Page 30 Daily Mail, Saturday, August 17, 2019
FROM PREVIOUS PAGE After some cereal and
milk if they are hungry,
the girls are led upstairs
infirmary, he was transferred to the
Palm Beach County Central
Detention Center. Despite its
almost identical name, this jail is
smaller and much safer. Epstein
was given his own cell and allowed
to pay for his own security guard.
He was allowed any number of vis-
its from his ‘sex slaves’. Sheriff Ric
Bradshaw, who ran the jail, com-
mented: ‘Let’s just say he didn’t
think he belonged there.’
And in only 13 months, he was
out. Hardly surprising, then, that
his email address was set up during
that time to send an automatic
reply to all messages. It said simply:
‘On Vacation.’
Where this power and wealth
came from is still a mystery. Epstein
claimed to be a financial adviser
who specialised in helping
billionaires avoid tax. Better to pay
him $5 million, he would say, than
to hand the taxman seven times
that sum.
But even if this is how he acquired
his wealth, or even if the story is
only partly true, his path to riches
is far from clear.
In the mid-Eighties, for instance,
he was trying to persuade wealthy
investors to sink their money into
an oil-drilling deal — but when one
of them wanted his money back,
Epstein refused to pay. The inves-
tor sued and the case was settled
out of court, in secret.S
HORTLy after that, one
(now estranged) friend says
he had to loan Epstein the
money to settle a repair bill
to the garage that had seized his
car for non-payment.
Diana Crane, a former model, says
Epstein would press first-class
upgrades on people, insisting that
no friend of his should ever fly
economy class. ‘Sometimes the
upgrades worked and other times
they didn’t,’ Crane says.
‘I remember he saw a friend of
mine wearing a Concorde jacket [a
souvenir of a flight on the super-
sonic passenger jet]. He asked if he
could borrow it. My friend never got
the jacket back, but Epstein would
tell people he always flew on
Concorde — a total lie.’
The wife of one business
associate saw through him and the
way he was worming his way into
their inner circle. She called him
‘the virus’.
However Epstein accumulated his
wealth, within a few years he was
able to buy his own island — Little
St James, one of the U.S. Virgin
Islands. He dubbed it St Jeff ’s.
It was while he was serving his
short spell in jail that a woman filed
a civil lawsuit against him, the first
stage in his long downfall. It took
ten years, and ended with his
apparent suicide in a prison cell, a
disgraced man with no hope of ever
being released.
That woman was named Virginia
Roberts, and she was a teenager
earning about $9 an hour as a
changing room assistant at DonaldTrump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, when a
woman approached her and asked
if she was interested in becoming a
massage therapist.
Later that day, her father drove
her to 358 El Brillo Way. He left,
after being assured a car would
bring his 15-year-old daughter
home. Virginia was led upstairs to a
spa room equipped with a shower
and a massage table. Jeffrey Epstein
was lying on it, naked.
A woman removed her own top to
demonstrate Epstein’s preferred
massage technique, rubbing her
breasts over his body. Virginia did
as she was asked, and was then
ordered to strip naked. The assault
quickly escalated. Virginia was
battered, sexually attacked and
subjected to abuse. At the end of
the two-hour encounter, she was
paid ‘hundreds of dollars’ and told
she had ‘lots of potential’.
A naturally compliant and docile
girl, Virginia returned to the house
whenever she was asked.
‘He said they were going to get an
education for me,’ she said in a
court deposition in 2015.
‘They were promising me the
world, that I would travel with
Epstein on his private jet. He said
he would match me up with a
wealthy person so that I would be
“set up” for life.’E
PSTEIn and a female friend
began to school Virginia
intensively. ‘I was trained to
be “everything a man wanted
me to be”. It wasn’t just sexual
training — they wanted me to be
able to cater to all the needs of the
men they were going to send me to.
They said they loved that I was very
compliant and knew how to keep
my mouth shut.
‘I knew if I left I would be in big
trouble. He knew all kinds of
powerful people. He could have me
killed or abducted, and I knew he
was capable of that if I did not obey
him. Speaking about himself, he
said, “I can get away” with things.’
Virginia said she saw Epstein
having sex with underage girls on a
daily basis. So it would be very
surprising if people who stayed
with him in his houses were
unaware of it.
He also told her he went out of his
way to procure girls for powerful
friends. ‘Epstein specifically told
me this was so they would “owe
him”, they would be “in his pocket,”
and he would “have something on
them”. I understood that Epstein
thought he could get leniency if he
was ever caught doing anything
illegal, or that he could escape
trouble altogether.’
He did not escape trouble. It
caught up with him, lethally. For
the women he abused, fate has
been much more unpredictable.
One who was raped as an adoles-
cent is now a successful real estate
broker in South Florida. Another is
an actress who appeared in several
films and starred for a time in a
soap opera.
But other have drifted into crime,
drugs and abusive relationships.
One girl was murdered by her
boyfriend. Several others have
been arrested for prostitution.
‘Mary’, who was just 14 when
Epstein abused her, was arrested
for shoplifting by the time she
was 20.
Jeffrey Epstein soiled all their
lives. But he didn’t see it that way.
Shortly before his first jail term, he
gave a boastful interview to the
new york Magazine.
When the interviewer asked
whether he saw himself as a
modern-day Icarus, the Greek hero
who fell to earth after flying too
close to the sun, Epstein smirked:
‘Did Icarus like massages?’
n ADAPTED from Filthy Rich:
The Shocking True Story Of
Jeffrey Epstein by James
Patterson with John Connolly
and Tim Malloy, published by
Little, Brown in the U.S. and
available to buy in the UK
through Amazon. © James
Patterson 2016.by Sarah. They drive over to Epstein’s house.
After a short wait in the kitchen — maybe
some milk and cereal, if they feel hungry —
they are walked upstairs. Epstein’s there,
waiting, wearing his towel. Sometimes the
girls refer their friends, and for this they
receive a commission.
In October 2005, police decided they had
enough evidence to get a search warrant for
358 El Brillo Way. Guns drawn, they walk up
the winding stairs to the second floor.
They see a pink-and-green couch described
by many of the witnesses, and many photos of
naked girls on the walls. In some cases, these
are girls they have interviewed.
They also find notepads with first names,
dates and phone numbers for girls written on
them. There are messages noted down, too: ‘I
have girls for him’; ‘I have two girls.’
Epstein’s house has a strangely antiseptic
quality. Some of the bedrooms look almost
like doctors’ offices. In one bathroom, there’s
a massage table as well as stands holding
strange equipment.
In a wood-coloured armoire beside Epstein’s
bed, they see a bottle of peach-flavoured lubri-
cant. In the bathroom, there are soaps shaped
like penises and vaginas, bottles of Mango
Mist, more lubricant and boxes of tampons.
The officers find receipts for books bought
on Amazon, such as SlaveCraft: Roadmaps
For Erotic Servitude. On the first floor, detec-
tives are drawn to two secret cameras hidden
in clocks. They know where the cameras are
because they actually helped install them — in
2004, when Epstein made a complaint of
burglary and then withdrew it.
Detectives can’t shake the feeling that the
house has been tidied up for their arrival.
Shelves look as though they have been
emptied, and several photographs appear to
have been removed from the walls.
That’s not so surprising. What is strange isthat, for a house that’s been scrubbed, so
much has been left lying around. It’s as if
Epstein was so accustomed to the sex toys,
the lubricants, the bizarre equipment and the
photographs of naked, underage girls that he
saw nothing wrong in them.
With additional evidence from a manservant
at the house, Alfredo Rodriguez, police were
eventually able to charge Epstein, to his
disbelief, with sex offences against minors.
Three years later, after a long court battle, he
was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but
served only one day in the notorious Palm
Beach County Main Detention Center —
known locally as the Gun Club. After spending
the night in the relative comfort of the prisonV1