Perversion of Justice: The Journalist Who Sparked Jeffrey Epstein’s Downfall

The old police report was typed, single-spaced. Case Number 1-05-000368 was categorized as a closed sexual battery case. There were eighteen girls, ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen, listed as possible victims. All of their names were blacked out. There were witnesses, too, their names also blacked out. The evidence was difficult to discern, except through the trained eye of a police detective.

I had probably read thousands of police reports in my long journey through journalism. When you’re covering a story, the police report often forms the backbone of your work, and you can count yourself lucky when you get a cop who knows how to write, does so legibly, and sneaks in scraps of life that make your story more vivid, helping readers understand the human part of tragedy—a teddy bear found in the back seat of a wrecked car; a yellowed photograph in a dead man’s wallet; the words of a father, mother, or son upon learning they had lost a loved one. A writer treasures the smallest of details. They don’t come often, so when you are given them, they are gold.

The Jeffrey Epstein police report was not one of those golden police reports. At 109 pages, the tome included probable-cause affidavits, arrest warrants, and nearly fifty separate reports, most of them written by Joe Recarey, then a thirtysomething police detective who had risen through the ranks of the Palm Beach Police Department.

The gregarious Queens-born detective had moved to Florida with his family at the age of thirteen, but never lost his New York swagger and his love for the Yankees. He began his law enforcement career in the Palm Beach state attorney’s office in the mailroom. The scrawny nineteen-year-old then graduated to become a process server who had the thankless job of serving cops with subpoenas to appear in court.

“That’s where I got my start in law enforcement,” Recarey said. “I did the mail for the investigations team at the state attorney’s office. That’s where I got my love for investigations.”

After five years, Recarey left the state attorney’s office to attend the police academy. In 1991, he was hired as a patrolman by the Town of Palm Beach, Florida. In just three years, he was promoted to detective.

Recarey wasn’t book educated. He didn’t have a college degree like many of the officers who came before or after him on the force. In some ways, he was an odd fit on an island populated by some of the most affluent people in the world, including more pro sports team owners than anywhere in the country. Howard Stern, Jimmy Buffett, Rod Stewart, and Jon Bon Jovi all have (or had) winter estates in Palm Beach.

But Joe had a knack for putting people at ease and he was brilliant at his job. He was a sharp dresser and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. He was charming and polite, with a boyish grin and prankster sense of humor. 

“He used to impersonate me, and he was good at it,” his chief, Michael Reiter, said. “Talking to Joe was like talking to your cousin across the kitchen table. He was the salt-of-the-earth kind of cop.”

At the time Recarey took over the Jeffrey Epstein case, he was divorced, and had started dating Jennifer, who worked in the police department’s administration. He had two children from a previous marriage, a daughter who was eight and a six-year-old son.

Recarey knew at the outset that the Epstein case was more complex than the usual crimes he had handled during his career. What he didn’t know was how the case would haunt him for the rest of his life. Reading his police report was like reading a story with half the words in another language, or trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces

missing. The names of sexual assault victims and minors are routinely blacked out in police reports to protect victims’ identities, so this report was typical.

But I nevertheless was able to piece together the basics of the crime: the suspect, Jeffrey Epstein, was an uber-wealthy financial adviser who sexually abused dozens of teenage girls in Palm Beach, offering them money for massages and manipulating them into believing he cared so much about them that he would pay for their college or art schools, or help them become the next Victoria’s Secret supermodel.

He was able to persuade many of them to work for him by recruiting new victims, similar to a sexual pyramid scheme.

A cultlike figure, Epstein convinced his targets that he would provide for them—as long as they obeyed him and did as they were ordered. Those who followed his rules were richly rewarded, not only with money but with clothes and cars, trips on his private jet to exotic places, and adventures that many of them probably never would have dreamed possible. As some of them grew older, he also hooked them up with prospective husbands in the worlds of finance, tech, and industry.

Those who remained most loyal he continued to support, and women came to depend on him, often because they had no one else in their lives. Without him, they felt lost and alone.

Most of the girls he preyed upon in Palm Beach came from broken families. A few were homeless. One slept under a highway overpass; another was a witness in the murder of her own stepbrother. Often they had been raised by single mothers, or they had parents who were alcoholics, drug addicts, or simply struggling to keep roofs over their heads. A few of the girls attended schools for troubled teenagers or lived in foster homes.

Epstein promised to rescue them, but at a cost: not only were they expected to perform for him sexually, but in some cases, they were pressured to have sex with other men old enough to be their grandfathers.

It’s difficult to know how and when Epstein’s scheme began. What is known is that in 1998, Epstein’s then girlfriend, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, began visiting colleges, art schools, spas, fitness centers, and resorts in and around Palm Beach County, under the guise that she wanted to hire young and pretty masseuses or “assistants” to come to Epstein’s home and work for him.

Epstein’s houseman, Juan Alessi, was ordered to drive Maxwell from resort to resort for her to hand out business cards and recruit massage therapists for Epstein. Alessi was skeptical of her motives, especially when the girls who began coming to the house looked as young as Alessi’s daughter.

By 2005, the operation was in full swing. Girls from in and around West Palm Beach arrived two, three, four, or more times a day to Epstein’s cottoncandy-pink waterfront mansion on the island of Palm Beach. He lived at 358 El Brillo Way, on a dead-end street lined with multimillion-dollar homes hidden behind high hedges, stone walls, and iron gates.

The estate fronted a private cove that opens to the wider Intercoastal Waterway separating Palm Beach from the mainland of Palm Beach County. The Mediterranean-style villa was built in the 1950s, in a historic neighborhood where some of the homes date back to the 1920s. It had a second-floor wraparound balcony, a swimming pool, and separate maids’ quarters.

Epstein purchased the property for $2.5 million in 1990, and set about refurbishing it with the finest furnishings and unusual pieces of art, per his rather eclectic taste. His walls were covered with photographs of naked girls and women who were his conquests. One girl recalled seeing a large black-and-white photo of a penis.

His garage was filled with SUVs, exotic cars, and motorcycles, and he employed a chef who offered the girls snacks every time they visited. For the most part, neighbors were weekenders, retirees, or snowbirds who kept to themselves and minded their own business.

But if one of them got curious and started asking questions, Epstein was known on at least one occasion to send a girl over to the man of the house to keep him happy—and get him to keep his wife quiet.

Among the resorts Maxwell visited was Canopy Beach Resort in Riviera Beach. A young woman who worked there was friends with a waitress named Haley Robson, and they both began working as recruiters for Epstein in 2004.

It was Robson who introduced the first victim reported to police in 2005. Identified in the report as Jane Doe 1, the girl was fourteen years old, with long, wavy brown hair streaked with blond. She and her twin sister lived in nearby Royal Palm Beach, and went back and forth between their divorced parents.

Jane Doe 1 told police that she was brought to the house to give an old man a massage.

But it was next to impossible for me to decipher exactly what happened because the police report was so redacted.

I soon realized it was not going to be easy finding Jane Doe 1 and the other Jane Does whose names were scrubbed from the police report.

ON MARCH 14, 2005, PALM BEACH POLICE DETECTIVE MICHELE PAGAN took a phone call from a woman who was so distraught and nervous that she didn’t want to give her name.

“My fourteen-year-old stepdaughter possibly has been molested in Palm Beach by a rich man,” the woman said, explaining that she learned about the incident secondhand from another mother.

“The mother overheard a conversation between her daughter and a boy about how my stepdaughter had met a forty-five-year-old man and had sex with him and got paid for it,” the woman told Pagan.

Jane Doe 1 was in her first year at Royal Palm Beach High School, a sprawling suburban secondary school that had lost four of its students to violence in the past four years, including one who was shot dead in a drug deal and another who had been planning a Columbine-style shooting on its campus.

By the time police got involved, word had gotten around the school that Jane Doe 1 and other girls were having sex with a rich man on Palm Beach island. One of Jane’s friends began calling her a whore and a prostitute, and Jane socked the girl in the face. That’s when the principal got involved. Jane’s purse was searched, and inside, the principal found three hundred dollars. Jane’s parents were contacted, and in the month following the discovery of the money, Jane Doe 1’s life spiraled out of control.

Both she and her sister were taking drugs, drinking, and partying, according to police and court documents. Jane Doe 1 ran away from home several times. Finally, both sisters were sent to a school for troubled kids. Jane Doe 1 was a full-time resident of the facility at the time that Pagan began the Epstein investigation.

At first, Jane denied everything, telling police that she had only accompanied Haley to Epstein’s mansion so that Haley could collect money from him. But little by little, the details spilled out.

JANE DOE 1’S SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOYFRIEND WAS HALEY ROBSON’S cousin, and he introduced the two girls.

Robson worked at an Olive Garden in Wellington. She told Jane that she also worked part-time for a wealthy man who lived in a mansion in Palm Beach. The daughter of a retired police detective, Robson said she resisted Epstein’s efforts to fondle her with a vibrator during a massage.

“I know you’re not comfortable, but I’ll pay you two hundred dollars if you bring me some girls,” Epstein told Robson afterward, adding, “the younger the better.”

Robson had a confidence that Jane Doe 1 admired. She also had a lot of cash. She told Jane that she, too, could earn two to three hundred dollars for giving her boss a massage.

One Sunday, Robson picked Jane Doe 1 up at her home. They drove from Royal Palm Beach toward West Palm Beach, then crossed a bridge onto Palm Beach island, where the narrow streets were lined with homes larger than Jane had ever seen. Before arriving at the house, Haley told Jane to make sure that if her boss, “Jeff,” asked, she was to say that she was eighteen years old.

Robson parked at the end of a road, got out, and led Jane up the driveway, to the side entrance, just off the patio.

“I’m here for Jeff,” Robson informed the security guard, who allowed them to enter. Shortly thereafter, a silver-haired man with a long face and bushy eyebrows entered the kitchen, along with a young woman who appeared to be about Haley’s age. His name was Jeffrey. After the introductions, the woman led Jane Doe 1 up a spiral staircase from the

kitchen to a master bedroom and bath. Jane told police she became anxious as the woman put up a folding massage table and laid out a bunch of oils. “Jeff will be up in a minute,” she told Jane.

“There was a big bathroom. I mean it was humongous,” Jane told police. “Like a zillion people could be in that shower . . . and there was the bigcouch in there, it was pink and green. Hot pink and green. And a table with a phone on it. And during the massage he made a phone call but I don’t remember what he said. He just said, like, four words and then hung up.”

She figured she could be in and out of there with her money after a quick massage, but as Epstein ended the call, he firmly ordered her to take off all her clothes.

Suddenly, she realized she was all alone, and that no one except Haley knew where she was. Robson was nowhere to be seen. She feared what this creepy man was going to do to her. She nervously disrobed, leaving only her bra and panties on.

“I didn’t know what to do because I was the only one up there, so I just took off my shirt and I was in a bra, and when he came in, and had a towel over him, he was like, ‘No, take off everything.’ And he said, ‘Now you can get on my back.’ ”

Jane Doe 1 told police Epstein directed her to straddle him as he laid on his stomach. He instructed her to rub his back by moving her hands in a circular fashion, clockwise.

He then told her to climb down, and he rolled over and dropped his towel, exposing himself. He began stroking his penis with one hand, while reaching over with his other hand to fondle her breasts under her bra. He placed a vibrator between her legs. She was disgusted by his hairy back and thought that he must have been on steroids because his body was muscular but his penis was egg-shaped and small.

As she told Pagan the story, Jane Doe 1 wept and pressed her finger hard against her thigh, recalling how Epstein admired her body and told her how she was sexually arousing him.

“It was disgusting, and I couldn’t even look,” she said.

Epstein asked her how she knew Haley, how old she was, what grade she was in, and what school she went to. She lied, telling him she was an eighteen-year-old senior at Wellington High School.

It was not clear how long she was in the room, but after he ejaculated, he ordered her to get dressed and gave her three hundred dollars. He told her to leave her name and phone number with his assistant. And then he went into the shower.

Robson collected two hundred dollars as a finder’s fee and the two of them left the mansion.

“If we do this every Saturday, we will be rich,” Robson told Jane Doe 1, giddy with excitement.

They then went shopping.

Robson bought a purse.

But Jane Doe couldn’t bring herself to spend the money.

PAGAN HAD REQUESTED A TRANSFER FROM THE DETECTIVE BUREAU well before she was assigned the Epstein case, and when the request was granted, Joe Recarey inherited the investigation. While a female detective was probably more ideal, there was no other woman in the investigations bureau, so when Pagan left, Recarey was assigned to head the Probe.

The questioning that Recarey conducted with the victims at times reflected the awkwardness of a father stumbling as he explains the facts of life to his daughter. The video interviews were included in discs from the case file I obtained from the state attorney’s office. The recordings are grainy and the victims’ faces are blurred. More so, they are excruciating to watch. The girls were uncomfortable, and many of them cried. At least initially, they did not want to say what had happened to them—and some of them tried to deny everything. They were ashamed and clearly afraid that their parents would find out.

Most of all, they were scared because they all knew how powerful Epstein was. They were certain he would never be arrested. And they were terrified he would come after them.

“Jeffrey’s going to get me. You guys know that, right?” one victim told Recarey. “He’s going to figure this out. I’m not safe now.”

Recarey, in a fatherly tone, tried to reassure them that they would indeed be safe and that Epstein would be arrested, telling them: “It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how many connections you have, if you commit a crime then you will be punished. That’s the way our justice system works.”

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