u2019t have to keep them on the Christmas card list. <\/p>\n Starr\u2019s access to more evidence about Epstein\u2019s 2008 plea makes his correspondence more disturbing than the emails involving other lawyers, but the same depressing question dominates over all of Epstein\u2019s stable of lawyer pen pals: didn\u2019t anyone ever bother to ask why a guy with a child prostitution conviction wanted to be their best friend?<\/p>\n Epstein was a groomer and part of that process involved cultivating relationships with the rich and powerful. He built a shield of legitimacy by association and all of his lawyer buddies became bricks in that wall. Epstein brought credentialed, respectable people into his orbit so people could point to his dinner companions and ask themselves \u201cwell, would all these important people hang out with a predator?\u201d The answer, obviously, was yes \u2014 but most folks naively thought it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n And look, people can deserve second-chances. But lawyers are professionally expected to exercise some healthy skepticism. Someone who served their time for a drunken bar fight 10 years ago probably isn\u2019t using their relationship with a lawyer as part of ongoing exploitation. Someone guilty of sexually exploiting children should raise some red flags. It\u2019s not so much that these lawyers responded to Epstein\u2019s emails, it\u2019s that they seemed to do so with reckless credulity. <\/p>\n For Starr \u2014 who knew back in 2008 that the government had reason to accuse Epstein of running a \u201ccult-like\u201d organization \u2014 it requires gobsmacking levels of obliviousness not to take a second to ask if maybe you\u2019ve become the mark once you\u2019re sending a sex offender \u201chugs\u201d and \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n Or maybe it was just cynicism. As we noted when Starr died in 2022<\/a>, this was a guy who dragged the country through scandal for naked political gain. A guy who abdicated his role in protecting Baylor students to maintain a winning football program. Why would anyone expect any sort of moral pause when it came to a charming rich man with a lot of friends who just happened to traffic children? <\/p>\n Ken Starr made a career out of arguing that character counts and that private conduct reflects upon public fitness. It\u2019s a shame he never took his own advice.<\/p>\n The post Ken Starr Writing To \u2018My Friend, My Brother\u2019 Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ken Starr spent the 90s and millions of taxpayer dollars investigating a real estate deal that turned up nothing before pivoting to criminalizing an affair between consenting adults. To be clear, Bill Clinton\u2019s relationship with Monica Lewinsky raised the sort of serious power imbalance issues that HR departments exist to prevent, but the Starr investigation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":143861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Headshot-300x200-WTmmGw.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-11-at-12.55.35-PM.png?resize=938%2C736&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a>
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Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
\nJoe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n