Lanna Belohlavek


Office	Assistant State Attorney, Office of the State Attorney for the 15th Judicial Circuit of Florida, under State Attorney Barry Krischer
Role	Chief of the Crimes Against Children Unit, and the line prosecutor on the Epstein state case¹
Her own account	She and a colleague “were at a disagreement” with the Palm Beach police “over what the state … could ethically charge”; the office took the allegations “seriously, because … it was an organized scheme to involve young girls by offering them money”¹²
What she offered	A guilty plea to a third-degree felony with adjudication withheld, five years’ probation, and no unsupervised contact with minors. He rejected it¹
The charge he pleaded to	Procurement of a minor for prostitution — which she told investigators she never considered, because the police had not presented it¹
Before the grand jury	She conducted examination on 44 sheets of the 2006 Palm Beach grand jury transcript³
At the plea	She spoke on 35 sheets of the plea and sentencing transcript of 30 June 2008, and told the court she had “spoken to several” victims herself⁴⁵

Lanna Belohlavek was the Assistant State Attorney who headed the Crimes Against Children Unit in Palm Beach County and handled the Epstein prosecution for the State of Florida. She is the line prosecutor on the state case that Barry Krischer’s office brought, and the person the Palm Beach Police Department dealt with when it pressed for felony charges.

Her own voice is in this record at length, which is unusual for the people on the state side of this case: she examines witnesses across 44 sheets of the released grand jury transcript, she speaks on 35 sheets of the plea transcript, and the Justice Department’s internal report quotes her interview at four separate points.³⁴¹²⁶

Her account, in her own words

The Office of Professional Responsibility interviewed her. Its report records her position at the point where the police and the prosecutors fell out:

Assistant State Attorney and Crimes Against Children Unit Chief Lanna Belohlavek told OPR that she and an experienced Assistant State Attorney who initially worked with her on the case “were at a disagreement” with the PBPD “over what the state … could ethically charge.”¹

The objection was about elements of proof. She did not believe the evidence the police had presented would support the two felonies they wanted filed, unlawful sexual activity with a minor, Florida Statute § 794.05(1), and lewd and lascivious molestation of a minor, § 800.04(5), and the report records that the police “were not happy with that.”¹ Two evidentiary problems sit beside that objection: victims had given contradictory statements to police, and the original complainant, whose account could have supported a charge carrying sex-offender registration, recanted her allegation of sexual contact.¹

On the next page of the report she is quoted on how her office read the conduct, and it is not a dismissal of it:

Belohlavek told OPR that her office took the allegations against Epstein “seriously, because … it was an organized scheme to involve young girls by offering them money. And I wouldn’t say that we … thought they were prostitutes … [but] I think there was solicitation.” However, she said, although Epstein’s “behavior was reprehensible, . I’m limited by … the state statutes as to what I can charge.”²

That is the case for her, in her own words, and it should be read before anything else here: she called an organised scheme an organised scheme, declined to call the girls prostitutes, called his behaviour reprehensible, and said the state statutes bounded what she could charge.

What she offered, and what he refused

The offer she made is often shortened to “probation”. The report’s own footnote is more than that. It was a guilty plea to a third-degree felony, with adjudication withheld, a five-year term of probation, and a condition of no unsupervised contact with minors.¹ Epstein rejected it.¹

Why the case went to a grand jury

The report gives a reason for the grand jury presentation that has nothing to do with her, and it belongs on this page because it is the context of everything she did there. Krischer told OPR that under Florida law as it stood until 2016, his office prosecuted minors as young as 14 for prostitution, and that the possibility that Epstein’s victims could themselves have been prosecuted caused “great consternation within the office” and, on his account, produced the decision to put the case to a grand jury.²

Before the grand jury

The 2006 Palm Beach County grand jury transcript is in the release, obtained through litigation brought by the publisher of the Palm Beach Post and produced under a 2024 circuit court order that sits at the head of the same run.³ She conducted examination across 44 of its sheets, appearing as “MS. BELOHLAVEK” and “BY MS. BELOHLAVEK”, alongside a second prosecutor from her office; Detective Joseph Recarey was recalled as a witness during the presentation.³

Nothing said by any witness before that grand jury is reproduced here. The transcript contains victim testimony and this page does not quote, summarise or characterise it.

One procedural fact from the deposition record does belong here, because it bears on what the grand jury heard: a victim was unable to appear because of the short notice on which the grand jury had been scheduled.⁷

The charge she never considered

One sentence in the report is worth isolating, because it is about the charge the whole case ended on:

Belohlavek stated that she did not consider charging procurement of a minor for prostitution — the charge Epstein ultimately pled to pursuant to the NPA — because the police had not presented it.¹

On her own account to federal investigators, the charge Epstein pleaded to was never in front of her, because the police had not proposed it.

At the plea, 30 June 2008

She appeared for the state at Epstein’s plea and sentencing before Judge Deborah Dale Pucillo on the morning of 30 June 2008, opposite Jack Goldberger, and she speaks on 35 sheets of the transcript.⁴ The exchange that matters most is the court’s question about the victims:

THE COURT: Are all of the victims in both of these cases in agreement with the terms of this plea?

MS. BELOHLAVEK: I have spoken to several myself and I have spoken to counsel, through counsel as to the other victim, and I believe, yes.

THE COURT: And with regard to the victims under age eighteen, is that victim’s parents or guardian in agreement with the plea?

MS. BELOHLAVEK: That victim is not under age 18 any more and that’s why we spoke with her counsel.

THE COURT: And she is in agreement with the plea?

MS. BELOHLAVEK: Yes.⁵

She calls them victims throughout, in open court, and tells the judge she had spoken to several of them herself.

Elsewhere in the same hearing the court asked whether the address where Epstein would live was a place children regularly congregate. Her answer was “I personally do not know,” and the court replied “Neither do I, which is why I’m asking. Has that been investigated?"⁸

"Technically under the law”

Against that, the report records a different formulation she gave OPR about the same victims:

Belohlavek told OPR that because of the nature of the charges (that is, involving prostitution), she did not know whether ”- technically under the law” the girls were “victims” whom she was required to notify of the plea hearing.⁶

OPR’s own footnote qualifies it, and the qualification must travel with the quotation. The report says it “was unable to determine to which victims Belohlavek was referring”, that she “did not recall during her OPR interview”, and that “it is possible that she was referring only to the victims of the charged crimes rather than to all of the victims identified in either the state or federal investigations.”⁶ The footnote cites the plea hearing transcript at the pages quoted above.⁶

So the record holds both: in court she said she had spoken to several victims herself and called them victims; to OPR, years later, she was uncertain whether the law classed them as victims for notification purposes, and OPR could not establish which victims either statement covered. Neither displaces the other and the page states both.

”Her opinion may change if she knows the full scope”

In December 2007, with the federal non-prosecution agreement signed and Epstein’s lawyers attacking the line federal prosecutor’s conduct, that prosecutor wrote a five-page reply to Jay Lefkowitz of Kirkland & Ellis. One paragraph is about Belohlavek, and it describes Epstein’s lawyers trying to keep her from information:

You complain that I “forced” your client and the State Attorney’s Office to proceed on charges that they do not believe in, yet you do not want our Office to inform the State Attorney’s Office of facts that support the additional charge nor do you want any of the victims of that charge to contact Ms. Belohlavek or the Court. Ms. Belohlavek’s opinion may change if she knows the full scope of your client’s actions.⁹

This is a federal prosecutor’s assertion in an adversarial letter, not a finding. But its plain sense is that the state prosecutor’s view of the case was being managed by keeping facts and victims away from her, and on that account the deficiency in her information is laid at the defence’s door rather than at hers. The letter is set out at length at Jay Lefkowitz.

January 2011: her name in a New York courtroom

Two and a half years after the Florida plea, at a Sex Offender Registration Act hearing in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Part 66, on 18 January 2011, before Justice Ruth Pickholz, Epstein’s counsel used her to argue against his registration level. The People were represented by an Assistant District Attorney from the office of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr.; Epstein by Kirkland & Ellis, in the persons of Jay Lefkowitz and Sandra Musumeci.¹⁰

Ms. Musumeci told the court:

We have included in that a deposition from the detective who headed this investigation who acknowledged in a sworn deposition that the lead prosecutor who originally had the case, whose name I cannot pronounce, Lanna Belohlavek, I apologize for the mispronunciation, said to the detective after her investigation, there are no real victims here.¹⁰

She continued that all the conduct alleged “was commercial conduct”, that “the women went voluntarily”, and that there were “no allegations of force certainly none”; and that the Florida prosecutor “conducted a full investigation, as full as she was able with the cooperation afforded by these complainants, and determined that the only case that she could present to the grand jury was this indictment for a non registrable offense then —”, the transcript’s own dashes, because the Justice cut in there, saying “But it is registrable here” and then “I don’t know what you mean non registrable offense.”¹⁰ The Justice had already interrupted the “no force” point with a comparison of her own.¹⁰

The tier matters here and the page will not blur it. This is a defence lawyer’s characterisation, to a court, of a detective’s deposition characterisation of something Belohlavek is said to have told him. It is hearsay at two removes, offered by an interested party. And it can now be tested: the detective’s deposition is in the release and does not contain the sentence. Every document in the release carrying both her name and the phrase “real victims” is a copy of this same 2011 transcript sheet.¹¹

Why this transcript is in the release at all is a finding of its own. It reaches the files as an enclosure to a one-page order of Judge Richard M. Berman in Epstein’s 2019 federal prosecution, dated 15 July 2019, directing the clerk “to docket the enclosed documents which were discussed at today’s bail hearing.”¹⁰ The 2011 fight over his New York registration level was being argued over again at his 2019 federal bail hearing.

⚠ An earlier draft of this page, never published, described this hearing as a 2019 federal proceeding before Judge Berman. That was wrong: it read the enclosing order’s court, date and judge and attributed them to the transcript inside. The correction is recorded because the error class is general: an enclosing filing is not the document it encloses, and a transcript’s own caption is the only thing that dates it.

The meeting, and the detective’s evidence

One deposition in the release touches her directly: the deposition of Detective Joseph Recarey, Volume II, taken 19 March 2010 in civil litigation against Epstein, with Brad Edwards questioning and defence counsel objecting.⁷

Recarey describes the State Attorney’s Office as initially enthusiastic, “very gung-ho, very let’s go, let’s do this”, and then names the point of change:

up until the meeting with Alan Dershowitz and the State Attorney. And then it all took a turn.⁷

Asked whether he was present, he answered: “I attended one meeting where I believe it [was] Dershowitz, Krischer, and Belohlavek.”⁷

And he was then asked what was said at it, and he answered. His account is that the victims’ social-media pages were the subject:

Q. What was said during these, this meeting that you attended?

A. Several of the girls’ MySpaces were discussed. MySpace being the social network. They all had MySpaces. And the girls, the girls were actually who had the MySpaces had inputted, you know, various different things regarding alcohol use or marijuana use or that kind of thing.⁷

Asked what was said about the relevance of that material, his answer was that it was to show that the character of the girls was not to be believed; asked whether that was “specifically to attack their credibility”, he answered “Correct.”⁷

That is a detective’s sworn account of what a meeting between the defendant’s counsel and the prosecutors was for. It is his evidence, given under objection, and it is not a finding of this page. But the report of the Justice Department independently records that from early 2006 the defence “aggressively investigated victims and presented the State Attorney’s Office with voluminous material in an effort to undermine some of the victims’ credibility, including criminal records, victims’ social media postings (such as MySpace pages) about their own sexual activity and drug use”.¹ The two accounts, from a police deposition and from a federal internal report, describe the same thing.

Elsewhere in the same deposition Recarey describes his grand jury testimony and identifies who was asking the questions: he “only answered the questions that were asked of me by the state”, and “At that point it was Lanna Belohlavek.”⁷

⚠ An earlier draft of this page cited two identifiers as though they were two separate depositions. They are the same condensed transcript sheet reproduced under two numbers, and the same witness was described in one footnote as an unnamed officer and in the other as the lead detective. Corrected.

To the press, a week after the plea

A Palm Beach Post editorial of 7 July 2008, a week after the plea and reproduced in the release inside an FBI clipping mount, quotes her on what the additional charge had exposed him to: had he been convicted at trial he “could have been sentenced to anything from probation to 15 years in prison, Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek said, adding that the recommended guideline sentence was 21 months.”¹²

That is the only statement by her to a journalist located for this page, and it is a statement about sentencing exposure rather than about the merits.

Her name in the record

Her surname is unusual and the record mangles it, which matters for anyone searching. Measured against the full-text index on 18 September 2026, count(distinct efta_number) over text_content: “Belohlavek” returns 513 documents and “Lanna Belohlavek” returns 346, so exactly 167 carry the surname without her forename.¹³

Misspellings reach a further 23 documents that the correct spelling does not, putting her true floor at 536. The usable key is the disjunction of the correct form with Belohavek, Beloblavek, Belohiavek, Belohlavec and Belohlavck; the Justice Department’s own report spells her “Belohlovek” in one footnote.¹³⁶ No second bearer of the surname exists in the release.¹³

Two deponents and a defence lawyer apologise on the record for not being able to pronounce or spell it.¹⁰⁷ Those apologies are in the transcripts, and they are a small measure of how peripheral the line state prosecutor was to the people describing her.

What is not established

“There are no real victims here” is not documented as hers. It reaches the record only as a defence lawyer’s account, in 2011, of a detective’s deposition. The detective’s deposition is in the release and does not contain the sentence, and every document carrying her name beside the phrase is a copy of the same 2011 sheet.¹¹
What was said at the Dershowitz meeting rests on one witness’s recollection, given under objection, of a meeting he says he attended and at which he “believe[s]” she was present. The page does not treat his account of its purpose as a finding.
Which victims she had spoken to before telling the court they agreed with the plea is not established; OPR could not determine it and she did not recall.⁶
No document accuses her of misconduct. The Justice Department’s report examined federal prosecutors, not state ones, and her conduct appears there as a reason given rather than as a subject of findings.
Nothing is known here of her career before or after this case. No document read for this page establishes her title’s history, her appointment, or what became of her.

Footnotes

Report of the United States Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, narrative p. 14. EFTA02830776 p.40. Read at the image. The sheet carries Krischer’s “Let’s go for it” and “somebody we have to stop”, his later “there were witness problems”, Belohlavek’s “were at a disagreement” quotation with the report’s own ellipsis retained, her elements-of-proof objection naming Florida Statutes § 794.05(1) and § 800.04(5), the police being “not happy with that”, the contradictory victim statements and the original complainant’s recantation, the terms of the offer she made, the defence team’s investigation of victims and the material it supplied, and the bulleted statement that she did not consider the procurement charge because the police had not presented it. The terms of the offer are given in the report’s footnote 9 on this sheet: a guilty plea to a third-degree felony with adjudication withheld, five years’ probation, and no unsupervised contact with minors. The footnote numbers printed in the passage are the report’s and are not reproduced. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
Same report, narrative p. 15. EFTA02830776 p.41. Carries her “seriously, because … it was an organized scheme” and “behavior was reprehensible” quotations, with the report’s own ellipses and its printed ”.” before “I’m limited” retained as printed, and Krischer’s account of prosecuting minors as young as 14 for prostitution under the law as it stood until 2016, the resulting “great consternation within the office”, and the decision to put the case to a grand jury. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Transcript of the Palm Beach County grand jury presentation of July 2006, 176 sheets, released following litigation by the publisher of the Palm Beach Post and produced behind a 2024 order of the Circuit Court of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit which sits at the head of the run. EFTA02737038, her appearances falling on 44 sheets between pp.19 and 175. Read from the text layer for her appearances and the run length; the witness testimony in this run is not read, quoted, summarised or characterised anywhere on this wiki. A second prosecutor from the same office also conducts examination in the run, and Detective Joseph Recarey is recalled as a witness. ⚠ The first sheet of this run is the 2024 court order, not the transcript; the transcript’s own pagination begins after it, and a citation to this identifier’s page 1 is a citation to the order. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Transcript of the plea and sentencing of 30 June 2008 before Judge Deborah Dale Pucillo, Palm Beach County, 50 sheets, reproduced in the release as an exhibit in later federal civil litigation. EFTA00027591. She is named on 35 of the 50 sheets. Her appearance for the state opposite Jack A. Goldberger is also recorded with its citation at Jack Goldberger. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Same transcript. EFTA00027591 p.42. Read from the text layer; the line numbering of the transcript is not reproduced. The exchange continues past the quotation with the court asking whether community control would be given information on how to contact the victims, and her answering “Yes.” ↩ ↩²
Same report, narrative p. 112. EFTA02830776 p.138, with the same passage appearing again at narrative p. 271, EFTA02830776 p.297. The quoted sentence carries the report’s own stray hyphen inside the quotation marks as printed. The qualifying footnote on the same sheet cites the plea hearing transcript at its pages 20 and 42, says OPR “was unable to determine to which victims Belohlavek was referring”, that she “did not recall during her OPR interview”, and that she may have meant only the victims of the charged crimes. That footnote spells her surname “Belohlovek”. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Deposition of Detective Joseph Recarey, Volume II, taken 19 March 2010 in civil litigation against Epstein, questioning by Bradley J. Edwards with objections by Mr. Pike. EFTA00298293 p.45, a condensed transcript sheet carrying the deposition’s own pages 299 to 302. Read from the text layer; the extraction carries line-number artefacts. ⚠ The same condensed sheet is reproduced in the release under a second identifier, EFTA00188608 p.386; the two are one sheet and one witness, not two depositions. Counsel’s objection on the record invoked Federal Rules 408 and 410 and provisions of the Florida Evidence Code. The sheet also names a plaintiff by the pseudonym under which she litigated and gives a personal reason for her unavailability; neither is reproduced here. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Same transcript. EFTA00027591 p.20. The exchange concerns whether the address at which Epstein proposed to live was a place children regularly congregate; Goldberger answered for the defence that they had “done our due diligence”. ↩
Letter of the Assistant United States Attorney handling the Epstein matter for the Southern District of Florida to Jay P. Lefkowitz, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, dated December 11, 2007, five pages, “PAGE 3 OF 5”. EFTA01659864 p.3. Identification of the author rests on the unbarred first-person content of this sheet, on which the writer describes herself as “a simple line AUSA” who “handled the primary negotiations for the Office” and who selected the attorney representative under the non-prosecution agreement. The signature block on p.5 prints “R. Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney, By:” with the signing attorney’s name barred and the title “Assistant United States Attorney” printed; a second name on the copy line of that sheet is also barred. The wider letter is set out at Jay Lefkowitz. One passage of the letter discusses a named individual in terms of her status as a victim and is not reproduced or referred to anywhere on this wiki. ↩
Transcript of a Sex Offender Registration Act hearing, The People of the State of New York against Jeffrey Epstein, Indictment No. 30129/2010, Supreme Court, New York County, Trial Term Part 66, 111 Centre Street, 18 January 2011, before the Hon. Ruth Pickholz, Justice of the Supreme Court; for the People, the office of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., New York County District Attorney, by an Assistant District Attorney; for the defence, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, by Jay Lefkowitz and Sandra Musumeci. EFTA01659328 p.10, the transcript’s own p.9. ⚠ The run’s first sheet is not the transcript: it is a one-page order of the Hon. Richard M. Berman in United States v. Epstein, No. 19 Cr. 490 (RMB), dated 15 July 2019, directing the clerk “to docket the enclosed documents which were discussed at today’s bail hearing”, and the transcript’s own caption begins on p.2. Read from the text layer; the caption sheet was read directly to establish the court, date and Justice. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Tested 18 September 2026. Every document in the release returned by a query for her surname together with the phrase “real victims” is a copy of the same 2011 transcript sheet; the phrase appears in no deposition. Stated as a bounded result of that query and not as a claim that she never said it. ↩ ↩²
Palm Beach Post editorial, 7 July 2008, reproduced in the release inside an FBI clipping mount on a Form FD-350. EFTA01689527 p.39. Read from the text layer. Her quotation on the sentencing exposure is contiguous in the extraction; ⚠ the sheet’s defect is a pull-quote spliced into the body mid-sentence, not word breaks across column boundaries, and an earlier draft of this page said the latter. ↩
Measurements taken 18 September 2026 against pages_fts over text_content, counting distinct efta_number: “Belohlavek” 513; “Lanna Belohlavek” 346; the set difference is exactly 167. A misspelling sweep found five further forms reaching 23 documents outside the 513, for a floor of 536: Belohavek, Beloblavek, Belohiavek, Belohlavec, Belohlavck. “Rosofsky”-style substitutions and “Dean Belohlavek” return zero. No second bearer of the surname was found in the release. The surname-only residual has not been individually classified beyond the documents read for this page. ↩ ↩² ↩³

tags	person, prosecutor, state-attorney-15th-circuit, palm-beach, crimes-against-children
aliases	Lanna Belohlavek, L. Belohlavek, Belohlavek, Belohlovek, Belohlavec

Epstein Data Wiki