If you're going to solicit underage prostitutes, it's best to be rich and white.
So says a South Florida attorney who feels his client should get off with a slap on the wrist just like billionaire Palm Beach perv Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, 57, received just over a year in jail and a year's probation in 2008 after pleading guilty to charges of soliciting a prostitute who was a minor. It was a relatively weak prosecution and light sentence for a man accused of having sex with a multitude of underage girls who were recruited by people he'd hired.
Contrast Epstein's story with that of Fort Lauderdale's Johnny Saintil, charged with recruiting two underage girls last year for an Internet-based prostitution ring.
Saintil, 28, faces life in prison if convicted when his trial begins next week.
Joel DeFabio, Saintil's lawyer, thinks he should get the same treatment Epstein got, and wants his client's case thrown out, according to the Miami Herald.
Calling it "selective prosecution," DeFabio claims the scales of justice aren't coming out even for Saintil, a poor black man of Haitian descent, and Epstein, who is rich and white.
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"Epstein was both a pimp and a `john' (an individual who pays the prostitutes for sex)," DeFabio said in court papers, obtained by the Herald. "He recruited and paid individuals to go out into the public and find minor girls to have sex with him for money."
The U.S. attorney's office says the claims are "unfounded." They claim Saintil and four other men recruited the girls, ages 15 and 17, to pimp them out. Epstein, on the other hand, didn't pimp out the girls or make any money off them, only using them for his own pleasure.
"Accordingly, Epstein and Saintil are not similarly situated individuals, and Saintil cannot show that his prosecution has had a discriminatory effect," prosecutors said in court papers.
Epstein, who once hob-nobbed with the likes of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, is done with probation and free as a bird, though he's now a convicted sex offender in the state of Florida. And then there's those dozen or so civil suits he's in the process of fighting related to his various escapades with the high school girls.
Saintil's federal trail begins Monday in Broward.
