How do you say Jeffrey Epstein in Russian?

Pennsylvania- www.law.com- A team of lawyers for Fox Rothschild sat patiently waiting in a federal courtroom on Thursday to hear a single word — guilty — before they headed to the clerk’s office to file a lawsuit that is packed with tragedy and international intrigue.

Attorneys Ely Goldin, David A. Gradwohl and Lilian Nikolaevsky were in the courtroom to witness the entering of a guilty plea by Andrew Mogilyansky, a Russian-American millionaire from Bucks County, Pa., to charges of traveling to his native Russia to have sex with young teenagers who had been plucked from an orphanage and forced into prostitution.

Moments after the hearing ended, the Fox Rothschild lawyers filed an $8 million lawsuit on behalf of five of Mogilyansky’s alleged victims.

In court papers, Mogilyansky’s personal wealth has been estimated at $10 million. A Columbia University graduate, he owns a car export business based in suburban Philadelphia and other businesses that provide a salary of $750,000 a year or more.

Goldin, who was also born in Russia, said Fox Rothschild’s work on the civil suit was a collaborative effort with a Russian law firm, Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners.

The suit alleges that Mogilyansky and cohorts in Russia developed plans for a business that advertised child prostitution services over the Internet through a Web site known as berenika.org.

Some of the details alleged in the suit are chilling.

“Mogilyansky, together with his U.S. and foreign accomplices, recruited underage girls between the ages of 13 and 15 — some of whom were orphans living in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia — and lured them into child prostitution under false pretenses and through false promises of fame and wealth,” the suit says.

“In certain cases, Mogilyansky personally had sex with the prospective recruits to determine their suitability as child prostitutes,” the suit alleges.

Once a girl was “deemed adequate,” the suit alleges, she would be “confined to an apartment and forced to have sex with Mogilyansky and with customers of the prostitution ring.”

The suit accuses Mogilyansky of playing a key role in operating the ring, alleging that he “modernized the ring’s operations by bringing in a professional management, ‘improved’ the ring’s website by arranging to have it translated into English in order to attract a wealthier international clientele, and marketed and advertised the Ring’s services as a ‘Western’ operation that was run professionally, much like a western business enterprise.”

But that “Western” enterprise, the suit alleges, “was built on the backs of child prostitutes who were robbed of their innocence and who suffered terrible and permanent physical, emotional and psychological harm.”

Mogilyansky’s criminal defense counsel said the charges described in the civil suit are untrue.

In the suit plaintiffs seek compensatory damages of at least $1 million for each of the five plaintiffs, as well as punitive damages of at least $3 million.

In the guilty plea hearing Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Morgan-Kelly said Mogilyansky, 38, had sex with three girls brought to his St. Petersburg apartment from a nearby orphanage in late 2003 and early 2004.

The indictment, handed up last year, alleged that Mogilyansky then recruited the three girls — two age 13 and one age 14 — into an online-based child prostitution business in Moscow that he ran with several other people.

But in his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Mary A. McLaughlin, Mogilyansky confessed to a narrower set of facts.

Mogilyansky’s lawyer, Jack McMahon, told reporters before the hearing that his client was never involved in the running of the prostitution ring. Instead, he said, Mogilyansky was merely a customer who admits that he knew the ring’s owners and “used their services.”

The prosecutor, in her brief description of the crimes during the hearing, said nothing of Mogilyansky’s role in recruiting the girls from the orphanage or his alleged role in running the ring.

Instead, Morgan-Kelly described only the facts necessary to prove the elements of the two federal crimes charged — one count of traveling in foreign commerce for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct, and three counts of engaging in such conduct.

Under the terms of Mogilyansky’s guilty plea, he faces a negotiated sentence in the range of 78 to 97 months in prison — far less than the sentence of at least 188 months that he would have faced if he had gone to trial.

The deal also calls for Mogilyansky to pay restitution of $15,000, calculated as $5,000 for each of the three girls to reimburse them for mental health treatment.

After the hearing, McMahon said that he has not seen the civil suit and is not sure whether he will be representing Mogilyansky in that case.
But when asked about the accusations in the suit that Mogilyansky was a manager of the prostitution ring, McMahon said: “They can accuse him of that, but it’s just not true.”