Jeffrey Epstein's New York Hunting Ground: Dance Studios
Lisa was 17 when a fellow dancer approached her after a ballet class in 2002 and asked if she wanted to give private exercise classes to a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein.
Another dancer, Priscilla, received a similar pitch in 2006 from a woman, this time to give Mr. Epstein a massage.
The same year, a third dancer, Marlo Fisken, was asked if she would become his personal trainer.
At the time, Mr. Epstein was exploiting dozens of girls he had plucked from high schools and shopping malls in Florida, luring them to his Palm Beach mansion and coercing them into giving him erotic massages through false promises, cash payments and threats, according to court records.
But in New York City, Mr. Epstein had a different hunting ground: dance studios.
The scope of Mr. Epsteins sex trafficking in Manhattan has become clearer as several lawsuits have been filed against his estate in the days since he was found dead from a suicide in his jail cell in Manhattan, where he had been awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
The suits say that when Mr. Epstein was luring teenagers into sexual exploitation in Florida, he was using a network of recruiters within New York Citys dance studios to procure aspiring performers into a similar scheme.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-dance-victims.html
True Blue American
(17,972 posts)Had no idea Jeff would do a thing like that! He is a nice guy.
Kid Berwyn
(14,651 posts)The Happy Hunting Ground.
From blogger SwedishJewfish at Daily Kos in 2016:
Excerpt...
About a month ago I came across a Mother Jones article about Trumps modeling agency and its treatment of a young, largely immigrant workforce. The story was, in a way the height of irony-here was a man who built an entire campaign on his hard-line stance against immigrants, and all the while his business was committing full-scale immigration fraud. But as I read on, I was struck by how much this all resembled the business model of sex trafficking-something I have researched and written about extensively.
I was not alone in my impressions-others who commented on the Mother Jones piece and the subsequent coverage made similar observations. MSNBCs Chris Hayes commented that Trump Models seemed to be borderline human trafficking, initially making the comment on Twitter and later on dedicating a segment of his prime time show to exploring the topic. Seth Meyers, for his part, did a segment on the MJ piece as well, comparing it to an episode of Law & Order SVU. While his commentary was cloaked in his usual sardonic humor, Seths disgust was evident as he wondered aloud if the prospect of Trump harboring sex slaves in his proverbial basement would be enough to make voters sour on his candidacy.
At the time this story broke, I assumed it was going to blow up. I assumed that follow up reporting would be done, and it would become the major story of the 2016 election. I thought it might even open up a long overdue dialogue about sex trafficking, and how our broken immigration and criminal justice systems enables its existence.
But that never happened.
To my astonishment the story disappeared into the ether of the 24/7 news cycle and seemed to be all but forgotten within a week, if that. Barbara Boxer initiated a senate inquiry, which I have been told is now underway. MJ did a short follow up, noting that Trump Models only response was to point out that the story was from many many years ago (it actually wasnt) Melania Trump sued a relatively unknown Canadian blogger and the Daily Mail over a related story, but otherwise disappeared from public view amid questions about her own strange and inconsistent account of her path to citizenship. And even as Trump ramped up his scathing rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, not one reporter bothered to challenge him on how he squared those public pronouncements with his business practices. Not one reporter asked him how much of his own purported fortune was made on the backs of undocumented immigrants, from his Polish demolition crews to his imported child models, and why that kind of thing was acceptable. The universe basically gave a collective shrug, and moved on.
Source:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/6/1578544/-The-Untold-Story-of-Trump-Model-Management-A-Daily-Kos-Exclusive-Part-1