About 20 years after I first hit the club as a very impassioned 15-year-old dancer, the doorman found me on Facebook. I nearly fell off my chair. I could not believe he remembered my name. For a moment I was back in the queue on a Saturday night, bright-eyed and reeking of desperation.
Just behind the very substantial chunk of fellow was the great booming paradise I so longed to enter. The man with the clipboard to my Saturday night happiness was called Larry, and I was as deferential to him as if he were a father confessor to a bevy of very sinful nuns.
Larry, like most bouncers from one’s youth, held an outsize importance in my imagination. The question that exercised me almost as much as what to wear to the much longed-for dance extravaganza was if he was going to usher me through or keep me waiting in the long queue of the perennially uncool.
I had already worked miracles and wonders to manifest in that queue. My mother was always in fierce opposition to the nightlife her daughter longed for. Her disposition to my constant campaigns for the right to party did not improve even when I hit the legal age for attendance at such places of worship. (Now I thank my lucky stars she was so strict.)
So many hurdles to surmount — so sweet the endorphins that are unleashed after hours on the dance floor. All that angst, all the posturing, all the pretending that I was older and cooler than my very obvious tender age.
There is a reason this shtick works and continues to work for all the Epsteins of the world.
In retrospect, I could have just relaxed. All those years later on Facebook I had a sudden epiphany. The fact that Larry would relent, make eye contact and send me to the front of the line had nothing to do with my innate qualities involving a quick wit, charm and style that obviously deserved a fast track route to the dance floor.
Nor was all my shmoozing of said Larry any help at all. No, none of that counted a jot with Larry — after all, the queue was packed with pimply but charming boys in my cohort also doing their level best to puff up their chests and their banter, to no avail.
All Larry could see was an all-important quality in me. I was a nubile teenage girl. I was fresh meat. I was jailbait. I was on the fast track to the Lolita Express. I would like to state I have nothing against Larry; in fact, I highly rate him. I mean, how many kings can remember their lowly supplicants by their actual God-given names? But I was realising that this little dysfunctional exchange is the currency that fuelled the Jeffrey Epstein empire.
Now that we are flooded with literally millions of new pictures and documents implicating all sorts of new Epstein team members who span continents, universities, hedge funds, governments and royal families, who have doughty representatives across every culture and every high-flying social network — and all I can do is picture lines and lines of girls waiting outside the gilded palaces of their imaginations just asking to be chosen and let in.
I see the fateful picture of the now dead by her own hand Virginia Giuffre with Andrew, formerly known as Prince, leering next to her — and all I can see and read from the millions of documents released was the fact that she was desperate for a picture to commemorate this moment and send to her family. She has another one from Naomi Campbell’s 30th.
It took years, or maybe just a few fateful minutes, for these girls to realise they had walked into a honeytrap, which as much as it was designed to ensnare all those men Epstein had on his Rolodex for whatever nefarious purposes he was gathering them for — these girls were more ensnared because many of them believed they had won a golden ticket. I still don’t really understand what the hell was going on — I mean, how much sex can one man actually have?
Apparently lots, but all these girls wanted was a Larry to move the velvet rope aside so they could get inside. And for most of them the idea of the hallowed clubs they long to enter holds so much promise they are prepared to endure the leery gaze and awful pawing of the creeps who always, but always linger there.
There is a reason this shtick works and continues to work for all the Epsteins of the world. There are always enough men inside the club oiling the wheels of this ancient exchange and enough nubile girls on the outside desperate to hit the dance floor, and whose mothers might not be as vigilant as mine. And in between is a gatekeeper who is in on the game — a Ghislaine Maxwell or a Larry who brokers the deal and smooths the exchange by creating scarcity and demand, and making you feel like you are the lucky one to have made it inside.
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