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Epstein’s wealth, but gets no closer to an answer, beyond confirming her own sense of dubiousness. Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, tried to stop the process (Ward, well known for offering an operatic view about her reporting exploits, says he threatened her), called Carter and said he was having second thoughts about being a public figure. “Then you should live in a two bedroom apartment in Queens,” responded Carter. And then the troubles began. 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,” says Epstein matter of factly, “but sometimes these were happy ending massages, especially in Palm Beach, where there are many massage parlors—‘Jack 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 went to Epstein’s house (most of the girls return to Epstein’s house many times) calls the police. The police interview the girl, Saige 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 18 girls—nine who are under 18; the others in their 20s and 30s; one woman is in her 60s—a number of whom give statements 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 demands 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 dramatically grow, nobody at this point alleges that he did anything to them.) Epstein, tipped to the investigation, vastly raises the stakes, calling 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. Dershowitz brings in Roy Black the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022721