Raúl Torrez is right to sue Indyke and Kahn over Epstein's crimes
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez sued Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer and accountant for facilitating sex trafficking, a move that correctly targets the white-collar machinery that protects predators.
I grew up in Flint, where the people who poisoned our water didn't hold the pipes. They sat in offices. They signed the memos. They managed the budgets while my neighbors got sick. In the world of the powerful, the person who commits the crime is rarely the only one who makes it possible. They have a professional class of enablers—the lawyers and the accountants—who treat human misery as a back-office accounting problem.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has finally named two of those enablers. In a federal lawsuit filed October 21, 2026, Torrez accused Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn of facilitating and concealing Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. This includes the abuse of girls and young women at Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. According to CNBC, the lawsuit alleges that Indyke and Kahn helped finance the operation and violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
This is not just about legal technicalities. It is about a payout. Epstein’s estate is valued at more than $107 million.
The price of professional silence
The money trail is where the truth lives. The lawsuit states that Indyke is eligible for a bequest of $50 million. Kahn is eligible for $25 million. These men are not just employees; they are co-executors of the estate and beneficiaries of the 1953 Trust.
Between 2011 and 2019, the payments were already flowing. Indyke received more than $16 million from Epstein and related entities. Kahn received more than $10 million. This is the "administrative backbone" of a criminal empire. These professionals provided the corporate machinery that funneled millions to maintain elite legitimacy while the human toll accumulated behind closed doors.
The defense, delivered by attorney Daniel Weiner, is the standard script for the white-collar accomplice. He claims the allegations are "categorically false." He argues that Indyke and Kahn had no knowledge of the abuse because it happened "behind closed doors" in "secluded locations." He even suggests the lawsuit is "baseless" because Torrez did not interview the defendants first.
That argument is a lie. You do not manage the finances and legal shields of a global predator for decades without knowing where the money goes. The 2008 financial crisis taught us that the people who manage the books are never just bystanders. High-level financial architects and accountants managed the risk while homeowners bore the cost. They always claim they didn't know the details until the house of cards falls.
This follows the same mechanism as Madoff Investment Securities, where a high-status predator uses a network of trusted financial facilitators to maintain a facade of legitimacy while systematically draining the lives and assets of the vulnerable.
The wall of institutional protection
The struggle to get these men into court reveals a deeper rot. Raúl Torrez has had to sue the Department of Justice to get unredacted files. He accuses the DOJ and Attorney General Todd Blanche of "stonewalling" the state’s investigation.
The failure is systemic. The Guardian reported that federal authorities had not searched Zorro Ranch, even though thousands of references to the property appeared in disclosed files. New Mexico's own initial probe was put on hold in 2019 at the request of federal prosecutors in New York.
This is how the system protects its own. We saw this again with the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Corporate executives and legal teams engineered a technical deception to conceal systemic fraud. In both cases, the professionals used their credentials to build a wall between the crime and the consequences.
Anouska De Georgiou, a survivor of Epstein's abuse, said the horror "did not happen in isolation." She is right. It required a network of people to look the other way. It required accountants to move the money and lawyers to draft the NDAs. As De Georgiou noted, accountability must extend to those who knowingly made the abuse possible.
The historical pattern predicts that the facilitators are the last to fall. They are the ones who keep the records and know where the bodies are buried. For them, the "professional services" they provided were simply the cost of doing business for a monster.
In February, Epstein’s estate agreed to pay up to $35 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused Indyke and Kahn of aiding and abetting sex trafficking. That settlement included no admission of misconduct. It was a payment to make the problem go away, not a step toward justice.
The verdict on the enablers
The law must stop treating white-collar complicity as a secondary offense. When a lawyer or an accountant helps a trafficker hide his assets and silence his victims, they are not "providing services." They are operating the machinery of the crime.
The federal government will likely continue to obstruct New Mexico's access to unredacted records. They will use bureaucratic stonewalling to protect institutional enablers until public pressure forces a congressional override. This is the standard play for federal agencies seeking to avoid exposing systemic regulatory failures.
Justice requires that not one cent of Epstein's remaining wealth goes to the men who helped him operate. As Raúl Torrez stated, those who enabled this exploitation should not profit from it while survivors continue to live with the consequences. The money belongs to the survivors, not the men who balanced the books of a sex trafficking ring.