US billionaire, Bill Clinton associate and registered sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested on new sex trafficking charges connected to allegations from the early 2000s, reports say.
Epstein was arrested in New York and will appear in court on Monday, law enforcement officials told US media.
It comes amid renewed controversy over a plea deal he once reached to end a federal investigation against him.
His lawyer has not yet commented on the latest charges.
Law enforcement officers have not been authorised to discuss the case, but several have spoken to US media outlets on condition of anonymity.
One told The Associated Press news agency that the latest charges stemmed from allegations that Epstein paid underage girls for massages and molested them at his New York and Florida homes.
Epstein, 66, was previously accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls.
The wealthy financier – who was once friendly with Prince Andrew and former US President Bill Clinton – reached a plea deal to avoid federal sex trafficking charges in the case.
Instead, he pleaded guilty in 2008 to lesser state charges of soliciting and procuring a person under age 18 for prostitution
This averted a possible life sentence, and instead saw him spend 13 months in jail and register as a sex offender.
Earlier this year, a Florida judge ruled that federal prosecutors broke the law by not informing Epstein’s victims of the plea deal at the time.
Judge Kenneth Marra is currently deciding whether the non-prosecution agreement that protected Epstein from the more serious charges should still stand.
Following the ruling, the White House said it was also “looking into” Labour Secretary Alexander Acosta’s role in the plea deal, which he approved in his previous role as a US attorney.
Epstein in December deprived his alleged victims of the chance to testify against him for the first time by reaching a last-minute agreement to settle a civil lawsuit.
Former President Bill Clinton took a romantic jaunt in 2002 to convicted pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein’s “orgy island” with “two young girls” from New York, according to a shocking interview.
Virginia Roberts, who’s accused Epstein of turning her into a “sex slave” at age 17 and forcing her to sleep with his powerful friends, claimed Clinton stayed in one of the many villas on Epstein’s US Virgin Islands estate — where group sex was a “regular occurrence.”
“I remember asking Jeffrey, ‘What’s Bill Clinton doing here?’ kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said, ‘Well, he owes me a favor,’ ” Roberts told her lawyers in a 2011 interview obtained by RadarOnline.com. “He never told me what favors they were.”
