Honest accounts emerge to show that the 2007 Jeffrey Epstein plea deal was on the up-and-up.

Trying to inoculate journalists against hindsight bias is like trying to teach your cat algebra—it’s an uphill slog. Happily, the Washington Post last Sunday gave us a history of the decade-old Jeffrey Epstein sex-crimes prosecution that didn’t rely on the anachronistic innuendo that filled a Miami Herald series entitled “Perversion of Justice.” The furor caused by that series led last week to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who had the misfortune of being the U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted the long-ago case. The Post investigation, with a non-tabloidal realism the Herald couldn’t muster, found “not a crisp portrait of white hats tilting against black hats, but rather a mottled mural of prosecutors who were eager to stop Epstein from preying on girls, but also sensitive to the young women’s desire not to have their names made public.” It adds that Mr. Epstein’s high-priced defense team “took advantage of the fact that many victims felt a bond with their accused abuser.” To put it more bluntly than even the Post wants to, prosecutors seem to have feared losing in court because their witnesses were unreliable. If so, this echoes the apparent experience of a state prosecutor in Palm Beach County in the same matter, who ended up going before a grand jury with a single witness, who wasn’t even underage. It also echoes a declaration, in the Herald’s own words, by the Manhattan district attorney in a subsequent matter that the “underage victims failed to cooperate” in the Florida prosecution.

More From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):