The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein has been focused on his crimes against underage girls.
It was what he was convicted of, and it's what led to his arrest before his death.
Some of the girls who were trapped in his web for years were as young as 14.
But as the Epstein files reveal, that wasn't the whole story.
After he was convicted of soliciting a minor in 2008, Epstein didn't stop being a predator.
He just changed his strategy.
Epstein focused on trafficking adult women.
Coercing them into sexual favors for him and his friends.
He obviously was convicted in 2008, and the takeaway
from that was that he was going to continue his sex trafficking operation,
but he was going to find adults that look like teenagers.
That's our colleague Khadija Safdar.
We interviewed her as she was recovering from an illness, which is why her voice sounds a little scratchy.
Khadija's been covering Epstein since 2019.
As long as they're of legal age, he felt that would mean that the authorities wouldn't come after him.
And unfortunately, he was right that he didn't get as much scrutiny because he was sex trafficking adults.
And so that was how his scheme worked.
And he was actually running, I would say, an international sex trafficking operation where he was moving women
from other countries to the U.S. Women who felt they had no choice but to do what he told them,
even when that meant coercing other women into being victims, too.