How Epstein files reveal financier's routine abuse of girls

By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of teen girls was routine.

- By Victoria Bekiempis

From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimised "dozens" of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14, prosecutors said.

Epstein leaned on a coterie of employees and associates - including British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell - to secure a "steady supply of minor victims”. He also enlisted his victims to recruit other girls under the false pretence of providing massages, prosecutors said.

Papers in recently unveiled investigative files from the Department of Justice have put into sharper relief how he and his associates had an almost assembly line-like process for procuring victims.

These documents also make clearer how girls and young women were perceived as commodities: mere bodies meant to serve a predator's twisted predilections and possibly those of his associates.

One document from 2001 described how Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding Epstein's crimes, accosted three female students on a Palm Beach, Florida, college campus.

"Maxwell said she needed young, beautiful unmarried women to answer phones and do office work at her home on Palm Beach," a police report stated.