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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 have gone to Epstein’s house (most of the girls return to Epstein’s house many times) calls the police. The place 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— who give depositions 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 demanding 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, vastly raising the stakes, calls 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, bringing 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 gorgeous 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 seems weirder that he doesn’t have sex with them.) 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 exploited and powerless. Still, with a critical eye, it also quite appears to be a straightforward tale of prostitution. And even though some of the girls are minors,, age 1s not a distinguishing factor in a prostitution charge in Florida, nor in most places HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022966