Chapter Eight The Pink House
Eight
The Pink House
Picture a girl in a crisp white uniform sitting behind a marble reception desk.
She is sixteen and wears a name tag pinned to her chest. The girl is slender, with the freckled face of a child, and her long blond hair is held back with a tie.
A new employee at the Mar-a-Lago spa, the girl is usually in the locker room, handing out towels.
But on this blisteringly hot afternoon, the spa is mostly empty, so the girl is at the front desk, which is outside, under an awning that provides shade.
The girl is reading a book about anatomy that she’s borrowed from the library.
The girl loves to read, and she hopes that studying this book will give her something she’s lacked for too long: purpose.
What would it be like, she wonders, to excel at something?
Suddenly, I look up from my book to see a striking woman with short dark hair striding toward me.
“Hello,” the woman says warmly. She looks to be in her late thirties, and her British accent reminds me of Mary Poppins.
I couldn’t tell you which designers she’s wearing, but I bet her purse cost more than my dad’s truck.
The woman extends her manicured hand for me to shake.
“Ghislaine Maxwell,” she says, pronouncing her first name “Giilen.” Her grip is firm.
I point to my name tag. “I’m Jenna,” I say, smiling like I’ve been told to smile.
Mar-a-Lago employees are required to make guests feel welcome.
The woman’s eyes alight on my book, which I’ve jammed with sticky notes.
“Are you interested in massage?” she asks. “How wonderful!”
Remembering my duties, I offer this mesmerizing woman a beverage, and she chooses hot tea.
I go and fetch it, returning with a steaming cup.
I expect that to be the end of it, but the woman keeps on talking.
Maxwell says she knows a wealthy man—a longtime Mar-a-Lago member, she says—who is looking for a massage therapist to travel with him.
“Do you do massage on the side?” she asks.
“Oh, no,” I reply, worried I’ve given her the wrong impression.
“I’m not trained, but I hope to learn someday.
” My lack of experience doesn’t concern her a bit.
“I’m sure you’d be terrific,” she insists, looking me up and down. “Will you come for an interview?”
I glance at my library book, with its illustrations of muscles and tendons.
“I don’t think I know the body well enough yet,” I protest, but Maxwell shakes her head.
What’s important, she says, is my desire to learn.
If I impress her friend, she says, he’ll happily pay to get me trained.
He’s a mathematician—a genius with a knack for making money.
“He loves to help people,” she says, adding that the rich gentleman’s home is right here in Palm Beach, less than two miles from Mar-a-Lago.
“Come meet him,” she says, her pretty face glowing. “Come tonight after work.”
Even today, more than twenty years later, I remember how excited I felt.
Could my dreams of becoming a professional masseuse be on their way to coming true so quickly?
Something about how this proper, well-spoken lady focused on me made that seem possible.
I told her I had to get permission from my dad first, but that I really wanted to come.
So, as she instructed, I wrote down her phone number and her rich friend’s address: 358 El Brillo Way.
“See you later, I hope,” Maxwell said, waving her right hand by twisting it slightly at the wrist. Then she was gone.
The next break I got, I ran to the tennis courts to tell my father I was in the running for a potentially life-changing opportunity. He said he could drive me over after work. I used the phone at the spa’s front desk to call Maxwell and let her know we were on. “Great,” she said. “See you soon.”
A few hours later, Dad gave me a lift up South Ocean Avenue to El Brillo Way, a short hedge-lined spur of a road that dead-ended into the Palm Beach Intracoastal Waterway. The drive took five minutes, and we didn’t talk much. No one ever had to explain to my father the importance of making a buck.
When we arrived at the high wall in front of 358, the last house on the left before we hit the water, Dad pushed a buzzer and spoke into the intercom.
A security gate rolled open. We eased into a driveway lined with palm trees and found ourselves in front of a sprawling two-story, six-bedroom mansion.
In countless TV documentaries, this house has been shown to be painted a tasteful white, as it was years later.
But in the summer of 2000, the home we pulled up to was a garish pink, the color of Pepto-Bismol.
Eager to be punctual, I jumped out of the car before my dad could turn off the engine, walked to the big wooden front door, and rang the bell.
Maxwell answered and came outside, the door still open behind her.
She shook my father’s hand. “Thank you so very much for dropping her off,” she told Dad, all smiles, but in retrospect, she seemed impatient for him to leave.
“We’ll get Jenna home safe,” she said, practically shooing him back into his truck.
Then she turned and ushered me into an elegant foyer with a spiral staircase and a huge star-shaped chandelier.
“Jeffrey has been waiting to meet you,” she said, starting up the stairs. “Come.”
Walking behind her, I tried not to stare at the walls, which were crowded with photos and paintings of nude women.
Maybe this was how wealthy people with sophisticated taste decorated their homes?
“Be cool,” I thought. “Don’t let her see how nervous you are.
” I fixed my eyes on the stairs, which were covered in pink, plush carpet.
When we reached the second-floor landing, Maxwell turned right and led me into a bedroom.
We made a U-turn around a king-size bed, then entered an adjoining room with a turquoise-green massage table.
A naked man lay face down on top of it, his head resting on his folded arms, but when he heard us enter, he lifted up slightly to look around at me.
I remember his bushy eyebrows and the deep lines in his face as he grinned a Cheshire-cat smile.
“Say hello to Mr. Jeffrey Epstein,” Maxwell instructed. But before I could do so, the man spoke to me: “You can just call me Jeffrey.” I nodded at the gray-haired stranger as he lay back down. He was forty-seven years old—nearly three times older than me.
Faced with Epstein’s bare backside, I looked to Maxwell for guidance.
I had never gotten a massage before, let alone given one.
But still I thought, “Isn’t he supposed to be under a sheet?
” Maxwell’s blasé expression indicated that nudity was normal.
“Calm down,” I told myself. “Don’t blow this chance.
” I wanted to be a good student. Palm Beach was just sixteen miles from Loxahatchee, but the economic divide made it seem way farther.
I needed to learn how rich people did things.
Besides, while the man on the table was nude, it’s not like I was alone with him.
The fact that a woman was with me made me breathe easier.
“Fake it ’til you make it,” I thought, as I tried to project a can-do energy.
Maxwell took the lead. “First, you must wash your hands,” she said.
“Hot water.” She pointed toward a white, marble-tiled bathroom, complete with sauna and steam shower, where I did as she asked.
Then she began the lesson. When giving a massage, she said, I should keep one palm on the client’s skin at all times, so as never to startle him.
“Continuity and flow are key,” she explained.
She turned to a dresser littered with bottles, pumped lotion into both our hands, and showed me how to keep an extra blob of the stuff on my forearm, so I could reload without interrupting the rhythm.
She then positioned us at Epstein’s feet, on either side of the table, and rubbed her hands together swiftly before placing them on the toes of his right foot.
She nodded for me to do the same on his left. “Just do what I do,” she said.
We started in on his heels and arches, then moved up his body.
“Don’t pull his leg hair,” Maxwell cautioned, explaining that our goal was to circulate the blood by firmly pushing it up his calves.
I paid close attention, mimicking her as we moved higher, to Epstein’s thighs.
When we got to his buttocks, I tried to glide past them, landing on his lower back.
But Maxwell put her hands on top of mine and guided them to his rear.
“It’s important that you don’t ignore any part of the body,” she said.
“If you skip around, the blood won’t flow right. ”
Only later would I see how, step by practiced step, the two of them were breaking down my defenses.
Every time I felt a twinge of discomfort, one glance at Maxwell told me I was overreacting.
And so it went for about half an hour: a seemingly legitimate massage lesson.
As Maxwell encouraged me—“You’re getting the hang of it!
”—Epstein asked me questions. “Do you have siblings?” Two brothers, I said.
“Where do you go to high school?” I told him I’d quit after ninth grade, but I was only sixteen—I hoped to get my GED.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I said I lived with an older boy in a trailer on my parents’ land.
“Do you take birth control?” Epstein asked.
Was that a weird question in a job interview?
Epstein indicated this was just his way of getting to know me.
After all, I might soon be traveling with him. I told him I was on the pill.
“You’re doing great,” Maxwell said, as I kept my hands in sync with hers.