The long lead-up to the ongoing MAGA civil war over the supposed Epstein files can be traced back two decades to a February 2005 fight in gym class between a 14-year-old and her best friend at Royal Palm Beach High School.
This tussle between two public school girls in their early teens triggered an extended series of events that would see Epstein commit suicide in prison and leave Prince Andrew in disgrace along with ex-JP Morgan CEO Jes Staley.
The then U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta in Florida prosecuted the first federal case against Epstein and went on to become President Donald Trump’s first secretary of labor, only to resign after the Miami Herald reported that he had entered into a disgracefully lenient plea deal, amounting to house arrest, in Epstein’s case.
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Others who have been muddied just by associating with Epstein include Microsoft founder Bill Gates. A host of public figures from former President Bill Clinton to attorney Alan Dershowitz have been the subject of conspiracy theories regarding a client list that may well not exist.
Incoming U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she would be releasing the Epstein files, but when that was delayed, she reported she had them on her desk and would soon make the contents known. She then said that there was nothing significant to reveal.
FBI Deputy Director Don Bongino, who has long joined Bondi and Trump himself in trading on baseless conspiracy theories, threatened to resign if Bondi did not step down. Trump stuck by Bondi and said too much energy was being expended on the Epstein mess.
He suggested that grumbling among the usually blindly loyal Trumpoids was the work of the Democrats. He thereby sought to assuage unhappy MAGA conspiracy theorists with a conspiracy theory.
And all that followed a March 14, 2005 phone call by the 14-year-old’s stepmother to the Palm Beach Police Department. Whatever is not or is not in law enforcement files about Epstein, the very first entry in the very first file begins there: the very first Jane Doe 1, to be followed by others in years of subsequent cases.
“[The stepmother] felt that there was some kind of sexual activity,” Palm Beach Det. Joe Recarey, told the grand jury. “[Jane Doe 1] had gotten into a fight at [Royal Palm Beach High School.]...After the fight, theory had discovered $300 in her purse…She had told them that she received it from a man in Palm Beach.”
Det. Michelle Pagan went to the school and interviewed Jane. The teen told the detective and later the grand jury that she had confided in her best friend during their first period dance class that she had received $300 from a wealthy older man for giving him a massage over the weekend.
“I told her like, if you ever want to make $300, you can come with me,” Jane later testified. “‘And all you have to do is give him a massage and stuff.’ And I told her what I did.”
Jane added, “I didn’t tell her everything I did. I didn’t tell her—the vibrator part. I just left that out. But I told her everything else.”
But the friend told somebody who told somebody who told somebody. The whole school seemed abuzz with it when Jane encountered her friend at gym class.
“I confronted her,” Jane testified. “I was like, ‘Well, why are you telling people? And that’s kind of my business. And you know I told you to be nice and not to go around telling people. You’re supposed to be my best friend.’”
Jane continued, “And she just laughed about it. So then we got into an altercation.”
The two ended up in the office of the assistant principal for freshmen, who asked why they had been fighting.
“At first, we both kind of lied about it.” Jane testified.
Jane tried telling the principal that her friend had been spreading rumors about her. But then, Jane said, her friend told the principal, “why, like for real.”
“And so then the Principal, she was like, ‘Let me see in your purse,’” Jane told the grand jury. “And I said, Why?...And then she said, ‘you don’t have to lie. You’re not going to be in trouble. Give me your purse.’”
Jane continued, ”And then I gave her my purse and she found the $300. And she asked me how I got it.”
Jane tried to say it was from her job at Chick-fil-A, but she only worked 10 hours a week, the maximum for a 14-year-old. She did not earn enough to make the lie convincing.
“She said, ’You don’t have to lie. I know. I know what happened,’” Jane recalled.
The principal called Jane’s stepmother, who came to the school. The stepmother said there was no way the $300 came from Jane’s paycheck.
“I said I was doing drugs, and I was dealing them,” Jane testified “Like, I made up any kind of lie. I didn’t want to tell ‘em what happened.”
But Jane ended up telling the truth to the police and to the grand jury. She testified that they had met an older teenage girl at a “family football thing” in the nearby home of her boyfriend’s aunt.
“It was just kind of like a regular night and we were hanging out, watching TV,” she recalled. ”And [the older teenager] was like. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And then she was like, ‘Oh, well, do you want to make like $200?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then she was like, ‘Well, you’re going to have to meet my friend Jeffrey. And he lives in a big humongous mansion, And, like, he lives on the water.’…And I was like, ‘That’s really cool.’”
Jane continued, “And then she’s like, ‘But you have to give him a massage for like 40 minutes. And that’s all you have to do and you get, like $200 for it. And it’s really easy.’ And I was like, ‘Okay. Like, whatever, it’s just massage.’”
Jane testified that her boyfriend tried to dissuade her.
“I guess because I was 14,” she testified. “He was just like. ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.’ And I was like, ‘Well it’s $200.’ And I was 14.”
Jane recalled that she told her father she was going to the mall when the older teenager picked her up and drove her to Epstein’s humongous waterfront mansion the next morning, a Sunday. The older teen led her in through the kitchen. She met Epstein.
“Old.” Jane would reply when a grand juror asked what he looked like.
Jane recalled that Epstein was wearing a Polo t-shirt and khaki pants. “Like he was going golfing.”
They shook hands.
“Then Jeffrey said, ‘Who’s going to go first?” Jane recalled. “And the other girl’s like, ‘I don’t care.’ And then Jeffrey’s like, ‘How about you?’ Pointing to me.”
Epstein was now wearing only a towel. He had sought to cover himself by asking the older girl to assure him that Jane was 18, though she clearly was not.
“I was a little shrimp, didn’t have boobs, and didn’t look 18 at all,” Jane told the Daily Beast in 2015. “My face, the way I spoke, and my body didn’t look like I was 18.”
She still had braces. And she was so short she could reach across the massage table climbing up on it. But that suited Epstein fine after he instructed her to strip down to her thong panties.
“As she gave Epstein the massage, he told her to get on his back,” a police affidavit says. “[Jane] stated she straddled herself on Epstein’s back whereby her exposed buttocks were touching Epstein’s bare buttocks. Epstein was specific in his instruction to her on how to massage him, telling her to go clockwise or counter clockwise.”
The affidavit continues, “Epstein then turned to his side and started to rub his penis in an up and down motion. Epstein then pulled out a purple vibrator.
Jane left with three $100 bills, the added one for watching him masturbate and allowing him to apply the vibrator outside her panties.
‘And he told me ‘Thank you,’” Jane recalled.
He asked her to write down her name and phone number.
“And then after that he just left the room and told me I could get dressed again and that it was done. It was over.”
At dance class the next morning, Jane confided in her best friend and then came the fight in gym class that landed them in the assistant principal’s office. Then the stepmother phoned the police. And there was the very first entry into what might be collectively called law enforcement’s Epstein files. The next addition was a report by Det. Pagan, who showed her a picture of Epstein. Jane confirmed that was the man and described what he had done. She was later asked in the grand jury why she had told Pagan about Epstein masturbating, but had initially said nothing about the vibrator.
“That’s his body, and the vibrator’s on my body,” she replied.
Jane never went back to the mansion. The Palm Beach police ended up interviewing dozens of underage victims who had. There were more in New York and elsewhere, but Epstein was essentially given a pass until 2019, when he was indicted by the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York for sex trafficking dozens of underage girls between 2002 and 2005, Jane among them.
He was remanded, but was found dead in his cell at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan before he could stand trial, almost certainly a suicide.
But that became the stuff of conspiracy theories involving the Epstein files, which go back two decades to a high school gym class fight between a 14-year-old victim and her best friend. Unlike the fight, they seem to be without end.
