The Spider by Barry Levine

Author:Barry Levine [Levine, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

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ACCORDING TO THE office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jeffrey Epstein had paid his debt to society after serving his sentence under the VIP conditions of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. But Epstein—and his crew—faced other debt collectors in the form of his many alleged victims, some of whom had by now obtained sophisticated legal representation. Maxwell, too, found herself in the legal crosshairs of civil suits. In September 2009, a process server walked through the packed lobby of the Sheraton Hotel toward Ghislaine Maxwell, who was attending a gathering of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. “Maxwell was huddled in a small group talking to other guests,” journalist Conchita Sarnoff recalled, “as the server approached her. He called out her name, and with so many people surrounding her, Maxwell was unsuspecting. She confirmed her identity and he served her notice,” Sarnoff recounted in her book, TrafficKing.11

In 2009, in the course of reporting on the lawsuits that had been filed against Epstein, New York Daily News columnist George Rush heard that lawyers for Virginia Roberts had served papers on Maxwell and he was looking to do a story. Rush reached out to Maxwell for comment and also contacted a spokesperson for Epstein, Howard Rubenstein.12 In the course of his research, he came across an affidavit in which Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, recounted how Ghislaine Maxwell had procured her for massages and sex. Rush was familiar with Maxwell—they had interacted on New York’s social scene, even going out to dinner once with mutual friends. He thought of her as a “charming” person, even a “sparkling conversationalist.”

Epstein, who rarely spoke with journalists, agreed to talk to Rush, but he stipulated that, on the advice of his lawyers, the chat—with Rush and a pair of Daily News editors—would need to remain off the record. Years later, Rush described the interview as “a self-serving rationale for how [Epstein] had been tormented by the lawyers” and the alleged victims they represented.13

In an interview for this book, Rush described how Epstein laid it on thick during the phone call, leaning into “his working-class roots and his Brooklyn accent” in an attempt, seemingly, to develop a rapport with the journalists. Epstein portrayed his victims as “like experienced sex workers” who had worked as strippers for clubs where their age “would have been verified.” Epstein also highlighted the differences among various states when it came to the minimum age of consent. The “statutory aspect to his prosecution was unfair” in Epstein’s view, Rush said, because if he had “done the same things in a different state there would be no cause to arrest him….So, he quibbled about whether he had done anything wrong and his regret was not so much about having had sex with them—and I think he emphasized several times that there was no penetration—but that he should have been smarter about checking their age. Like it wasn’t the act itself that was bad, it was his sloppiness.

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