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each is laid out in clinical, lurid, and near-identical detail. A cold Epstein demands that these allegedly unwitting juveniles (though they have come here for this very purpose) perform repulsive (or at least repulsively described) acts on him and then they return again. (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 in a solicitation charge in Florida, (in New York, for instance, at this time soliciting sex with anyone over the age of 14 is aclass D misdemeanor calling for a $100 fine—the law has recently been changed to TK). In fact, the very “SG” clearly tells the police that she lied about being 18 because otherwise she knew she would not have been admitted to the house (other girls will say they knew this is what they had to say, nevertheless not stopping them from saying it). The local sex crimes prosecutor, Lana Belhalevic, interviews all the girls and determines that the offense is solely related to prostitution—that there are “no real HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022858