In the end, the police tracked down 18 girls—nine of whom were under 18 [THIS IS IMPORTANT: HOW OLD WAS THE YOUNGEST?]; the others were in their 20s and 30s; one woman was in her 60s—a number of whom gave statements describing, in essence, happy - ending massages. (Although the nature of the allegations will dramatically grow into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, nobody at this point alleged anything more than this.) A shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and disgraced president, at all times surrounded by a retinue of young and attractive women doing his bidding, is 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 girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the daughter of the disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of the girls to come to Epstein’s home (and is henceforth known as the procurer or madam for Epstein and, later, his friends). It certainly doesn’t look good. Epstein called in Dershowitz, who flew into Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place— alienating Palm Beach officialdom—and, further amping up the profile of the case, also brought in Roy Black, the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. Epstein might have just been hit with solicitation charges and paid a fine even though some of the girls HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022919