Part I. The System Didn’t Fail. It Worked.

Who Epstein Targeted First, How It Scaled, and Why the First Girls Were Erased From the Story

Editor’s Note:

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on how Jeffrey Epstein’s empire of abuse was built not in secret, but in plain sight. We’re starting with the victims the world ignored first Black girls, brown girls, and poor girls because the story doesn’t begin with the royal connections or the private islands. It begins with who didn’t matter.

If you want to see the full paper trail behind this part of the story, read the companion piece: Receipts & Timeline: The Story They Erased , every date, document, and detail laid out in order. And if you haven’t yet, check out the Intro to this series where I talk about my initial reluctance to write it.

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Early Targets: Black and Working-Class Girls in the Shadows

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t start out recruiting debutantes from prep schools or flying in models from Milan. Nah. In the beginning of the late ’90s into the early 2000s he went after the kind of girls he assumed nobody would come looking for. Black girls. Latina girls. Working-class girls who didn’t have a lawyer uncle or a morning show host mom. He went after the vulnerable. The ones who needed twenty bucks more than they needed dignity that day. And the system let him.

He didn’t invent the method. He just applied an old American formula to a modern setting: find the girls society forgets first. Investigators in both Florida and New York would later say Epstein was methodical in targeting minors from broken homes, foster care, unstable families with girls as young as 13 and 14. In Palm Beach, his recruiters literally scouted high schools and poor neighborhoods, offering what sounded like an easy hustle: quick cash for a “massage.” It was a cover of course. And once inside, they were trapped.

Some of the earliest girls we know about were Black or Latina teenagers from West Palm Beach. And when they tried to report it? When they said something wasn’t right? Police didn’t roll out a task force. They treated it like a “local situation.” Not a scandal. Not a pattern. Just some poor girls talking.

Let’s be honest, Epstein was able to run a field test on vulnerable girls. A dry run. And because the first girls weren’t rich, weren’t blonde, and didn’t come with an Ivy League transcript, he got away with it long enough to scale it up. America didn’t miss the warning signs. It just ignored the girls holding them.

And here’s the part that’ll make your jaw tighten: this ain’t new. Rachel Feinstein wrote a whole book, When Rape Was Legal, where she breaks down how rape during slavery wasn’t just common, it was profitable. Black girls weren’t just targets, they were assets. Their wombs were a revenue stream. The more they were violated, the more children they had. And the more children they had, the more property the enslavers acquired .

Refuse a white man’s advances back then? You weren’t just punished you were sold down the river. And every enslaved girl knew it . The line between a “no” and a whipping, a rape, or an auction block was razor thin. Feinstein calls it a “collective understanding.” Epstein called it a recruitment model.

Take Maria Farmer. In 1996, she was a 25-year-old art student working for Epstein. She filed the first known report. Told both the NYPD and the FBI that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sexually assaulted her and her 15-year-old sister. This was years before the rest of the world caught on. You’d think that would’ve blown it open. But nothing happened. Nothing. The FBI shrugged. The case went cold. And Maria, like the Black girls before her, was quietly erased.

Now before somebody gets confused, yes Maria Farmer was white. And that’s exactly what makes her story so damning. She came forward in 1996. She told the FBI. Named names. Gave details. She even warned them Epstein was targeting underage girls. And still? Nothing. If a white woman with receipts got brushed off for a decade, you already know what happened to the Black and brown girls.

Now don’t get it twisted this wasn’t just about race. It was about power. Maria didn’t have the kind of rich daddy, country club connections, or media spotlight that forces people to care. So even though she was white, the system put her in the same category as the other “unimportant girls.” Ignored. Discarded. Filed under not newsworthy. Her silence proves the point: if you ain’t connected, you’re disposable. Period.

In 2003, Vanity Fair was ready to publish a story that included Maria and other victims. But the editor cut their voices out. Epstein applied pressure, and the girls’ accounts were gone. That’s media compliance not just media bias.

And again, America has played this scene before. Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman, wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in 1861. She was 15 when her master started whispering “foul words” in her ear. Same age as some of Epstein’s victims. But her story didn’t go viral. It went out of print. Sat in obscurity for decades until Black feminist scholars dusted it off and said, “Hey, we’ve heard this before” .

Jacobs’s pain wasn’t marketable. It didn’t sell newspapers. And neither did the early Epstein victims. That’s the throughline.

Epstein, just like the enslavers Jacobs wrote about, moved within a racial value system where a girl’s trauma only became real when it looked a certain way. Whiteness. Wealth. Innocence that’s “relatable.” Everyone else? Expendable. Erasable. Their pain was too complicated. Too Black. Too inconvenient.

Feinstein. Jacobs. Farmer. None of them tell a different story. Just the same one from different centuries.

And Epstein? He didn’t break the system. He used it exactly as designed. He didn’t need to hide. He just needed to start with the girls no one thought mattered.

The “Pyramid” Scheme: How Epstein Scaled Up His Abuse

By the early 2000s, Epstein had engineered a full-blown pyramid scheme of sexual abuse, a system sharpened on those early, ignored victims and then scaled up like a franchise. Palm Beach was home base. And just like any business, it had a script: one vulnerable girl gets brought to the mansion to give a “massage.” She gets a few hundred dollars of easy money. Then comes the pitch. Epstein tells her she can make even more if she brings friends. $200 a girl. Every referral, every sister, every friend from school became another rung in the ladder. According to court records, some of these girls were repeating the cycle multiple times a week by recruiting their peers into Epstein’s orbit. No accidents. No randomness. This was designed to keep the stream of “fresh” victims flowing while hiding the full scope of the operation.

Now if that structure feels familiar, that’s because it is. America has done this before.

Back on Southern plantations, enslaved Black girls were “paired off” or flat-out force-bred to increase property value. Nobody cared about love or family. The only goal was reproduction. More babies meant more labor. One survivor testified that “over 100 slaves were mated indiscriminately, without regard for family unions” . The rape wasn’t the byproduct. It was the system. And the economic engine behind it ran on girls.

Epstein’s Palm Beach model followed that same cold logic: target girls “nobody was protecting.” Runaways. Girls in foster care. Kids with no real backup. One investigator said it plainly: “He knew how to find the girls nobody was looking out for.” His team scouted trailer parks, parks, even middle schools. Police files from 2005 describe how some victims were still on suspension from middle school when they were brought in. One girl was living in a foster home. Another had no home at all. Many described Epstein as “like a boyfriend” at first. He gave them money “for school,” or offered to help their families. The setup always came wrapped in a promise.

And that strategy? That fake kindness before the abuse? That wasn’t new either.

bell hooks once wrote about how enslavers used fake courtship to hide their crimes. They’d give enslaved women gifts, private rooms, sometimes even jewelry barely just enough to make it look like consent, even when it wasn’t. It was manipulation disguised as generosity . Epstein played the same game. He handed out cash and mentorship advice like he was building their futures, not breaking them.

But when the girls finally tried to speak up? The system didn’t just fail them. It called them liars.

Officers in Palm Beach later said they were frustrated because prosecutors didn’t want to bring serious charges. Not because there wasn’t evidence because there was plenty of it, but because the girls didn’t “fit the image.” That’s the quote. “Didn’t fit the image.” Translation: they weren’t white enough, rich enough, or innocent enough to be believed.

And that was the secret weapon in Epstein’s whole setup. Not just the abuse. Not just the recruiting. But the way the system turned its back the moment a poor girl said, “He hurt me.”

By mid-2005, police had identified over 30 victims. Some were as young as 14. They built serious felony charges. But Epstein was ready. He wasn’t just protected by silence…he was protected by lawyers. By power. By a legal firewall made of private investigators, intimidation, and names like Alan Dershowitz. Chief Michael Reiter later confirmed that Epstein’s team went on offense by surveilling victims, harassing officers, and signaling loud and clear: if you come for him, you’d better come correct.

Now let me speak from experience. I was a cop for 20 years. And I’ve seen what it looks like when someone with money wants a case to go away. But what Epstein’s team did? That was an all out full-blown counteroffensive. They didn’t just hire lawyers. No, they sent investigators to follow the police. Harassed victims. Tried to intimidate the people building the case. I’ve seen dirty lawyers and scared prosecutors, but this? This was a legal hit squad. And here’s the sick part: it worked. If you think justice is blind, let me assure you…it’s not. It just blinks a lot when rich men are in the room. Justice when you really dig deep is just ice.

Power protects a predator like ice around poison. It keeps it cold, contained, and pretty so nobody sees the danger underneath. And if you try to break it? It’ll cut you before you ever get to what’s inside. Epstein didn’t hide. He didn’t have to. The ice did the hiding for him. Lawyers. Banks. Universities. Prosecutors. All of them froze around him like a glass case making him look untouchable while little girls bled outside.

Institutional Enablers: How Power Protected Epstein

Let’s cut the polite language: this wasn’t some shadowy backroom conspiracy. Epstein was protected in broad daylight. The institutions we’re told to trust—courts, prosecutors, law enforcement helped him stay in business.

When girls started coming forward in Florida in the early 2000s, the Palm Beach police were ready to go. They had evidence. Witnesses. Consistent patterns. They expected serious felony charges. But the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office wasn’t trying to hear any of that. They tried to reduce the case to a misdemeanor which is basically a slap on the wrist for solicitation. That in and of itself was a message.

Chief Reiter was so fed up, he bypassed them and called the feds. And for a minute, it looked like justice might show up. A 53-page federal indictment was drafted in 2007. Epstein was facing decades in prison for trafficking. But then… that influence kicked in.

In 2008, Epstein negotiated a secret Non-Prosecution Agreement with U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta. That deal shut the whole federal investigation down. Not only did Epstein walk it granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators.” That meant recruiters, accomplices, Maxwell…everybody.

And they didn’t tell the victims. Let that sink in. The girls who came forward never got told the case was dropped behind closed doors. Years later, a judge ruled that this violated their rights under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. But by then? The damage was done.

Epstein’s punishment? Thirteen months. Not in prison. In county jail. And even that was barely jail. He was on “work release” six days a week, 12 hours a day. Chauffeured. Running his business. He didn’t do time. He did time management. One columnist called it “prison à la carte.”

You already know what this means. If you’re rich enough, your sentence becomes a schedule.

And don’t let anybody tell you this was new. This wasn’t a system breaking, it was a system performing. Harriet Jacobs laid it out over a century ago. As she wrote, “There is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.” Back then, white men didn’t have to hide their crimes. The law guaranteed their protection .

So let’s stop pretending like Epstein slipped through the cracks. There were no cracks. There was a door. And that door was wide open.

Erasure and Spotlight: How the Narrative Was Shaped

The contrast in media treatment between Epstein’s early victims and the ones who finally made the headlines? Stark. And telling.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the stories of Black girls and working-class teens—some barely teenagers—were erased like they never existed. Local reporters in Florida covered the court proceedings from 2006 to 2008, sure. They noted the girls’ young ages, the rough home lives, the pattern. But nationally? Nothing. Silence. As Epstein’s case crept through the courts, no major outlet focused on his earliest accusers who were mostly anonymous girls from the poorer parts of Palm Beach. No Vanity Fair cover. No Netflix deal. Just silence.

Journalist Vicky Ward tried to publish their accounts in 2003. Tried. But the editors gutted it. Pressure was applied. Stories were scrubbed. And instead of a predator, Epstein got painted as an eccentric money whisperer for the rich. That ain’t just journalism failing….that’s journalism choosing. Choosing whose pain counts and whose gets cut from the final draft.

And when the media finally did start talking? They focused on a narrower profile of victim. You know the one…white, blonde, prep school adjacent. The 17-year-old spa attendant from Trump’s resort. The art student who looked like she belonged in a Columbia dorm. And let’s be clear: those women absolutely deserved to be heard. But so did the ones who came before them. The ones who didn’t look “media-ready.” The ones who got erased.

And this ain’t new. The silencing of Black girls is a national pastime.

Back in 1861, Harriet Jacobs dropped a bomb: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. First known autobiography by an enslaved woman about sexual violence. What did America do? Pretended it didn’t exist. Called it fiction. For decades. Because Jacobs didn’t play into the myth. She didn’t pretend Black girls were willing participants. She wrote about being 15 when her master started whispering “foul words” in her ear. About how the mistress—his wife—blamed her for it .

Sound familiar? Because it should.

The same pattern repeated centuries later: Epstein’s earliest victims didn’t get believed. Not because they lacked evidence—but because they didn’t “fit the profile.” And we all know what that means.

Scholar Rachel Feinstein puts it plainly: the history of racial oppression is the history of the institutions we still live under. These systems weren’t built to protect girls like Epstein’s early victims. They were built to ignore them . Black girls were commodified during slavery—and later written out of stories that might’ve saved girls in the present.

It took until 2018 for that silence to break wide open. Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald went back. She dug up the truth and gave those early girls a voice. Her series, Perversion of Justice, revealed that Epstein had preyed on what she called a “seemingly endless supply” of underage girls most whom were from poor or unstable backgrounds. And she didn’t sugarcoat it: race and class shaped whose stories got airtime. If Epstein had started out with daughters of CEOs? Front-page news. But because his first victims were Black and brown girls from West Palm? Nobody blinked.

Then came the royal connections. The billionaire island. The “sex-trafficking socialite.” Once famous men got linked to the story, now it was sexy. Now it was ratings. The same media outlets that yawned when a 14-year-old Black girl said she was raped? They couldn’t stop talking once a prince’s name got mentioned. The narrative shifted from “nobody believed them” to “how did he get away with it for so long?”

And the answer to that question? Because he started with girls society trains itself not to see.

Even the FBI leaned into the prettier version. Documentaries, press releases, podcasts most of them spotlighted the girls who looked like victims, not the ones who were first. That’s not a mistake. That’s narrative management. The kind that says: these are the girls we mourn. And those over there? They’re just… unfortunate.

That erasure, by the way? It’s not a bug in the American story. It’s the blueprint.

Historian Catherine Clinton broke it down: the myth of white civilization needed the image of pure, chaste white womanhood. And to protect that image, society had to paint Black girls as impure. As always available. As incapable of being violated. That false binary let slavery continue—and later, let stories like Epstein’s start with Black girls and never get told .

But here’s the shift. In the past few years, some of the women society ignored have been pushing their way back into the story.

Take Courtney Wild. She was 14 when Epstein abused her in Palm Beach. Today, she’s a full-throated advocate, reminding the world: “There were dozens of us, little girls—and we were ignored.” Lawsuits, FOIA requests, and survivor activism have peeled back the curtain. Turns out, the FBI knew about many more victims back in 2008. They just didn’t make that information public.

And during Maxwell’s 2021 trial? Even the ugly language came to light. Prosecutors revealed that Maxwell referred to the girls as “slaves.” That word wasn’t metaphorical. It was literal. Epstein’s circle viewed these minors who were mostly girls of color as property. As bodies. As disposable.

And the press? Barely flinched.

Because if the word “slave” had been used to describe the daughters of Wall Street bankers or senators? The country would’ve set itself on fire.

But here’s the hard truth: Epstein was never an exception. He was an example. A system worked exactly the way it was supposed to. The silence wasn’t failure. It was function.

Conclusion: A Blueprint of Exploitation and Erasure

When you lay it all out, the pattern becomes impossible to unsee.

Epstein’s rise was built on a pyramid of pain—structured like a business, enforced by wealth, and lubricated by silence. Who did he go after first? The girls least likely to be believed. Black girls. Brown girls. Poor girls. Girls who’d already been discarded by the system.

How did he scale it? By turning victims into recruiters. By grooming institutions as effectively as he groomed children. He bought silence in courtrooms, classrooms, media rooms, and bank vaults.

And why were the first girls erased from the story?

Because acknowledging what happened to them would have required America to look in the mirror and admit: we don’t value all girls the same. Not even close.

The system didn’t fail. Absolutely not. It functioned. It protected the powerful. It punished the poor. And it buried the truth.

So if we’re serious about stopping the next Epstein, we can’t just prosecute predators. We have to interrogate the pyramid. We have to name the names, and more importantly we have to name who got left out.

Because until the first girls are heard, the story ain’t done. And this ice cold system isn’t broken. It’s just waiting for its next client.

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If you made it this far, you know this ain’t just a story—it’s a pattern. And the only reason stories like this ever see daylight is because we refuse to let them die in the dark. This voice? This platform? It’s not backed by billionaires. It’s held up by people like you who know silence is how they win.

If you feel this, keep it alive. $8 a month says our stories, those of marginalized people, will not be erased again.

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Part II. The Child Molester Went to Harvard. The Girls Went to Hell.

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Sources

1. Maxwell Trial Testimony (2021) – Media coverage and transcripts revealing Ghislaine Maxwell’s use of the word “slaves” to describe Epstein’s victims.
   → Maxwell Trial: NPR Coverage

2. Julie K. Brown, “Perversion of Justice,” Miami Herald (2018) – Groundbreaking investigation into Epstein’s abuse and the legal system’s failure.
   → Read the full series

3. Palm Beach Police Department Investigation Files (2005) – Documents detailing the original investigation into Epstein’s crimes in Palm Beach.
   → PBS Frontline: Police Report Summary

4. U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida (2008) – Epstein’s Non-Prosecution Agreement and the court filings that sealed his deal.
   → Documented by The New York Times

5. The New York Times & BBC News (2019) – National and international coverage of Epstein’s arrest and the unraveling of his elite network.
   → NYT Coverage
   → BBC Summary

6. Victim Impact Statements (2020) – Courtroom statements from survivors like Courtney Wild during sentencing and litigation updates.
   → Court Transcript Coverage via The Guardian

7. Rachel Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence During Slavery – A scholarly history connecting systemic rape under slavery to institutional patterns today.
   → Book on Amazon

8. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – The first known autobiography to describe sexual violence under slavery.
   → Free digital copy at Project Gutenberg

9. Iman Cooper, “The Commodification of the Black Body,” Spelman College (2015) – Academic paper on the historical dehumanization of Black women’s bodies.
   → Read via Spelman Repository (PDF)