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Epstein, in man-who-can-have-everything fashion, has, for many 
years, ordered up a daily massage following his workout sessions. 
"Often these were massage massages," explains Epstein matter of 
factly, "but sometimes these were happy ending massages, especially in 
Palm Beach, where there are many massage parlors—lack Shacks,' they're 
called—that do outcalls. There was no sex. An often there was no happy 
ending. Often I would be on the phone for the entire massage. There were 
however a lot of massages and a lot of girls, with one girl recommending 
others." 
It is after Epstein's round of publicity and widely touted association 
with Clinton, that the mother of one of the massage parlor girls who have 
gone to Epstein's house (most of the girls return to Epstein's house many 
times) calls the police. The police interview the girl, Sage Gonzales, who 
then supplies names of other girls. Some of whom are found to be younger 
than 18. 
In the end, the police track down 12[WHAT NUMBER?' girls who 
give depositions describing scenarios not terribly different from Epstein's 
description above, except each is laid out in clinical, lurid, and near-identical 
detail—a cold and forceful Epstein demanding that unwitting juveniles 
(though they have come here for this very purpose) perform repulsive (or at 
least repulsively described) acts on him. (Although the nature of the 
allegations will operatically grow, none at this point allege that he did 
anything to them.) 
Epstein, vastly raising the stakes, calls Dershowitz, who flies into 
Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place—alienating Palm 
Beach officialdom—and, doubling down on the profile of the case, bringing 
in Roy Black the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy 
Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. 
Here's the narrative: the shadowy rich man, friend of the disgraced 
President, at all times surrounded by a retinue of gorgeous retainers doing 
his bidding, is now found to be recruiting a network of wrong-side-of-the-
tracks Palm Beach girls for weird sexual services. 
Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter is reported to say: "This is 
bigger than Rush Limbaugh," who, in a storm of publicity, has just been 
arrested in Palm Beach for possession of controlled drugs. 
On one side are some of the nation's most powerful defense attorneys 
(who, increasingly, seem more stumblebum than effective), on the other 
side, a round-up of hapless girls, with sensational tales of perversion and 
infamy (in the telling they are not so much sex workers, as Dickensian 
victims), relatively speaking giving the Palm Beach authorities the choice 
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between utter capitulation to the powerful or standing on the side of the 
exploited and powerless. 
Still, with a critical eye, it also quite appears to be a straightforward 
tale of prostitution. And even though some of the girls are minors, age is not 
a distinguishing factor in a prostitution charge in Florida, nor in most places 
(in New York, for instance, paying for sex with anyone over the age of 14 
falls under general anti-solicitation laws). 
Sage Gonzales will later testify that she lied about being 18 because 
otherwise she would not have been hired for the job. 
Dershowitz rejects a series of lower-level plea deals and Palm Beach 
District Attorney Barry Krischer empanels a grand jury, which returns with a 
recommendation of a single count of soliciting a prostitute—a charge 
without jail time. (Epstein can apply to have his record expunged after a 
year.) 
At which point, Reiter, the police chief, at odds with the District 
Attorney, recruits the involvement of the FBI. This is of course the Bush-era 
FBI and Epstein presents quite the Clinton-connected scandal. Still, 
solicitation, even of a minor, is not a federal crime. The FBI's way in is to 
expand it, by way of Epstein's planes, into a trafficking charge, and a deep 
dive into Epstein's friends, many of whom receive subpoenas and who are 
threatened with prosecution as a party to Epstein's actions. 
It's quite in the eyes of the beholder: On the one end, Epstein is 
paying for sex acts (Epstein paid $200 for a massage with or without happy 
ending), on the other, he is abusing teenage girls. Epstein finds himself 
caught in an escapable moral quandary: how can a girl not old enough to 
vote be a prostitute? And yet, many girls not old enough to vote are 
prostitutes. 
Or, when is a prostitute not a prostitute? When the anonymous 
acquires an identity. 
Compounding Epstein's predicament, the world outside of his 
carefully constructed and controlled environment is someplace that he seems 
not just ill-equipped to handle but in which he seems to be blindly grouping 
about. I visited him once during this time and found him weighing the 
conflicting advice of some of the most vaunted and egomaniacal lawyers 
(along with Dershowitz and Black, celebrity criminal attorney, Gerald 
Lefcourt, and Clinton prosecutor, Ken Starr) of the day—anyone with new 
advice, Epstein seemed to hire—as well as a catchall of the leading crisis 
managers, who he seemed to retain at will, all wrangling for fees and 
primacy. If it was a Dickensian world, he was caught in its legal system. 
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Certainly, the upshot of his dealings with the Justice Department seem 
to involve a farce-like logic. The government threatens to prosecute him 
(with the possibility of a 20-year sentence) and various friends, associates, 
and lovers, or offers an ass-backwards sort of deal in which Epstein has to 
go to the Palm Beach authorities and convince them to charge him with an 
offense that will send him to jail and get him a sex offender status. Except 
that a prostitution charge won't produce that result. Therefore he has to 
agree also to a procurement or pimping charge (even though he has paid 
money, not received it—the sine qua non of pimping). What's more, he has 
to agree to pay the legal fees of any of the girls who want to sue him—and, 
not to defend himself in their suits-forcing him to settle with each of the 
girls for what are reportedly high 6-figure sums or more. 
He goes to jail in 2008 for 13 months. 
This hardly ends the legal catch all. Epstein's butler, Alfredo 
Rodriguez, steals and tries to sell an alleged journal or calendar with 
Epstein's activities—but he tries to sell it to an undercover agent. Rodriguez 
is sentenced to 18 months in jail on a charge of theft and of withholding 
evidence. Scott Rothstein, a lawyer whose firm represented additional girls 
in their suits against Epstein, also goes to jail for recruiting investors to pay 
for these suits on the fraudulent basis that settlements had already been 
reached. 
Then, Brad Edwards, Rothstein's former partner, sues the government 
in 2008 for abridging several of the girls' rights under the Victim Rights Act 
(under which victims have the right to be consulted). In 2014, Edwards tries 
to ad 
, one of the original complainants, who is said to have 
settled with Epstein for over $1 million, to the long-running suit—and is 
now, with Edwards, further suing Epstein for $50,000,000. 
who has been the most vocal of the accusers, with the Daily 
Mail as her prime outlet, emerges now, more than ten years after the fact, 
with a diary from her time with Epstein supporting her charges of "sex 
slavery." 
It is hard to find a more hyperbolic intersection of media and lawyers 
then in Epstein's case. 
Edwards, over the six years of his law suit, tries to depose Clinton, 
Donald Trump, and Dershowitz—almost all of his targets coming directly 
from the original Vanity Fair and New York Magazine articles about 
Epstein. 
In addition to Clinton being the early hot button (and continuing now 
in his role of potential Hillary-spoiler), Prince Andrew emerges, first 
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through 
interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, as a particular 
British hot button. 
A story that might be dubious in the US—unverified charges in a 
long-running law suit—becomes in the U.K. a feast of certainty and scandal, 
where Prince Andrew is a particular bet noir of the Daily Mail and royal 
sexcapades tabloid gifts. The words themselves are enough of a story: sex 
slaves (as though women kept in basements), peodo (an obessions with pre-
pubesscent children) and registered sex offerender (that human end of the 
road). Indeed, U.S. court documents circumvent the usual UK restrictions on 
legal proceedings. Hence the Daily Mail is free to repeate 
tales of 
Island visits by people (notably Clinton) who Epstein avows have never 
been there. With its massive Internet arm, the Mail has now managed to 
reintroduced the story back into the U.S., where Dershowitz, in a paroxysms 
of rage, has managed to himself revivify the story with countless interviews 
and new law suits. 
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