Al Capone liked to relax in Miami Beach.
Ex-dictators, junta leaders, and death squad commanders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Venezuela, and Panama have moved here when things got too hot at home.
Then there are the dodgy New York billionaires, including the felonious current occupant of the White House and his erstwhile pal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, who installed themselves in ocean-front mansions and became Florida Men.
Epstein’s girlfriend/posh pimp Ghislaine Maxwell made herself a Florida Woman, too, shopping for young girls in Palm Beach County.
Then she moved north, although not by choice: She was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking and imprisoned at FCI Tallahassee.
Now the feds have whisked her off to some tennis prison in Texas.
If you’re a halfway rational human being, you probably haven’t given much thought to her over the past six months, what with the attacks on science, the attempts to wreck higher education, the dismantling of environmental protections, and destruction of the rule of law.
Obsession
Our brothers and sisters in MAGA, however, just can’t get her out of their heads.
They’re fixated on her, Jeffrey Epstein, and these alleged files which may or may not still be sitting on the attorney general’s desk.
They’re convinced the files contain mighty secrets about nefarious cabals, Pizzagate, Lizard People, and sex island dirt on the Clintons.
Pam Bondi claimed on Fox “News” she would “review” the files then put Epstein’s stuff out there for everyone’s delectation.
Yet no files have been forthcoming, and boy, is MAGA mad.
Recently some “personal finance” website voted Tallahassee the ninth most boring city in America.
Unfair!
Until last Friday when Maxwell left us, everybody wanted to visit Tallahassee.
Florida’s capital was the focus of the political world, an object of slathering fascination especially among podcast hosts, news junkies, cable TV reporters, Never Trumpers, Ride-or-Die Trumpers, and people on psychotropic medication.
Call that boring? We hadn’t gotten this much attention since the Great Presidential Vote Count Screw-Up of 2000.
Trump acolyte Todd Blanche (his side-hustle is being Bondi’s deputy AG) recently descended upon the United States Courthouse in downtown Tallahassee to interview Maxwell in the presence of her Miami attorney David Markus.
Look over there!
Blanche and Markus admit they are good friends but swear there’s no conflict of interest, no sir, nothing to see here.
We don’t know what they said, but Ghislaine-o-mania isn’t going away.
Hoping to distract us, the regime keeps hollering “Squirrel!”
The FBI just released 230,000 files on the assassination of Martin Luther King.
National Security Tsarina Tulsi Gabbard has accused Barack Obama of treason, claiming he cooked up a coup against Trump in the 2016 election.
Speaker Mike Johnson was all for releasing the Epstein files until he wasn’t (maybe there was a phone call from the Oval Office?), so he adjourned the House early to avoid a vote on it.
Trump himself has been slinging delusions around like a chimp with a barrel of feces, claiming the Epstein files were created by James Comey or Joe Biden or maybe sinister Greenlandic elves.
When that didn’t seem to work, he started barking about changing the names of NFL teams in Cincinnati and Washington back to “Indians” and “Redskins.”
Then he tried to change the subject by flouncing off to Scotland (where three-quarters of the population heartily despise him) to (in order of importance) 1. Play golf; 2. Make a “trade deal” with the EU that will cleverly raise costs for Americans.
The Scots and the international press made sure nobody forgot how the president and Florida’s favorite pedophile used to be bosom buddies, dogging him with questions and snark.
There’s a grand sign at the entrance to his Aberdeenshire golf course proclaiming “Trump International Golf Links.” Underneath, somebody placed a smaller, quite official-looking sign which said, “Twinned with Epstein Island.”
Overboard
Neither heat domes nor killer floods nor ICE agents nor gloom of night will stay Americans from their fixation with Epstein and Maxwell.
And so — inevitably — back to Florida, always the humid center of bad behavior, back to Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach palace of horrors, and back to Ghislaine Maxwell, surely the most uptown inmate in FCI history.
She was once an heiress, the youngest child of megabucks London newspaper baron Robert Maxwell. As a student at Oxford, she was described as a “shiny glamazon.”
But her father was not only physically and emotionally abusive, he was embezzling from his own company and defrauding its employees.
In 1991, they found Robert Maxwell face down in the sea.
He’d been sailing near the Canary Islands on his yacht “The Lady Ghislaine.” Nobody ever figured out whether he jumped or was pushed.
Next thing you know, Ghislaine is Jeffrey Epstein’s arm candy, hard at work procuring young girls for him.
Like Trump, Epstein was a New Yorker trying to be a big deal in Palm Beach. In 1990 he bought a 14,000 square foot mansion and partied at Mar-a-Lago.
Like Trump, noisome stories about sexual abuse swirled around him like a nasty cocktail of skunk spray and dog poop.
Enabling Epstein
You will not be surprised to learn that the state of Florida played a major role in enabling Epstein.
Having amassed vast evidence he’d raped and sexually assaulted at least a dozen under-age girls, Palm Beach County cops searched his Palm Beach mansion in 2005, only to find his six computer hard drives had disappeared.
Epstein finally got arrested, and though a federal grand jury returned a 60-count indictment, he was allowed to plead guilty only to “soliciting a prostitute.”
In 2008, he was put into the private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. He had his own television room. His personal driver arrived every morning to take him to his office.
Turns out the Palm Beach County state attorney, the FBI, prosecutors and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida — a man named Alex Acosta, later appointed Secretary of Labor by Donald Trump — colluded to give Epstein the sweetest of sweet deals: a 20-month sentence.
He served about a year.
This is corrupt even by Florida standards.
When he got out in 2009, Epstein went back to living the lifestyle of the rich and infamous while the young women he assaulted and exploited were forgotten.
We might never have known all this were it not for the relentless and brilliant work of journalist Julie Brown, whose 2018 series in the Miami Herald gave voice to his victims: She tracked down more than five dozen of them.
‘Pyramid scheme’
Brown’s reporting detailed how he’d prey on homeless girls or especially vulnerable kids, paying them to bring in other girls.
This sex-trafficking “pyramid scheme,” as Brown calls it, was run by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell would visit South Florida gyms and spas, telling petite blonde high schoolers — apparently Epstein’s “type” — they could make big money giving massages to “this old guy.”
She encountered 17-year old Virginia Giuffre working at Mar-a-Lago’s spa and convinced her to “work” for Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre said Epstein passed her around to various men, including Prince Andrew and prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz, instructing her to have sex with them. Prince Andrew denied the allegations but he wound up reaching a settlement with Giuffre. Dershowitz has also repeatedly denied allegations. Giuffre dropped her allegations against Dershowitz in 2022 and said she “may have made a mistake.”
Trump claims he had no idea what his good friend Jeffrey was up to back then, variously insisting he ditched Epstein for being “sleazy” (insert your own pot-and-kettle joke here) or they quarreled over Epstein’s “stealing” his pretty young Mar-a-Lago employees.
Brown’s attention to the shady nonprosecution deal in Palm Beach eventually led to his 2019 New York arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
Epstein, of course, is now dead, most likely by suicide — though lots of MAGAs don’t believe that.
Virginia Giuffre is also dead, definitely by suicide.
Ghislaine Maxwell, however, is still here.
She wasn’t exactly living her best life in Tallahassee, spending her days giving yoga classes, teaching etiquette (even criminals want to be ladylike!) and, no doubt, explaining over and over that her name is not pronounced “Gizz-Lane.”
MAGA (and quite a few Democrats) want her to talk; she wants out of prison.
She may be about to get lucky.
Pardon
Thanks to Trumpists’ rich fantasy life, in which everything is a conspiracy of the Deep Swamp, she suddenly has some power.
She says she’ll testify in public as long as Congress agrees to a few little provisions as spelled out by her lawyer, chiefly immunity and a chance to see the committee’s questions in advance.
She also doesn’t want to appear before them until after the Supreme Court hears her appeal, in which she makes the thoroughly bizarre argument that the nonprosecution deal the Southern District of Florida cut with Epstein should apply to her, too.
Classic Florida move: The rules are different here.
Anyway, if they don’t comply, she’ll take the Fifth.
Trump keeps saying he’s “allowed” to pardon her, though he evades the question of whether he actually would.
That, no doubt, depends on what kind of dirt he thinks she has on him and whether that outweighs dirt she might have on his perceived enemies.
Here in Tallahassee, we’re feeling a little sore, a little mad at Texas for stealing our celebrity sex offender.
But once a Florida Woman, always a Florida Woman.
Texas will never take that away from us.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.