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- [00:02]
A
Campsite Media. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Infamous. This is episode three of Geoffrey and Ghislaine's Secrets. If you haven't listened to episodes one and two, and we know there was a flub with episode one coming out on the right day, sorry about that. Please scroll back in your feed, go back to episode one and and listen from there. We really appreciate you being a fan of Infamous. Thank you so much for being here and supporting our work. And now please enjoy the episode. Jeffrey Epstein was a Coney island boy, but he enjoyed being in the places that posh people were. And there's nowhere more posh than Palm Beach, Florida. It's got stately mansions, pink hued sunsets over the water, palm lined boulevards full of every store you ever could want to shop at. It's about an hour from Miami and Palm beach is the wintertime spot for affluent snowbirds. You know that word? It's people who travel down from usually the east coast to spend cold months in the Sunshine State's warmer climate.
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B
There was a huge difference between summer occupancy of the island, which would have been few thousand to winter, which got up to tens of thousands.
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A
That's Jose Lambier, a former reporter with the Palm Beach Post turned private investigator.
- [01:52]
B
I had a column in the Palm Beach Post that was somewhat similar to Page Six in New York. I spent quite a bit of time in parties and galas and fundraisers on the island, in Mar a Lago, at the breakers, just about everywhere. I came into the office one morning and I got called into the editor's office and he asked me if I ever heard of a guy named Jeffrey Epstein.
- [02:18]
A
Lambert's editor thought he might have seen Epstein around some of those society parties.
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Starting in mid November and until early April, there is a fundraising gala. Tuxedo, black tie, whatever. Just about every night for a different cause.
- [02:37]
A
Epstein maintained a house in Palm beach, not far from Mar a Lago. He bought it in 1999. Five bedrooms, a pool, a boat deck looked out onto the water.
- [02:49]
B
It was a cul de sac on the west side of the island. I never thought that his house was anything special. If it had been anywhere other than Palm beach, it would have been worse than the 3 or 400,000. It was sort of not that well maintained. It wasn't best furniture. It was just a strange place in that it didn't fit in the rest of the palatial homes around.
- [03:18]
A
Still, even Epstein's small house on Palm beach was miles away from how the other half lived because there's a big difference between the people who winter in Palm beach and those who work for them.
- [03:32]
B
I remember going to parties there and sitting on a couch underneath a legitimate Picasso painting and drinking the best champagnes and eating the best food. And then at 10 o', clock, I had to get in my car and get across the bridge where I live. And very often it was sort of a shock. The difference between the two, even worse is when you keep going west and you get into some suburbs that are quite poor. You're talking about smaller houses, broken windows, trailers, that sort of stuff. That is where Epstein was looking for these girls.
- [04:14]
A
Because Epstein isn't just employing regular staff, he's hiring teenage girls, girls he will pay to give him, quote, unquote, massages. And so much worse.
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President Trump's remarkable new claim that Jeffrey Epstein's stole young woman who worked at his Mar A Lago resort.
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Jeffrey Epstein is accused of sexually abusing.
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Dozens of underage girls, some as young.
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As 14 years old. Two counts of sex trafficking for alleged.
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Crimes committed in New York and Florida.
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Between 2002 and 2005.
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A
From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is an infamous miniseries, Jeffrey and Ghislaine's Secret. I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis.
- [05:01]
D
And I'm Natalie Roberman. And this is episode three, the Girls. So thanks to Victoria's Secret billionaire Les Wexner's money and other people's money, Epstein was able to make these major friends, very important people, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. He became a big wig, someone important and rich.
- [05:35]
A
So it's the mid-2000s and Epstein, who is friend to Bill Clinton, who is hanging out with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, Naomi Campbell, basically all of these big names from both government, business and Hollywood, he's traveling back and forth between Palm beach and New York on his private plane. Sometimes he's with Ghislaine, sometimes without. And even though he's only a part time player on the Palm beach scene, people are starting to take notice.
- [06:13]
B
I did a little bit of research and I see that he's a major donor to the Democratic Party and that he knows Clinton, that he's given just mind boggling amounts of money to the Democratic Party and that he makes this plane available to party people. That's what the research at the time shows. I also see some pictures of him at Mar a Lago, that he is indeed in society, but a minor society player.
- [06:44]
A
There are other rumors going around about Epstein.
- [06:48]
B
At the time, we had heard that he was flying in girls from all over the world, like on his private jet, making them available to society people. Now, there's always rumors at that time in Palm beach of orgies. Was I ever invited to one? No. I don't know if it's true or not. Right. You know, maybe, maybe not. And this was the first time that we actually heard that a particular individual, in this case Epstein, may have been flying in these extremely beautiful model types from France. That's what we had heard.
- [07:26]
A
Now, this sounded like a good story, especially for a gossip columnist. So Lambert put his ear to the ground, and soon there began to be rumblings about Jeffrey Epstein's love of massage. Here's Ghislaine talking about how they both actually liked massage, and her especially because, well, she used to do extreme sports.
- [07:49]
E
So in terms of massage, I had a lot of injuries. I do a lot of dangerous sports and have had multiple serious accidents and walk without any lameness because of physical therapy and massage. That to me is a very. It's medicinal for me.
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A
Massages were a frequent occurrence for him, sometimes daily or multiple times a day.
- [08:17]
E
So if you were staying with him and you had a massage, he would often travel with a masseuse. He would say, hey, would you like a massage? And he. He did do that. So it is true that I found masseuses. And he became more insistent. He, like, knew all the time he got bored. So he would be bored with a masseuse and he would say, find me a new masseuse. I am the entire opposite. If I find someone that I like, I stay with them. I'm like, I don't want you. He would drive for new. So that is true. And in my effort to find them, I would go to massage spas, like legitimate spas. We're not talking, you know, funky ones. If I got a massage from somebody in a spa that was I liked, I liked. I asked them if they would do home visits. If they said yes, I would ask them to come to the house and he would see if he liked them or not. But these were people who worked at spas. I never ever checked their age and I never checked their crew credentials.
- [09:17]
A
But of course, the massages Epstein wanted on those home visits weren't just medicinal, nor were all of them from trained, licensed masseuses. Because it seems that after targeting models, Epstein starts to focus on teenagers, on girls in Palm Beach.
- [09:38]
B
At one point, a 16 year old went to the police in Palm beach and told her she had been shuttled via chauffeured car from her house in the suburbs in Royal Palm beach, which, even if it sounds royal, is anything but. And that she was driven to a strange place and that a man had her stripped down to her underwear and giving him a massage.
- [10:11]
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Because Epstein had a pattern. He would hire a girl to give him a massage, and then partway through, he would expose himself, start to masturbate, or worse. Afterward, he would throw the girls a couple hundred bucks.
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Some people in the inside were telling police he might get five or six massages a day.
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Oftentimes, the girls coerced into performing these massages were from the wrong side of the tracks, as it were, were the other Palm Beach.
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They somehow were able to identify girls with problems at home, with alcoholism, in the house, with domestic violence, with drugs. And this is what they were looking for. And so imagine you might be living in a trailer park. A car picks you up with a chauffeur, takes you to Palm beach, where some of these girls told police they had never been before, and they end up with Jeffrey Epstein.
- [11:15]
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Epstein's money serves as a lure and a bludgeon for these girls, keeping them coming back. And one of the girls that Epstein meets will end up with him, or so she says, for a long time. So Epstein maneuvers his way to many girls in Palm beach, and one of them is a girl named Virginia Giuffre. She says she's working as a spa attendant at Mar a Lago. And Mar a Lago, as I'm sure you know, is the resort owned by President Donald Trump. Lambert says he's been there many times. When he says he. In the next passage, you're going to hear he's talking about President Trump.
- [12:03]
B
It is the equivalent of the mansions on the cliff in Newport. It's truly beautiful. A lot of people in Palm beach say it's gaudy, but if the very same building on the same piece of property, where in Normandy or in Brittany or in Spain, people would say it's a jewel. You come into this giant mahogany covered room that looks a lot like an old English club. Big chandeliers and huge paintings, including some of him. And then there's a giant pool where people usually have their drinks when they get there and move on to a ballroom that he built in the mid-2000s that has these galas.
- [12:48]
A
Mar a Lago was the sort of place where Epstein and his ilk would visit. And indeed, there are photos of Epstein at Mar a Lago as far back as 1995. And this is where Virginia says she worked. She's young with blonde hair. She says she's Had a hard life. Molested and even sex trafficked as a young teen. And then when she was 16, she got a job as a locker room attendant at the spa at Mar a Lago. Virginia says that one day in the year 2000, she was sitting outside the locker room reading a book about massage therapy when Ghislaine approached her. Virginia claims she told her if she gave a wealthy man a massage, a whole world of opportunity would be open to her. And so Virginia soon became a regular, traveling with Epstein, attending parties. She was different than the other girls in that she was with Epstein a lot of the time. Still, there are so many girls coming and going from Epstein's house that the Palm beach police get word, and now they begin investigating.
- [14:07]
B
What is it that you were told you would have to do?
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E
Give you a massage. Okay. No.
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Okay.
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E
The first time, he asked me if I would take my jeans off, and I told him I wasn't comfortable with that. He had the towel on him, and. And about five minutes into it, he took the towel off and started pleasing himself, which I was very uncomfortable with.
- [14:28]
A
According to the book the Spider, the detective on the case identifies 47 girls who had fallen prey to Epstein in Palm Beach. They hear from girls as young as 14 who say that Epstein had allegedly raped them. The police start building their case. So where is Ghislaine in all of this? Well, she says she was never a target of this specific Palm beach investigation, and she says she was never involved.
- [15:00]
E
My understanding is that in 2000, let's say, 2008, they had interviewed 44 women, let's say, or around that number. You have to understand, not a single One of those 44 women mentioned me in a single report because they never met me, they never saw me, and they never interacted with me.
- [15:26]
A
She says that one victim did describe someone who looked like her, but that that woman had the wrong type of accent.
- [15:34]
E
She reports seeing a woman with short dark hair at the house, which then is used as evidence that that person was myself. Short dark hair and an accent. I'm sorry, but I find. And you can ask yourselves this. I mean, I've obviously modified my accent. I've been in America a long time, but I'm British. I've been brought up with a very strong British accent. And I don't believe there's American on planet Earth that doesn't recognize this to be British or Australian maybe, if you really don't know. But it's not some random accent. Now, the Hispanic, maybe.
- [16:11]
A
Okay, so she's saying that she had nothing to do with the recruiting.
- [16:16]
E
His mother, Paula, had been in a very serious car crash. She had become sort of like a surrogate mother for me. So because my mum wasn't there, I could look after her the way that I would, the way that I would have liked to look after my own mum. So I became very close to his mother. And she had been in a car crash. And in 2004, I believe it may have been five. I don't recall exactly. She took her health, took a serious decline, and Epstein called me and asked me if I could look after her. By looking after her, that meant organizing her doctors, making sure she had new clothes, making sure her house was clean.
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B
Where was she?
- [17:09]
E
She lived in. In a retirement establishment in. Outside of Palm Beach. Outside of. It's West Palm. I want. I was gonna say something like the Golden Girls, but it's not called that.
- [17:23]
A
And there were other women who were involved in helping find girls. It seems as though Epstein was operating a pyramid scheme of sorts. There was a rotating door of young girls and massages and just never ending recruitment. Haley Robeson claims that she was about 16 when an acquaintance from school came up to her at a swimming pool pool and asked if she wanted to make some cash giving massages to a billionaire. She says she was taken to a room by an assistant of Epstein's and then found him on a massage table wearing only a towel. He paid her $200 for the massage, but it's clear she was uncomfortable with it after that encounter. She says she was then told to recruit more. More girls. She told lawyers she made $200 for every high school girl she brought to the Palm beach mansion. And she did it. She recruited the girls from her high school, including one who was only 14. And to coordinate all these visits, it seems like Epstein had a whole staff at the ready. They were just handling the logistics of his perversion, Helping drive the girls home, giving them rental cars, feeding them. One worker at the house reportedly told the police that at Epstein's direction, he brought roses to a girl to congratulate her on her high school play. According to reports, his staff were always told to have at least $2,000 on hand because at the end of each massage, Epstein would pay the girls in cash.
- [19:11]
B
They would go home with 100 bucks. Some of them had never seen $100 bill. And this made some of them want to go back, which was a problem when it came to the prosecution of Epstein, because somehow, in some people's minds, wrongly, it made them look like they were budding. Hookeries or something, which was not the case.
- [19:40]
A
This would become critical because one day there's a physical fight at school between two girls who are associated with Epstein. And in the discussions between adults, the school, the parents, after the fight, one of the girls says, there's an old guy who's been paying for students to come to his house and do perverted things with him. And it's unclear if girls did meet Ghislaine or not. If she's telling the truth about that. We'll be getting into that later. But for now, the cops in Palm beach hop to it. They're on the case.
- [20:33]
D
On October 20, 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department Special Investigations Unit goes out on a job. They drive to 358 El Brio Way. They enter the gates and park in the driveway, which is flanked by two large gargoyles. They are here to execute a search warrant of Jeffrey Epstein's house. They seize massage tables and boxes of photographs. They find computers, some of which are missing their hard drives. They also discover 15 telephones and 20 cars, including a Rolls Royce and a Bentley. At another point, they even search through the trash and find the phone numbers of girls who have been brought to the house, along with sex toys and receipts for S and M books, including Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude. They use the evidence to bolster their case against Epstein, which at this point is charging ahead. But Epstein has a plan. He puts together a dream team of lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz. With Dershowitz leading them, Epstein's defense sets out to clear his name.
- [21:49]
C
They went full blast to intimidate everybody from the police detective all the way on up to the U.S. attorney's office.
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That's Thomas Volshow, a sociology professor at CUNY and a part time investigative reporter.
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C
They engaged immediately in a Darvo strategy, which means deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, and to basically claim that Epstein's the real victim and all these girls are lying or they're making it up or they didn't. They lied about their ages. Look, they have MySpace pages that show that they smoke pot and they talk about sex. They're bad people. Epstein's a good man. Look at all the money he's donated to organizations throughout his life.
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D
The tactic is essentially to age up these girls and present them as calculating sex workers rather than teenagers being coerced. And unfortunately, the Palm Beach State's attorney, Barry Krishner, the guy supposed to be prosecuting this case, seems to think a jury will view it similarly. Here's Jose Again, his main problem was.
- [22:53]
B
How do I make these girls look like anything other than whores? Which I thought was absolutely despicable, because there is no whores here. There are victims, and there are girls who might be misguided by their lot in life and definitely misguided by Epstein's law. That's what was going on here.
- [23:18]
D
The police do their best. Remember, they found more than 40 girls who said they had dealt with Epstein. From there, they put together a solid witness list of 13 underage girls. But in the end, the prosecutor went to a grand jury with only two victims. Here's what the Palm Beach Post reported recently, way after the case was concluded. These two girls were, quote, chided by grand jurors as if they were wayward teens putting up their bodies to get extra cash to spend at the mall. Rarely was there any focus from prosecutors on the fact that the teens were underage, many living in poverty, when a man in his 50s sexually abused them. Nor did prosecutors state the number of victims police found and the fact that the girls all told similar stories. After all that, the grand jury indicts Epstein on one count of solicitation of prostitution.
- [24:20]
B
At that point, they saw this as a low level prostitution, basically the equivalent of a john picking up a girl on the street.
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D
Nowhere does it matter mentioned that he had sex with a minor. It seems like a major miscarriage of justice and a major coup for Epstein. The FBI gets involved, but that goes nowhere because Epstein's lawyers are able to secure a remarkable deal for him. He will plead guilty and in exchange will get a non prosecution agreement. On June 30, 2008, Epstein walks into a courthouse in West Palm Beach. He wears a blue blazer and jeans. With his attorneys, Epstein settles in and pleads guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18. He has to register as a sex offender and is sentenced to 18 months in prison. But even then, Epstein gets off light. His time in lockup is very, very loose.
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B
Epstein ended up in a satellite of the jail in Royal Palm beach in the middle of his victims. Yes, there were barbed wires around that place, but it was low level security and it was probably the most comfortable jail that they had. He managed to talk the system into letting him go to work in his office. They gave him the chance to hire off duty deputies from the sheriff's department who were getting double pay and they would monitor his comings and goings. So they would go with him home and sit in the office and make sure he wasn't doing anything untoward.
- [26:09]
D
Around this time, Epstein is also facing at least a dozen civil suits from victims, which he begins settling out of court.
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B
Some of them got what I'm told by them, $100,000 here, $50,000 theirs. So the victims were sort of cutting their own deals, and some of them used it to go to college. Some of the money was used to buy drugs. I covered the death of a former victim of Epstein a few years ago in a sleazy motel in Palm beach of a drug overdose. Because what happened with Epstein in 2005, 2006, doesn't stop there. Some of these women are scarred for life.
- [26:54]
D
But for Epstein, he's able to move on. After about a year in pseudo prison, he's free to go. He returns to his life, but this won't be his last arrest.
- [27:11]
A
All right, everyone, that's it for this week. Next time on Infamous. We'll be getting into what happens to Epstein after prosecutors cut him this ridiculously lenient deal that we talked about this week in Palm Beach. And we'll talk about the photo that Virginia Giuffre produces. You know the one, the one with Prince Andrew with his arm around her waist and Ghislaine in the back ground. It's a photo that sets the world on fire. Palm beach county sheriff has ordered an internal affairs investigation into how his agency handled Jeffrey Epstein's case, calling for a.
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Congressional hearing into the 2008 handling of Epstein's case. Here in Palm beach county.
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The Palm beach county sheriff confirms tonight that he is investigating whether deputies properly supervised convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.