Objections: With Adam Klasfeld

In 2000, former President Bill Clinton signed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, a landmark piece of legislation later reauthorized by his successors that protect survivors with tools like "T" visas and stiff penalties for alleged perpetrators.

"Prior to that, victims were loathe to cooperate, because they would often be shipped back to towns where the traffickers held power and could exact awful reprisals," attorney Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who led intake on sex-trafficking cases in the District of New Jersey in 2003 and 2004, told Law&Crime. "Traffickers would often threaten girls and women that, if they cooperated with police/prosecutors, they would be killed in hideous fashion after being deported."

Now of counsel with the firm Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, Epner drew from his experiences navigating that then-nascent prosecutorial tool to offer insights into the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. She stands accused of sexually trafficking minors for Jeffrey Epstein and enticed them to travel to perform illegal sex acts.

If convicted of all charges, Maxwell, 59, can be imprisoned effectively for the rest of her life.

Offering analysis at length in a Zoom interview, Epner told Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld" that the outcome of Maxwell's trial will depend less on the panel's studious parsing of the various exhibits that come into evidence.

Instead, Maxwell's fate will hinge upon something more fundamental: whose account the jury believes.

Quoting the famed trial lawyer Gerry Spence, Epner said: "Facts are not persuasive; stories are."

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Nearly two decades after the Boston Globe's watershed "Spotlight" investigation blew the lid on sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church, one of the key lawyers who brought that scandal to public light has not relented on his clergy accountability crusade.

Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who was depicted in a film about the "Spotlight" series, discussed the ongoing legal battles, his Hollywood treatment and his continuing fight for disclosure on the Law&Crime podcast "Objections: With Adam Klasfeld."

"The investigation had a tremendous impact and helping notify the public that they have to protect children, where those children and adults are in a caring custody of priests," Garabedian said in the interview, referring to the Globe expose. "And it had great impact in helping clergy sexual abuse victims or survivors try to heal and come forward and report the abuse."

"With a clergy sexual abuse survivor or victim, it's all about validation," Garabedian added. "The survivor of victim has to know that the abuse was not their fault."

In early 2002, the Globe published its Pulitzer-winning series "Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church," sparking multiple criminal prosecutions and international attention. It also made the already tenacious Garabedian even busier, inspiring other people who said they are survivors to seek legal counsel.

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With the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery's accused murderers coming to a head in November, U.S. gun law and policy have captured global attention the same month a new book exposes the inner workings of the National Rifle Association—the most powerful group in shaping these topics.

NPR's investigative correspondent Tim Mak's book "Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA" details what the author describes in an interview as the "serious existential threat to the NRA" posed by New York Attorney General Letitia James's (D) lawsuit seeking its dissolution.

"The NRA has in the past dealt with revolts from its members. It's dealt with legal problems. It's dealt with allegations of financial malfeasance and dealt with just incredible challenges from within and disparate factions in-fighting," Mak says on the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld."

"But it's never dealt with all of these things happening all at once and in this acute crisis," Mak added.

James, for her part, campaigned for attorney general by calling the NRA a "terrorist organization." Now, she's running for governor.

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A little more than a week after her landmark $220,000 victory against Hobby Lobby, a transgender manager and her lawyer have confirmed that the conservative Christian-owned crafts company now allows her to use the women's restroom.

Hobby Lobby denied frame department manager Meggan Sommerville that right for more than a decade, a policy that an Illinois appellate court recently found caused her "emotional devastation" deserving of the toughest penalty the state's Human Rights Commission has ever awarded.

"Fortunately, about a week and a half ago, they told Meggan that, for the first time, they will abide by the court's decision, and she can use the women's room at work," her attorney Jacob Meister reveals on the show.

Fresh from her victory from a unanimous three-judge panel, Sommerville opens up about the turmoil Hobby Lobby's former policy caused her.

"I still will have dreams, nightmares of being in environments where I'm not accepted, where I am just in this constant battle to prove to the world around me who I am," Sommerville said. "It's tough. I don't wish this on anybody. Hopefully one day I will be able to get past it, but it's been emotionally devastating."

Her lawyer Meister unpacks the significance of his client’s court victory for other transgender people in the workplace and explains why lawyers say in cases involving gender: "It always comes down to bathrooms."

Toward the end of the episode, Sommerville shares an anecdote about the support she received from one of her Hobby Lobby customers when she first transitioned.

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From his stint on a Ukrainian oligarch's company board to endless conspiracy theories about his laptop, the career path of the president's son Hunter Biden has ignited controversy for years. His recent foray into the art world, however, has put him under fire outside the familiar corners of the political right.

Take former President Barack Obama's ethics czar Walter Shaub, whose criticism has been persistent and stinging.

The week after the New York Times reported that the First Son hopes to fetch up to $500,000 apiece for some 15 works of art, Shaub did not mince words.

"I just think that's absolutely appalling," Shaub said on Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: With Adam Klasfeld."

"Now, that's a criticism of Hunter Biden, and he's a sympathetic character, who we can feel bad for on many levels," Shaub continued. "But some of his problems are of his own making, in that he has always built his career around being Joe Biden's son. And here he is doing that, once again. If he were a patriot—if he cared about this country—he would not want to tarnish his father's reputation that way."

Learn more about why Shaub believes the fledgling artist's debut showing—and the White House's response to it—stands in the way of an "ethical Renaissance" in Washington, which he fears will undermine the president's promise to turn the corner from the Trump era.

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Swift and enduring, the impact of the Miami Herald's three-part investigative series "Perversion of Justice" reanimated the Jeffrey Epstein docket, brought survivors from the shadows onto the record, led to the disgraced exit of a presidential cabinet member, and has been credited with sparking two federal prosecutions. Its author Julie K. Brown's subsequent open records battles foisted thousands of pages onto the public domain and established legal precedent in favor of sunlight.

Still, Brown's accomplishments have not made her optimistic about a new era of openness.

"We've had to fight so hard to get every single little document that we've gotten," she said, exasperated. "Instead of becoming more and more transparent, the process is becoming less transparent, because so many people are involved."

Reflecting on her fight for transparency on Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Brown talks about her new book about her watershed investigation, her interactions with Epstein's victims, her lingering suspicions about his death, and why she believes that courts remain "under pressure" to keep the rest of the story "under wraps and heavily redacted."

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Even by the standards of a feverish post-election cycle, a recently disclosed draft letter by a Department of Justice staffer seeking to undermine the election results in Georgia reached new heights of paranoia.

Jeffrey Clark, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil division under Trump, cited an unspecified theory about hackers having evidence that a Dominion voting machine "accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China," according to a draft letter first reported by ABC News last week.

Dated Dec. 28, that draft letter urged top Peach State officials to evaluate supposed election “irregularities,” and Clark sent it to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. Both reportedly rejected the overture, but the disclosure of the thwarted scheme reportedly spurred Rosen to share what he knew about the plans the Justice Department’s inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: With Adam Klasfeld," New York University School of Law Professor Ryan Goodman reflects on last week's revelations in Clark's saga and what it means for what national security experts like him call the "insider threat."

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Soundly defeated in four separate courts, the election-attacking legal monster known as the "Kraken" has been morphing into a different beast.

Associated with pro-Trump conspiracy theorists Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, the Kraken took its name from an octopus-like creature of mythology and inserted its tentacles into federal courts in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan. The last court is where the Kraken met perhaps its most formidable adversary: Detroit's lawyer David Fink, who decided that defeating the lawsuit alone was not enough.

"Step one was stopping the Kraken," Fink declared on the podcast. "Step two is caging the Kraken."

In December, Fink became the first attorney to seek heavy sanctions against the lawyers pushing former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A federal judge in Michigan has been considering Fink's long-pending request to refer Powell, Wood, and seven other attorneys working with them for disbarment proceedings. He also wants the judge to sanction the nine lawyers with a fine for the money that they raised in support of their election conspiracy theories.

That brought Fink to another phase of his opposition: "Defanging the Kraken."

Learn more on this podcast.

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"Big, Dirty Money" author Jen Taub sounds off on a month of opioid settlements with the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma and others on the latest episode of "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld."

In the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, public officials across the country who defended the integrity of the vote were subjected to hatred and threats. One of them was Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), who called out former President Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party for stoking public rage.

“Their words and actions have consequences,” Hobbs said in November, linking the threats against her, her family, and her office to widespread misinformation.

For her efforts, Hobbs was targeted by death threats and even had her home address and son's phone number leaked online.

In a wide-ranging interview for Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Secretary Hobbs—who is now running for governor—disclosed that she needs protection yet again in the wake of a so-called "forensic audit" in Arizona that have reheated the old conspiracy theories that previously put her in danger.

"The level of harassment and just attacks on my office from every angle has not let up, and there are renewed threats, leading to me having to have a security detail for the second time," Hobbs said. "It's not part of my job to have that. But it's the second time in the last six months that it's happened."

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