“He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,” a victim who claimed to have recruited at least seventy girls would tell the Miami Herald.11 “He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough.”
Meeting Epstein’s needs required a significant operation. His house staffers, including Maxwell, his assistant Sarah Kellen, and his butler Alfredo Rodriguez, were needed to help keep the system running.
“He explained to me that, in his opinion, he needed to have three orgasms a day. It was biological, like eating,” said Johanna Sjoberg, a woman who was in her early twenties when she started giving Epstein sexual massages.12
The phone memos found by police in the house make it clear that his employees spent a large portion of their days trying to help feed his sexual appetites.
Many of the notes, written by household staffers, document phone messages from young girls and attempts to schedule Epstein’s “sessions.” “She is wondering if 2:30 is okay cus she needs to stay in school,” read one phone memo in February 2005.
Prior to 2003, the recruiting of girls was handled primarily by Ghislaine Maxwell, according to Epstein’s house manager Juan Alessi and others. Maxwell often passed out business cards to pretty girls at spas and on college campuses.
“Ms. Maxwell was the one that recruited,” said Alessi in a court deposition. “I remember one occasion or two occasions she would say to me, [Juan], give me a list of all the spas in Palm Beach County, and I will drive her from one to the other to PGA in Boca; and she would go in and drop 20 . . . business cards,” he said. “Was never, never done by me or Mr. Epstein or anyone else that I know of.”
Alessi said Maxwell was demanding and would often make him drive her up and down the coast to search for girls to hire.
“She was rotten spoiled and she tried to drive the house like a palace and not a home,” he said.
Although Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend at the time, she seemed eager to bring in additional women for him, according to Sjoberg.
“She let me know that she was—she would not be able to please [Epstein] as much as he needed and that is why there were other girls around,” said Sjoberg in a court deposition.
* * *
—
As Epstein was finding his way in a new social class, he had found a partner to help navigate this new world. Together, with Maxwell, he was able to satisfy his social needs and sexual desires.
But Maxwell’s friend Goldman said the British socialite never gave up hope that her relationship with Epstein would one day have a degree of normalcy.
“I guess she kept thinking if she brought one more girl, did one more thing, that he would marry her,” said Goldman in an interview. “She really thought that he would marry her in the end. She always, always, always believed that.”
8
The Victims
Preying on the Vulnerable
No, he really had some kind of contempt for women.
A GOOD FRIEND OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S
I’ve got enough money to get out of anything I ever need.
JEFFREY EPSTEIN
Royal Palm Beach High School in West Palm Beach is twelve miles from Epstein’s waterfront mansion, but it might as well be a world away. The thin strip of land between the Intracoastal Waterway and the shimmering white beaches a short walk to the east is the waterfront home to the elites—the Epsteins, the Trumps, the Bill Gateses, the Tiger Woodses of the world. Cross the giant bridges under which yachts pass, and you start going inland, where the farther west you get, the more the surrounding areas are populated by the people who serve the wealthy who live on the beaches and canals.
It was inland where the kids of housemaids, groundskeepers, and law enforcement lived. It was “ground zero,” as The Palm Beach Post would put it, for Epstein’s sick pyramid scheme.1
“These girls had never even been to Palm Beach island,” the victim attorney Adam Horowitz told the newspaper. “Some of them were living in trailer parks. This was a whole new world to them.”
Epstein, who himself had to cross the Brooklyn Bridge to begin to rise up in the world, was no stranger to how people from a lower financial class might react to a made man with a wad of cash. He would use this power differential to maximize his own pleasure. Those stories are shocking.
* * *
—
One Sunday in the winter of 2005, a fourteen-year-old girl named Amanda (not her real name) told her dad she was going shopping with her friend Haley Robson in West Palm Beach. Haley picked up Amanda at her dad’s house in a red pickup truck. The girls didn’t tell Amanda’s father what they were planning to do first—stop by the house of Haley’s boss, an “old man” in Palm Beach, to pick up some money.
“The old man’s gonna give us both money so we can go shopping,” Haley reportedly told Amanda.
Amanda had a vague idea that they would have to do something for the money. “I knew something was wrong, nobody’s just gonna pay you money,” she told police later. But her friend Haley, who was several years older, had told her only that they would be getting $200 each. To Amanda, who made $6 an hour at her part-time job at Chick-fil-A, this was a fortune.
In a subsequent police interview, Amanda described the events that followed.
The girls listened to music on the drive, singing along to the radio. They crossed over the bridge to Palm Beach, past Worth Avenue, the town’s posh bougainvillea- and palm-lined main street with storefronts advertising Chanel and Louis Vuitton. They followed A1A past the Everglades Club, through neighborhoods shielded by towering boxwoods, and finally turned onto the narrow cul-de-sac of El Brillo Way.
Haley’s boss, Jeffrey Epstein, lived in the house at the end of the road, an unadorned, boxy white mansion with a security gate. The gate opened when the girls drove up, and they were ushered into the house by one of Epstein’s female assistants.
Haley made herself at home in the kitchen, chatting with Epstein and his house staff. Meanwhile, Epstein’s female assistant motioned for Amanda to follow her upstairs.
“I thought Haley . . . was gonna get paid in like, you know, private,” Amanda told police later. “So I went upstairs.”
Epstein’s assistant took her up to the master bathroom, where there was a massage table. She told Amanda that the fourteen-year-old would be giving Epstein a massage, placed several bottles of lotion on a nearby table, and then left the room.
After about five minutes, Epstein entered.
“Hi, I’m Jeff,” said the man. Amanda noticed that he had graying hair and a long horsey face. “I’ll be right back,” he told her. “You can take off your clothes.”
Amanda was uncomfortable. She wondered why Haley had stayed downstairs. She took off her shirt but kept her bra and pants on. When Epstein came back into the room, wearing a towel, he was noticeably annoyed.
“No, I meant get naked,” he said sternly. “Take off your pants.” There was an edge to his voice. The fourteen-year-old took off her pants, but kept her underwear and bra on.
Epstein dropped his towel and lay down naked on the massage table. The girl rubbed lotion on his shoulders in circles, trying not to look at his hairy back.
“Where do you go to school?” he asked her.
“Wellington High School,” she told him.
“How do you know Haley?” he asked.
“She’s my boyfriend’s cousin,” said Amanda, who had been dating her first boyfriend, Chris (not his real name), a baseball player at her school, for three weeks. “How do you know Haley?”
“She’s been working for me for a long time,” said Epstein. He paused. “It would feel more comfortable if you got on my back,” he said.
Amanda looked at his back. There was a thick line of hair running down it to his buttocks. “Gross,” she thought. She climbed tentatively onto the massage table, putting one knee on e
ither side of him and kneeling to avoid touching his bare skin with her underwear.
“Sit on me,” he insisted. “Put all your weight on me.”
Mortified, the fourteen-year-old girl did as he told her. She continued to massage his back in circles, and Epstein started to moan. He turned over onto his back and ordered her to rub his chest while he groped her hips. She tried not to look down, but she could see he was masturbating.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she told police later. “I just felt intimidated.”
After what seemed like an eternity, he wiped himself off with a towel. He paid her $300 in cash and told her to leave her phone number with his assistant.
“You can see yourself out,” he said.
Amanda left the room. Later she would recount wandering through the maze of hallways for a while, unable to remember how to get back downstairs.
* * *
—
Haley Robson, Amanda’s friend, recruited multiple underage victims for Epstein for the $200 commission. Robson had started working for Epstein as a teenager and told police that she preferred bringing new girls to him rather than performing sex acts herself. She said Epstein made it clear that he was interested only in girls in their teens and very early twenties. Once, when she brought a twenty-three-year-old, Epstein told her the woman was “too old.”
Haley wasn’t the only victim who also recruited. “I brought girls I didn’t like and really, frankly, did not give a shit about,” said one of Epstein’s sixteen-year-old victims in a police interview. “Girls that I knew were skanks that would do anything. Who, like, girls that would just like suck dick in the bathroom at school. Like not even people that I was friends with, I’d just hear a rumor about a girl and be like hey I know a way you can make two hundred dollars.”
Epstein’s house manager, Juan Alessi, recalled seeing more than a hundred women visit Epstein to give him massages in the years he worked there.
“We have a table—massage table in basically every room, guest room,” said Alessi. He said Epstein received up to three massages a day, and estimated that the house went through forty or fifty towels each day and had “gallons” of massage oils and lubricants.
He said he saw sex toys in Epstein’s sink after some of the massages.
“It was a long dick, I think. Rubber thing,” he said.
There were always young women around the house. One, a shy Yugoslavian blond girl named Nadia, was his live-in “number one girlfriend” in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, according to a police interview with Epstein’s former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez. Epstein claimed that she was his sex slave and he had purchased her from her parents.
“[Nadia] told me that she came from Yugoslavia when she was, like, fifteen, with Jeffrey,” recalled one victim named Jennifer (not her real name) in a police interview.
Jennifer was sixteen years old and working at the Hollister store in West Palm Beach, trying to save money for a camping trip to Maine, when one of her co-workers asked her if she wanted to make some quick cash.
“You can get a plane ticket in two hours,” the girl told Jennifer, according to a police interview. “We can go and give this guy a massage, and, um, he’ll pay two hundred dollars for like forty-five minutes or an hour.”
The sixteen-year-old started going to Epstein’s house regularly to give him “massages” that quickly morphed into explicit sexual encounters. She told police in an interview, during which she broke down crying at multiple points, that she was with him “hundreds” of times over a two-year period.
“The way it went was if you worked there for the first like three times, you got paid $200,” said Jennifer. “After that, if you were persistent and worked all the time, it was on average $300. Sometimes I got paid $1,000.”
The money “was a lot for a sixteen-year-old girl making six bucks an hour,” she said.
Jennifer said Epstein would offer her additional money for letting him use sex toys on her. He also paid her to have sex with his girlfriend Nadia.
“Sometimes he got violent,” she recalled. “He pulled my hair a lot harder than it should have been pulled . . . he would pull it to where it would rip my hair out. It would rip my hair, and then sometimes he would pick me up and like throw me whichever way he wanted me, and then he would just like use a toy or like his hand or whatever.”
After some encounters she said it was painful for her to walk because of how aggressive Epstein was with sex toys.
“He would get really rough and I’d get cut . . . like ripped a little bit,” she said.
Jennifer said she never had sexual intercourse with Epstein and suggested that he might have been unable to perform sexually.
“[His penis was] really fat at the bottom and skinny at the top where it’s attached. And, he can never get fully hard, ever,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s some sort of thing that’s wrong with him, but it definitely was not normal.”
She said she stopped seeing Epstein after two years because her boyfriend asked her to stop. But she said she did not want to completely sever ties.
“If I called him today he would give me as much money as I asked him for,” she told police. “He doesn’t know that I hate him the way I do.”
* * *
—
The number of girls Epstein victimized could be as high as the hundreds, and there are many who have declined to speak about it publicly. But the most outspoken and now well known is Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was one of the first to go public with details about her alleged experiences with Epstein and his associates.
Giuffre was around seventeen years old working at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach when she met Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre was a spa attendant at the exclusive club owned by Donald Trump. Her dad, a well-respected maintenance worker at the resort, had connected her with the job.
“While reading a book about anatomy, Ghislaine Maxwell, met me at the spa, not having an education or anything behind me, I thought this was a great opportunity to work for her . . . to make some extra money and learn about massage. So, I went to Jeffrey’s mansion about five or six that afternoon,” Giuffre has said in a proffer.2
Her own dad drove her to the Palm Beach mansion, just a mile and a half away. “[Maxwell] led me upstairs into Jeffrey’s bedroom past Jeffrey’s massage room that has a steam room, shower and massage table,” she said. “There is actually an extra room that has—that nobody knows about—a kind of secret room and it’s got a whole bunch of pictures of pornographic literature and sex toys.”
Epstein “was lying naked on top of the massage table.” He dictated what she should do. First “it was actually a real massage.”
Then, Giuffre alleges, “Ghislaine who had stayed in the room told me to undress and began to take off my shirt and skirt—that is—my white Mar-a-Lago uniform.” Maxwell then undressed herself.
At this point, the girl was scared. “I was expected to lick his nipples and give him oral sex while he fondled me and then at the end I was told by Ghislaine to get on top and straddle Jeffrey sexually.”
Laura Goldman, Ghislaine’s friend, said she believed Ghislaine’s involvement was less about sex and more about asserting her position as Epstein’s “main” girlfriend.
“I really, really believe that she was there to tell [the girls], ‘He’s my man.’ She wasn’t there for the girls,” said Goldman. “She was trying to mark her territory, or domination, or whatever.”
Epstein immediately took a liking to Giuffre. “So you’re a bad girl in a good girl’s body,” he told her, according to Giuffre’s 2011 account in the Daily Mail. She said Epstein gifted her an “absolutely beautiful” Palm Beach pad. But of course there was a catch; she had to be on call. All the time.
She even began traveling with Epstein, according to flight records. She’d stay with him on his trips and very o
ccasionally in a spare room at his Palm Beach mansion.
So insecure was Epstein about himself that he used to brag to his victims about preying on other children, said Giuffre. “The worst story I heard directly from his own mouth was about these pretty 12-year-old girls he had flown in, transported to Palm Beach by somebody else, for his birthday,” Giuffre said.
“I did see them. I did meet them. Jeffrey bragged after he met them they were 12 years old and flown over from France because they are really poor over there, and their parents needed the money or whatever. That was the worst. He was constantly bragging about the girls’ ages or where he got them from or about their past and how terrible their past was and good he is making it for them,” according to Giuffre.
Giuffre has said the quality of the massages, though they always ended sexually, was actually important to Epstein. And in fact, he wanted her to become a better masseuse, so he sent her to Thailand to improve her skills so that she could then return better able to serve her master.
But Giuffre used the trip to Thailand for something else. Days into her trip she met her future husband and decided she would never return to Epstein’s servitude. Within a week, they would marry.
9
The Perps
Epstein’s sexual abuse of Giuffre also extended to him “lending” her out to his elite circle of friends, she publicly alleged in media interviews and court documents years after she cut ties with him. In a 2015 Florida district court filing as part of a civil lawsuit against the U.S. government, Giuffre claimed Epstein “sexually trafficked” her to “politically-connected and financially-powerful people” in order to “ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information.” Giuffre said Ghislaine Maxwell was the “primary co-conspirator in his sexual abuse and sex trafficking scheme.” Epstein allegedly began trafficking Giuffre to his friends about two years after they met, she told the Mail on Sunday in her first press interview in 2011.1
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