Chapter Twenty-One A Person of Interest
Twenty-one
A Person of Interest
When the police interviewed the girl, she said the student who’d recruited her was named Haley Robson.
She said that Robson told her on the way to the man’s house that if the man asked her age, she should say she was eighteen.
The girl recalled that the house they went to—two stories and painted pink—was on a dead-end street.
When they arrived at the gate, the incident report says, the man was not there, but the girl and Robson were welcomed into the kitchen by an assistant who said the man would return soon.
The girls were offered something to drink.
When the man did return, the fourteen-year-old said he introduced himself as Jeff.
The girl recalled that Jeff had “a long face, and bushy eyebrows, with graying hair.” At this point in the interview, the incident report notes, the girl “became upset and started to cry.”
The girl said a young blond woman she believed to be Jeff’s assistant took her upstairs.
She “recalled walking up a flight of stairs, lined with photographs, to a room” with a massage table at its center, the report says.
There was a mural of a naked female in the room, as well as several nude photographs of women on a shelf.
The assistant told the girl Jeff would be there in a second, and she left.
Soon, Jeff walked in wearing only a towel and told the girl to take off her clothes.
Jeff was stern when he told the girl to undress, she recalled.
She didn’t know what to do because she was alone with him.
She took off her shirt, she said, but left her bra on.
Jeff told her to take off everything. She took off her pants but left her thong underwear on.
Jeff dropped his towel then, exposing himself, and got on the massage table face down.
He told the girl to get on top of him, straddling his body, and to start massaging.
Her exposed buttocks were touching Jeff’s bare buttocks.
Jeff “was specific in his instruction to her on how to massage, telling her to go clockwise,” the report says.
At some point, Jeff flipped over and masturbated.
He told the girl she “had a really hot body.” Later, Jeff used a purple vibrator to massage the girl’s vaginal area.
Then he went to the bathroom, where she believed he masturbated again.
When he returned, he gave her three hundred dollars.
Before she left the house, he asked her to leave her phone number.
Two days after interviewing the fourteen-year-old victim, police officers showed her a photograph of Jeffrey Epstein in a photo lineup.
She immediately recognized him as “Jeff.” The Palm Beach police initiated undercover surveillance on 358 El Brillo Way and began secretly collecting and analyzing the contents of its trash cans.
Among the items police would eventually find in Epstein’s garbage: carbon copies of handwritten phone messages that chronicled a steady stream of girls who’d been coming “to work” at the house; a receipt for a 2005 purchase of three books about sadomasochism: SM 101: A Realistic Introduction; SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude—Principles, Skills and Tools; and Training with Miss Abernathy: A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners; as well as numerous sex toys, including a purple vibrator that looked identical to the one the fourteen-year-old girl told police Epstein had used on her.
Over the next thirteen months, investigators tracked down more than thirty victims—each one seemed to lead them to at least one more—and interviewed them.
The incident report obscures their names, but not their ages.
“REDACTED also stated she was sixteen years old when she first went to Epstein’s house.
” “During a sworn taped statement, REDACTED stated she met Jeffrey Epstein over a year ago. She was sixteen years of age.” “REDACTED advised that when she was fifteen or sixteen years of age, she was taken to Jeffrey Epstein’s house.
” An employee said Epstein routinely received two or three massages a day from different girls.
Asked how old the “masseuses” appeared to be, the employee said he “felt they were very young.” The man recounted how they ate “tons of cereal and drink milk all the time”—“like his own daughter who is in high school.”
Almost every girl interviewed told a similar story: on her first meeting with Epstein, he’d say that he only wanted her to do things she was comfortable with.
But over time, if a girl returned to the house, Epstein would push her to go further and further sexually.
First, he’d ask for his nipples to be pinched, hard, then he’d masturbate, then he’d try to fondle them and use sex toys on them.
The incident report says he would pay them more if they brought their friends to him.
He would pay them more to have intercourse with him and sometimes would force girls to have sex against their will.
And he would pay them more to participate in threesomes with him and an assistant, Nadia Marcinkova (the girl I’d been forced to “train” before I left for Thailand).
A particular line in one of the victim interviews jumps out at me, the echo too loud to ignore (and the threat still terrifying, even after all these years): Epstein had told at least one girl “that she could not tell anyone what happened at the house or bad things could happen.”
On October 20, 2005, police executed a search warrant on Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, right under the noses of a New York decorator and an architect, who were there planning a renovation.
Police officers noted that it appeared Epstein knew they were coming—it seemed computers had been removed from desks.
Still, the incident report says officers seized the photographs of naked females that so many of the girl victims had described, as well as the incriminating message pads that included notes to Epstein like this one, written after a call from his friend Jean-Luc Brunel: “He has a teacher for you to teach you how to speak Russian. She is 2 x 8”—sixteen—“years old not blonde. Lessons are free and you can have 1st today if you call.” Officers also seized a high school transcript of one of the alleged victims; a bottle of peach-flavored Joy Jelly sexual lubricant; two hidden cameras placed inside clocks; and several penis- and vagina-shaped soaps, which were displayed prominently in the bathrooms.
In February 2006, investigators requested a grand-jury session in which all the girls who had been interviewed would be called to testify.
The goal: to seek an indictment against Epstein.
But the incident report indicates that there were forces protecting Epstein from being brought to justice: the report notes that a lawyer for Epstein met with the state attorney’s office and provided information about the main victims, including their MySpace profiles, where some mentioned alcohol and marijuana use.
Afterward the grand jury was postponed. Translation: a smear campaign was underway.
So was a campaign of intimidation. The incident report notes that the father of the original victim “stated there has been a private investigator [at] his house photographing his family and chasing visitors who come to the house.” Detective Joseph Recarey, who was then leading the investigation, soon reported that another victim told him she was “personally contacted through a source that has maintained contact with Epstein. The source assured [the victim] she would receive monetary compensation for her assistance in not cooperating with law enforcement.” The victim stated she was told, “Those who help him will be compensated and those who hurt him will be dealt with.”
The grand jury was rescheduled to convene over three days in April 2006, and Detective Recarey served each victim with a subpoena.
But on the eve of the proceedings, not a single victim had been told when or where to appear.
Outraged, Recarey went to the state attorney’s office to confront the two prosecutors assigned to the case.
In the incident report, he states that one of them said that Epstein had been offered a deal: plead guilty to one count of aggravated assault with intent to commit a felony and receive five years probation—no jail time.
“Epstein would have to submit to psychiatric/sexual evaluation and no unsupervised visits with minors,” the report says.
While Recarey was present, the prosecutor answered a phone call from one of Epstein’s lawyers, who said his client would accept the deal.
Epstein’s lawyer then requested that the grand jury be canceled.
Recarey couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I explained my disapproval of the deal and not being consulted prior to the deal being offered,” the detective wrote in the incident report.
Still, later that day, someone in the state attorney’s office called Recarey, he wrote, “to officially notify me of the cancellation of the grand jury. He requested I contact the victims that had been served to appear, to notify them of the cancellation.” Recarey told that person he wouldn’t do any such thing; since the state attorney’s office had made that decision, he said, someone there could handle contacting the victims.
Recarey was pissed off—the incident report makes that clear.
On May 1, 2006, in apparent defiance of the prosecutors, he prepared three arrest-warrant requests and submitted them to the Crimes Against Children unit of the state attorney’s office.
The one for Epstein sought a warrant for four counts of unlawful sexual activity with certain minors and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation.
The one for Epstein’s assistant, Sarah Kellen, sought that she be charged with “four counts of Principal in the 1st degree Unlawful Sexual activity with certain minors and one count of Principal in the 1st degree Lewd and Lascivious Molestation.” The third arrest-warrant request was for Haley Robson.
It sought her arrest for lewd and lascivious acts on a victim under sixteen years old.
In July 2006, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on only two state felony charges: procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute.
He was allowed to post a $3,000 bond and go home.
The state attorney, Barry Krischer, had finally convened a Palm Beach County grand jury, but presented evidence from just two victims. The grand jury returned a single charge of felony solicitation of prostitution, to which Epstein pleaded not guilty in August 2006.
That was the last straw for Recarey’s boss, Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter.
Disgusted with the way Krischer and his prosecutors had botched the case, Reiter took his department’s findings to the FBI.
I knew exactly none of this in 2007, when Epstein and Maxwell called me out of the blue. I’d had just five years away from them, and I wasn’t done recovering. Soon, though, my family and I would be swept into their maelstrom yet again.