"How to Spot Misleading Coverage of the Crucial Epstein/Maxwell Story", I DID NOT HAVE SEX WITH THOSE CHILDREN!, Pt. II.
12. MARY POPPINS IN LOVE
While Schedule III Sexual Predator Jeffrey Epstein was aptly described as a "monster", feeding little girls to men in high places, outlets like The New York Times gloss over the reality of what 104 children have said that Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends did to them, the Times using dismissive elides like “lurid details,” which they don't describe. Then they refer to child rape as "sexualized massage" which readers believe because they haven't heard the "lurid details". Cute trick.
Not only Epstein moreover but Ghislaine Maxwell is an alleged child procurer, child rapist and child trafficker, not "Epstein's girlfriend" or "Epstein's enabler". Many articles make her sound like Mary Poppins in love. Sensationalism is not journalism. Blinding readers' eyes to dangerous reality is however not journalism either, and she's still at large.
Their circle of prominent people is moreover still extant, finding other ways to get its needs fulfilled.
13. THE DIFFERENCE IS OBVIOUS
The basic story, which survivors from different years and parts of the country have consistently told (which Epstein denied and Maxwell denies) is not a reports of "massages". That's what Epstein called them, not what they were, yet the mainstreams use his word. This was child procurement, child rape, child trafficking and using raped children to blackmail grown men.
Predators moreover smell blood, lure a child whose parent has just died, a runaway, or a kid whose family is desperately poor, or who sees no other way out. To pretend otherwise is not to cover the story; it’s to cover up the story. Those who don't want details of Epstein's routine, skip the italicized section:
The process began when an Epstein procurer, a woman or older girl, told a 12-16 year old girl that she was beautiful, could have a real future, could get into modeling if she just attended some parties “to get seen” at an old guy’s house; or could get into spa work if she gave a wealthy old guy a foot massage. She'd make $200. Assuring the child that she’d be safe, offering to act as a chaperone, the procurer then took the child to one of Epstein’s houses.
“There’s just one catch”, the procurer told the 13-15 year-old. “Mr. Epstein only accepts girls 18 or over. So tell him you’re eighteen.” That did not legally protect Epstein. It's up to adult to be sure what a young person's age is. What it did do was get the child to try to act older than she was or felt, to accept what she thought older girls would accept. No matter which of Epstein's houses this was, a sunny woman named Sarah, a co-conspirator who traveled everywhere with Epstein, met the girl in the kitchen, gave her something to eat, accompanied her up a stairway to a large bathroom, opened a message table, and reminded her to “say you’re 18” -- then left.
Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly enacted this ritual three times a day, entered in only a towel, and while chatting took it off, then lay down on the massage table, nude and face down. As the child tentatively began to rub his back, she perhaps was determined to act older, perhaps was standing on tiptoe because the table was deliberately set high. So she might have obeyed when he cheerfully told her to just climb up on him. If not, he didn't push.
Praising her when she did what he asked, stopping whenever she told him to, but dangling $100 more at each stage if she “acts grown up”, Epstein chatting all the while, first asked the child to remove her shirt, then her pants. It might take several visits but Epstein next turned over and attempted to fondle her buttocks and breasts as he masturbated, then penetrated her — with, as kids as young as 13 told the police, “his finger, or a vibrator, or his egg-shaped penis.” Sometimes allegedly he just held the child down and raped her.
Sometimes allegedly, Ghislaine Maxwell joined in and they both molested her. [Maxwell denies it.]
Survivors say that in any case, Epstein was leading up to sex with the child and another adult, Nadia Marcinkova, whom Epstein “acquired” in Yugoslavia at age 14 and called his ”live-in sex slave.” In her twenties, nearly six feet tall, Nadia was called in, wearing a strap-on penis. Survivors say that under Epstein's stage direction, she fondled and painfully penetrated the little girl. [In testimony, Nadia takes the Fifth.]
If the child was still trying to endure it in order to be brave, to not to seem childish or to get more money than she's ever heard of, or to get a chance at the promised career, or all four, then parents were told that their little girl was so beautiful/talented that a wealthy benefactor was financing her training as a masseuse or her launch into modeling and that she would be accompanied by a member of British high society as a chaperone -- that this was her main chance. Epstein shipped her off to New York to Maxwell.
The kid by this point was often hundreds -- or in the case of children acquired by "modeling agencies" overseas, thousands -- of miles from home. Maxwell and Epstein through a hair and dress makeover and often-violent daily sex readied the child to be trafficked. They then "lent her out" to powerful men as a "sex slave" for the night or weekend. The girls were not protected from violence, or from the many forms of rape, and on his vast estates no one who would help her could hear a child plead and scream.
Survivors say that Epstein did not charge men for raping the girls, his goal was to get the men in his debt, to blackmail them.
All the above is not a description of a "sexual message", what the media call it. These were almost all blond US girls without tattoos, ages 13-16. Police say many of the girls had been raped 100 times each.
14. MISQUOTING, OFTEN OUT OF CONTEXT
Mainstreams trumpet that "there is no evidence" that Bill Clinton (or Donald Trump, or Alan Dershowitz, or whoever) was involved.
Actually there is [see Parts III and IV]. So far, with most of the records sealed, there's no smoking gun but there's already enough snoke to indicate a forest fire. Mainstreams cover that up not only by not presenting the evidence but also by misreporting what the survivors are saying.
The Daily Mail for example wrote, "[Virginia] Roberts also revealed two men who did not engage in any sexual acts with Epstein's victims in her own deposition that was unsealed on Friday - Bill Clinton and Donald Trump."
That's flatly untrue.
She does not accuse Clinton or Trump of raping her. Virginia Roberts for example said that she never flew with Clinton in the Lolita Express (the infamous Boeing 727 that Epstein allegedly used for rape parties with underaged girls). That does not mean that Clinton was not on the Lolita -- in fact, according to flight logs, he flew on it dozens of times, with underage girls -- it means only that Virginia was not there when he was.
What Virginia Roberts also said was that in the time she was with Epstein 2001-2004, she never had sex with Clinton or Trump. She says that she saw Clinton on Little St. James, Epstein's "orgy island" but did not have sex with him herself, or witness him having sex with others. She was flatly misquoted as saying, "Trump 'didn't partake in any sex with us ... and never flirted with me'" As she stressed in testimony she never said that, she did not know Trump, the Daily Mail reporter simply "made that up."
Pulling another fast one, the mainstreams say that she's "clearly lying" because she testified that she never slept with any US presidents.
She didn't and never said that she had.
Virginia Roberts accuses other men entirely -- Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, British Prince Andrew, Harvard Law professor and Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz, etc. -- of raping her when she was a child. Echoing Dershowitz without checking, however, the mainstreams state that she "retracted her accusation" of Dershowitz. She in fact has not. Her attorney filed that accusation in the wrong set of court papers and withdrew the papers to amend them. She stands by her statement.
Remember moreover that Virginia Roberts is girl #102 in the Epstein case, and was there for only three years. Multiply that level of misreporting times at least 104 survivors who have come forward.
15. RAPED AND TRAFFICKED CHILDREN ARE NOT CHILD PROSTITUTES
Under US law and indeed in reality there is no such thing as a "child prostitute", only a trafficked or raped child, because kids literally do not have fully formed brains. Even if a hungry child offers, the proper response is food not rape.
Yet in 2007, when the Palm Beach police after two years of hard work brought the court a tightly-proven case against Epstein, federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta accepted a plea deal that 1) let Epstein go free, it 2) extended immunity from prosecution to Ghislaine Maxwell and other “named and potential conspirators” without requiring information in return, and 3) protected all of Epstein’s "guests" from investigation, while 4) labeling the raped and trafficked girls as “prostitutes”.
Dutifully the media did too.
Although Ghislaine Maxwell vehemently denies it, according to police-identified victims, Maxwell's training sessions involved everything from school work, etiquette classes, healthy food and new clothes to beatings and daily enforced sex of every kind with Maxwell, Epstein and his assorted friends -- gang rape. Like other survivors, Virginia Roberts has said that she was not protected from even the most violent "guests". Quite the contrary, she says that Maxwell told the girls to "smile, smile, smile" and to gather information on the sexual preferences and chit-chat of the rich men to whom they were lent. If the man was dissatisfied, the girl was badly hurt when she got back.
Yet the mainstreams and even survivors' lawyers call Maxwell a “madame”, a word used to describe the head of a house of adult prostitutes. Maxwell is not a madame just as the kids were not prostitutes. Many survivors, now in their 20s and 30s, describe Ghislaine Maxwell as a child procurer, child rapist, child sex trafficker and Epstein's main co-conspirator.
Similarly, Epstein's Lolita Express was not "a flying brothel", with willing women renting out their own bodies. It was a huge privately-owned passenger plane, a jumbo jet, able to fly thousands of miles without refueling while adult men allegedly raped very young girls, with grown women there to make the girls submit.
Consequently in 2008, when Jeffrey Epstein was charged with "solicitation", with being a john asking to have sex with a prostitute, it was a lie, a cover-up. Of course the media should report what the charge was, but reporters also have a duty to point out the criminal absurdity of it.
When highly-placed adults rape kids, responsible journalists would not use language that subliminally teaches readers that the kids not the rapists were the perps. Right until the end moreover "leading" publications were being paid for puff pieces.
According to Alan McLeod from FAIR, "Epstein’s team managed to convince many supposedly reputable outlets, including the Huffington Post (11/17/17), Forbes (10/2/13) and the National Review (7/10/13) to publish puff pieces about him (New York Times, 7/21/19 - after his 2019 arrest.). Epstein pled guilty to charges connected to sexual abuse of minors in 2008. Forbes described him as “one of the largest backers of cutting-edge science around the world,” making no mention of his criminal past. The stated writer was paid $600 by a PR firm to attach his name to the pre-fab article."
16. ILLUSTRATIONS THAT LIE
Illustrations can also mislead. The picture above on the banner of this story is of a beautiful girl. That's Virginia Roberts, no question, but it does not show the gangly kid she was when she says that Ghislaine Matthews procured her from the Mar-a-Lago Club, where she was a handing out towels, and lured her to Epstein's house by telling her that an old man would pay $200 for a "massage" and that she, Maxwell, would stay with her to make sure she was safe.
Virginia at 16 moreover was among the oldest children lured. Some little girls hardly came to Epstein's waist. Choosing only pictures when the girls were almost grown hides the full horror of what happened to often very young kids, making it easier to pass them off as "prostitutes" when none of them were. Many survivors of Epstein, their lives shattered, spiraled down into drug use, homelessness or suicide. We need to cover them. Pictures of the few who overcame it and as women found the strength to turn and fight Epstein, Maxwell, and their powerful friends for future little girls are important too.
17. MEDIA OUTLETS CANNOT "BREAK A STORY" IF IT WAS ALREADY PUBLISHED OVER A DECADE BEFORE
In 2018, when Epstein and Maxwell allegedly had been at it for at least 22 years, Julie K. Brown, a topflight Miami Herald reporter who specializes in child trafficking, published a series on Epstein. She interviewed Epstein survivors, found many new ones, challenged Acosta, and finally in going to press broke through the US corporate media wall of 12 years standing, giving people who’d never heard about Epstein an encyclopedic view of the case. Incredible job.
However, now other mainstreams are saying that in printing her article, The Miami Herald “broke the Epstein story” in 2018. No. In fact, it didn’t.
That story broke in 2007, eleven years before, and little independent outlets and indie reporters kept covering it. Not only hundreds of girls’ lives but, because so many prominent men might have gone to prison, our nation’s and the world's trajectory might have changed dramatically if the Herald with its huge readership had actually been the one to break the story in 2007.
The years 1993-2007 were wild times in New York, the Anything Goes Era, and Jeffrey Epstein from Coney Island, hedge-fund manager, a genuine math and science whiz with no college degree and mysterious sources of money, was moving up by giving Harvard, Israel, politicians and the arts serious sums of money, into wealthy, highly educated circles. Epstein had a seat on the Council on Foreign Relations, which is what passes for gravitas in some minds. He however was always accompanied by extremely young girls, who were eerily quiet and respectful and jumped to do his bidding.
Reporters Vicky Ward and Conchita Sarnoff, and editor Tina Brown (an Oxford graduate whose legal title in Britain is "Lady Evans" but has become a US citizen, dropping the title) move easily in that monied world; they heard rumors. The two say that in those circles by the late 1990s almost everyone knew that Epstein was a child rapist.
In 2003 Ward was assigned by Vanity Fair to write a piece on Epstein’s suspicious finances. Pregnant, Ward has said that she found Epstein so menacing that when she prematurely gave births to her twins, she hired armed guards for the NICU until the newborns were strong enough to be brought home. Not that it stopped her. She had stumbled over the two young sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer [see Pt 1] who said that Epstein and Maxwell had raped them in 1996. Ward convinced them and their family to go on record by name, risking themselves to do it, because the police and FBI would not listen.
Ward writes that she could not get Vanity Fair to publish. The then-editor-in-chief Graydon Carter insists that she did not have sufficient documentation. Her copious other finds about Epstein were published as The Talented Mr. Epstein in 2003, but there was no hint of child rape.
That was seventeen years ago.
The tiny Palm Beach Post was the first to publish anything on Epstein’s December, 2007, arrest for child rape, twelve years ago. By then, there was already powerful police evidence of a rabid child rapist operating nationwide. He had been arrested in Palm Beach but unbelievably was going free, and there was copious evidence that other child rapists, reportedly important men, and a highly-educated British woman named Ghislaine Maxwell were involved.
With 34 girls coming forward, even vague references already told an ominous story. Yet even with names like “presidential candidate Bill Richardson”, “ex-president Bill Clinton” and “wealthy businessman Donald Trump” floating around, the mainstream media did not investigate or sound a warning about Epstein’s release. For eleven more years the US corporate media rarely covered the constantly-erupting story at all.
Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter is the superb professional who with his top detective had gathered over two years of child rape and child trafficking evidence, and arrested Epstein in 2007 -- only to see federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta essentially release Epstein and anyone involved with him. Reiter was dedicated to helping the survivors fight Epstein. Yet even Reiter would by 2018 be refusing to talk to reporters because for a solid decade he did talk to reporters -- gave interviews, shared records, gave leads -- and yet nothing that he said was published in the US mainstreams.
The British media were meanwhile like the US indies all over the story, in the Brits' case because Queen Elizabeth’s favorite son, Prince Andrew, whom two of the survivors have accused, was fourth in line to the British throne, and Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused procurer, rapist and trafficker, is from British high society. Australian newspapers were interested because the friendly, beloved wife and mother whom they knew by her married name, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, was going back with her husband to her native United States to fight a monster. They were solidly in “our Ginny’s” corner.
So the Epstein story, at least the parts about Epstein and Maxwell, were already there, almost in full, by 2010, much of it summarized in Conchita Sarnoff’s 2010 piece in Daily Beast, right down to the “thrice daily massages”, the Acosta deal, and knowledge that very important men were potentially involved. There were still nine more years to go in mainstream media darkness.
Most independent reporters are not like Sarnoff from wealthy circles. They cover their own expenses, thus are typically broke, without access to key research sources, do not have editors or other reporters backing them up, and write without a powerful publication giving them legal cover -- so that the slightest mistake that any phalanx of lawyers could consider libelous could cost that reporter and that reporter’s family their home.
Yet the indies kept on it, monitoring the lawsuits, interviewing angry cops, pouring over court records, finding for example the flight logs of the The Lolita Express, indicating that Bill Clinton had taken 26 long flights on it. (No, FOX news did not find those flight logs or spot Clinton’s name in them. That was Nick Bryant in tiny Gawker.) Certainly in the indies you find a lot of trash. In 2016, though, Conchita Sarnoff wrote and self-published a highly-detailed, tightly-documented e-book on the Epstein story, TraffickKing, studded with accurate quotes and solid links.
Consequently, although mainstreams are now shouting “Exclusive!”, their exclusives are often about things long routine to readers of the Guardian, the Observer, the Daily Beast, even Gawker and Radar. Yeah, the tabloids. Lots of reporters went there to publish on Epstein because they could not get the information printed or broadcast anywhere else.
ABC anchor Amy Robach had the story three years before the Miami Herald but ABC refused to broadcast it because of enormous pressure from Buckingham Palace, which was worried that Prince Andrew would be outed. They "threatened us in a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that it also quashed the story. And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in it..." The power elite including its media arm knew without question from 2008 onward what Epstein was doing. What part of it was not directly involved was at minimum complicit.
The tiny Daily Beast -- not the New York Times -- broke the story on July 6, 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein was back in custody in New York City on new charges.
An enormous cache of nude photos of underage girls (further proof of what the ones who have come forward have been saying? leads to still hidden girls?) and computers have been seized. Since those unwiped computers could be leads to child rapists in high places, this could be a national turning point, legally and politically. Survivors say that Epstein compulsively went through a sick ritual of raping two to three 13-15 year old girls every day.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s 730-1095 rapes a year, by Epstein alone, not counting his “guests”. Think of the children who could have been saved if the US mainstreams with their huge reach had actually broken the story, had piled on 12 years ago, called the child rape "child rape", and not let go. When Epstein committed suicide, was murdered or escaped, the mainstreams basically dropped the story again.
Yet Maxwell is still out there. At least 100s perhaps 1000s of prominent people to whom the girls were "lent", all child rapists, are still out there. Two US presidents have been accused. What evidence that is already documented are the mainstreams missing, downplaying and/or deliberately hiding. Begin with Bill Clinton....
[Pt. I is The Complex Epstein/Maxwell Case in a Large Nutshell. You just read Part II.]
Go on to Part III: Bill and Hillary, Jeffrey and Ghislaine
Pt. IV: Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, New York and Mar-a-Lago
Pt. V: The Oddly Impervious Ghislaine Maxwell, Honey Traps and Dead Man's Keys