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 reads weirder that he doesn’t have sex with them.) To boot, his former girl friend, Ghislaine Maxwell tthe 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 exploited and powerless. Still, with a critical 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 prostitution charge in Florida, nor in most places (in New York, for instance, at this time soliciting sex with anyone over the age of 14 is a class D misdemeanor calling for a $100 fine). In fact, Saige Gonzales told the police that she lied about being 18 because otherwise she knew she would not have been admitted to the house. The local sex crimes prosecutor, Lana Belhalevic, interviews the girls and determines that the offense is solely related to prostitution—that there are no innocent victims. Dershowitz rej