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interview the girl who then supplies names of other girls. Some of whom are 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 into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, nobody at this point alleges anything more than Epstein masturbating.) Epstein vastly raises the stakes by 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, brings 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 louche and disgraced President, at all times surrounded by a retinue of young and gorgeous female retainers doing his bidding, is now found to have gathered a network of wrong-side-of-the-tracks Palm Beach girls to provide him with weird sexual services. (It somehow reads weirder that he doesn’t have sex with them.) To boot, his former girl friend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the daughter of the disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of the girls to come to Epstein’s home (and forever more has become a fixture of further weird possibilities in this tale). 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 between utter capitulation to the powerful or standing on the side of the seemingly exploited and powerless. Still, with a cold eye, it also quite appears to be a straightforward tale of prostitution (however more or less kinky). And even though some of the girls are minors, age is not a distinguishing factor 1n a solicitation charge in Florida, nor in most places (in New York, for instance, at this time soliciting HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022761