Courtney Wild Takes Her CVRA Fight To The Supreme Court

Courtney Wild, one of the dozens of women victimized by Jeffrey Epstein, brought a bold claim: when the federal government secretly negotiated a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Epstein in 2007, prosecutors deprived her and others of rights guaranteed under the CVRA — specifically, the right to confer with government lawyers and be treated fairly. She argued they were kept in the dark and misled about why there was no federal prosecution. Wild’s case was trying to force accountability for those abuses of process, not just the underlying horrors


But in a deeply disappointing outcome, Wild lost in court. In April 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, held that the CVRA does not allow a victim to bring a freestanding lawsuit when there’s no preexisting criminal prosecution. Since Epstein was never federally charged in those earlier negotiations, there was no “proceeding” in which her rights under the CVRA had been triggered. The Supreme Court later declined to hear her petition, letting the decision stand. Wild’s legal argument was powerful, but the statutes — as currently written and interpreted — didn’t give victims a path to enforce their CVRA rights under those particular circumstances.


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