Picture a girl in a crisp white uniform sitting behind a marble reception desk. The girl is slender, with the freckled face of a child, and her long blond hair is held back with a tie. On this blisteringly hot afternoon, the spa is mostly empty, so the girl is at the front desk, reading a book about anatomy that she’s borrowed from the library. The girl hopes that studying this book will give her something she’s lacked for too long: purpose. What would it be like, she wonders, to excel at something?

I look up from my book to see a striking woman with short dark hair striding toward me.

“Hello,” the woman says warmly. She looks to be in her late 30s, and her British accent reminds me of Mary Poppins. I couldn’t tell you which designers she’s wearing, but I bet her purse cost more than my dad’s truck. The woman extends her manicured hand for me to shake. “Ghislaine Maxwell,” she says, pronouncing her first name “Giilen”. I point to my name tag. “I’m Jenna,” I say, smiling like I’ve been told to smile. The woman’s eyes alight on my book, which I’ve jammed with sticky notes. “Are you interested in massage?” she asks. “How wonderful!”

Remembering my duties, I offer this mesmerising woman a beverage, and she chooses hot tea. I go and fetch it, returning with a steaming cup. I expect that to be the end of it, but the woman keeps on talking. Maxwell says she knows a wealthy man – a longtime Mar-a-Lago member, she says – who is looking for a massage therapist to travel with him. “Come meet him,” she says. “Come tonight after work.”

Even today, more than 20 years later, I remember how excited I felt. As instructed, I wrote down her phone number and her rich friend’s address: 358 El Brillo Way. “See you later, I hope,” Maxwell said, waving her right hand by twisting it slightly at the wrist. Then she was gone.

A few hours later, Dad gave me a lift to El Brillo Way. The drive took five minutes, and we didn’t talk much. No one ever had to explain to my father the importance of making a buck.

When we arrived we found ourselves in front of a sprawling two-storey, six-bedroom mansion. In countless TV documentaries, this house has been shown painted a tasteful white, as it was years later. But in the summer of 2000, the home we pulled up to was a garish pink, the colour of Pepto-Bismol.

Giuffre as a teenager. ‘Epstein asked me questions. Do you have siblings? Where do you go to high school? Do you take birth control?’
I jumped out of the car before my dad could turn off the engine, walked to the big wooden front door, and rang the bell. Maxwell answered and came outside. “Thank you so very much for dropping her off,” she told Dad, all smiles, but, in retrospect, she seemed impatient for him to leave.

“Jeffrey has been waiting to meet you,” she said, starting up the stairs. “Come.”

Walking behind her, I tried not to stare at the walls, which were crowded with photos and paintings of nude women. Maybe this was how wealthy people with sophisticated taste decorated their homes?

When we reached the second-floor landing, Maxwell turned right and led me into a bedroom. We made a U-turn around a king-size bed, then entered an adjoining room with a massage table. A naked man lay face down on top of it, his head resting on his folded arms, but when he heard us enter, he lifted up slightly to look around at me. I remember his bushy eyebrows and the deep lines in his face as he grinned.

“Say hello to Mr Jeffrey Epstein,” Maxwell instructed. But before I could do so, the man spoke to me: “You can just call me Jeffrey.” He was 47 years old – nearly three times older than me.

Faced with Epstein’s bare backside, I looked to Maxwell for guidance. I had never had a massage before, let alone given one. But still I thought, “Isn’t he supposed to be under a sheet?” Maxwell’s blase expression indicated that nudity was normal. “Calm down,” I told myself. “Don’t blow this chance.”

Palm Beach was just 16 miles from my home town, Loxahatchee, but the economic divide made it seem way farther. I needed to learn how rich people did things. Besides, while the man on the table was nude, it’s not like I was alone with him. The fact that a woman was with me made me breathe easier.

She began the lesson. When giving a massage, she said, I should keep one palm on the client’s skin at all times, so as never to startle him. “Continuity and flow are key,” she explained. We started in on his heels and arches, then moved up his body. When we got to his buttocks, I tried to glide past them, landing on his lower back. But Maxwell put her hands on top of mine and guided them to his rear. “It’s important that you don’t ignore any part of the body,” she said. “If you skip around, the blood won’t flow right.”

‘We know where your brother goes to school,’ Epstein said. ‘You must never tell a soul what goes on in this house’
Only later would I see how, step by practis