Records: Girls were recruited from throughout South Florida. 21A

Jeffrey Epstein’s lust for teen girls led to a search across South Florida for fresh faces to deliver to his Palm Beach house, according to newly unsealed court records.

One woman was hired from the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Christian school in West Palm Beach. Another was recruited from the locker room of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, suddenly acquiring wads of cash to spend on food and rent. An Epstein employee was told to draw up a list of spas to be scoured for recruits.

“I remember one occasion or two occasions she would say to me, John, give me a list of all the spas in Palm Beach County,” said Juan Alessi, manager of Epstein’s Palm Beach house, in a sworn deposition. “And I will drive her from one to the other to PGA, in Boca; and she would go in and drop credit cards — not credit cards but business cards, and she would come out. And then we’d go to — she will recruit the girls.”

The statements appear in court papers from a defamation lawsuit filed by one of the Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, against Epstein’s assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein, a wealthy Palm Beach County sex offender and associate of the famous and powerful, died in an apparent suicide Saturday in New York, where he was in federal custody awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Sworn statements of employees and the girls brought in to service him paint an image of a man constantly in search of young girls for sexual encounters in his Palm Beach mansion and at destinations reached such as Morocco, Paris, the Virgin Islands and New York, reached by private jet.

Maxwell portrayed the spa recruitment tour as an innocent attempt to find wellqualified masseuses.

“In the course and a very small part of my job was from time to time to find adult professional massage therapists for Jeffrey,” she said in her deposition. “From time to time I would visit professional spas, I would receive a massage and if the massage was good I would ask that man or woman if they did home visits.”

Maxwell recruited Giuffre, when she was a 16-year-old locker room attendant at Mara-Lago. After starting to work for Epstein, Giuffre suddenly had cash, lots of it, said her ex-boyfriend Tony Figueroa, a former Epstein bodyguard. “And did she always have cash?” a lawyer asked in a deposition. “Yes,” he said. “And how was the apartment paid for?” “Cash.”

Figueroa said Giuffre and Maxwell “would all go out to clubs to pick up girls and try and find them to bring back for Jeffrey.” And he said he experienced a couple of phone calls with Maxwell that went like this: “Hi. This is Ghislaine. Jeffrey was wondering if you had anybody that could come over.”

After trying to break away from him, making herself unavailable and getting a job at a chain called Roadhouse Grill, she was still able to use Epstein’s influence, she said. At work, her boyfriend stole from the tip jar, she said. Although she got the money back, the manager said he still had to call the police.

“And knowing that Jeffrey Epstein has got the Palm Beach Police Department in his pocket, I went to Jeffrey Epstein and told him what had happened,” she said. “And Jeffrey said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Let me take care of it for you.’” She said she never heard from the police.

Maxwell took sharp issue with how her work for Epstein has been characterized.

“Virginia is an absolute liar and everything she has said is a lie,” Maxwell said in a deposition. “Therefore, based on those lies I cannot speculate on what anybody else did or didn’t do because if Virginia is the example of what that story is and everything she said is false, so everything that leads from that is false.”

Another girl, Johanna Sjoberg, testified that Maxwell recruited her from the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University.

“She explained that she lived in Palm Beach and didn’t want butlers because they’re too stuffy,” she said in her deposition. “And so she just liked to hire girls to work at the house, answer phones, get drinks, do the job a butler would do.”

That part of the job lasted one day. Maxwell then asked her if she wanted to make $100 an hour giving foot massages. That, also, turned out to be an understatement.

Upon arriving, she was soon asked to strip. Epstein and another girl rubbed her all over her body, she said.

On another occasion, on the subject of why he wanted so many different girls, Epstein described his needs to her.

“He explained to me that, in his opinion, he needed to have three orgasms a day,” she said. “It was biological, like eating.”

Asked by a lawyer for her reaction to that statement, she said, “I thought it was a little crazy.”

Giuffre had a troubled life as a teenager in South Florida.

In the summer of 1997, she was 13 and a runaway in Miami Beach, she wrote in chapters of a book included in the newly disclosed documents. A man in a stretch limousine, who turned out to be Ron Eppinger, 65, befriended her.

He was sex trafficker who held her captive, abused her and trafficked her to others. After he was prosecuted, she ended up at home in Palm Beach County, she wrote.

She bounced around jobs in Palm Beach and Broward counties, according to documents released Friday.

In 2000, she worked a Nieman Marcus store, but in a deposition couldn’t recall exactly where it was. “Well, it’s around Fort Lauderdale. I can’t tell you exactly. Fort Lauderdale is so big, like Broward County? Is that the word for it?”

Her job was in the changing rooms. She was vague about exactly what her job duties entailed. “If I remember right, I just put clothes away that people left in there. Probably went out to get sizes, different sizes for women who wanted different sizes of the same product.”

Then she went to work for a Taco Bell. A boyfriend with whom she lived with at the time in Oakland Park said they worked together at the restaurant, which he thinks was in Sunrise.

On job applications, she wrote that she’d attended Survivors Charter School for four years and had a high school diploma or Royal Palm Beach High School for four years and graduated. But that wasn’t accurate. “I just wanted to get a job, and I wanted it to look good, so I fluffed it up.”

She lost a job at Courtyard Animal Hospital in Wellington. An undated letter in the court file told her she was being terminated because it was “obvious that you have a number of personal issues going on that need your immediate attention and keep you from being able to focus on and perform the material duties of your job.”

“In the short time you have been employed here, you have missed multiple days, arrived late, called in sick multiple times. The reasoning you have given has shown that you are ‘distracted’ at minimum. Between your ‘engine falling out of your car, your axle breaking off which your boyfriend ‘repaired it roadside’ and your landlord tossing all your furniture and clothing out in the front yard and setting it on fire’ it is clear you have more pressing issues in your life to focus on. You have been unable to perform to an acceptable standard within our company.”

Her father got her a job in 2000 at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, where she worked.

She was a locker room attendant. One day, while reading a book on massage therapy outside the spa’s reception area, a woman approached and asked if she did massages on the side. The woman, Giuffre said, was Ghislane Maxwell.

Maxwell was Epstein’s companion, and the one, Giuffre said, who first convinced her to perform sexual acts on Epstein. David Fleshler can be reached at dfleshler@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4535. Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @browardpolitics