| Ghislaine talked and acted as if she and Epstein were lovers, but Christina didn’t buy it. Whatever the truth about their relationship, the problem, as Oxenberg saw it, was simple: Ghislaine very much wanted to marry Epstein, but Jeffrey had no interest. “There was no romance and there was no sexual relationship,” Christina told me. “Ghislaine was his employee. But she wanted to get married, to be a real power couple.” According to Christina, Jeffrey’s disinterest notwithstanding, Ghislaine thought she could win him over by making him part of this upper-crust world. “What you do in London if you’re upper class is you give dinner parties,” Christina said. “That’s what they do. So Ghislaine would have brought her knowledge of that to New York, and she does these dinner parties. “Generally, the point is just to get drunk and have really good plonk. That’s the point of dinner parties. But hers were transactional. She had an agenda. She was creating a life for Jeffrey, trying to present him as, ‘Hey, he’s got money. He’s James Bond. He’s someone you should know. He’s cool.’ “She’s branding him, probably showing him not to wear white sneakers and maybe go with the Oxford low scissor with the tassels. He is a Pretty Woman. He doesn’t know shit. She believes that she can make herself indispensable to the point where he will marry her.” Or as Ghislaine also told Christina, “The reason Jeffrey keeps me around is because I don’t make mistakes.” She could |
later, according to the Washington Post, law enforcement officers checked on the status of personnel who had training in deploying pepper balls and other irritants. Barr then left the park as a barely audible announcement ordered the crowd to disperse. At 6:32 p. m. military police on the southern edge of the protest area moved forward in a face-to-face confrontation with the protesters. By 6:35 p. m. police in riot gear with shields and clubs began forcing the protesters back, away from Lafayette Square, just as Trump had begun speaking from the Rose Garden. According to a statement by Park Police, at that point, “Violent protesters on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids. The protesters also climbed onto a historic building at the north end of Lafayette Square that was destroyed by arson days prior. Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats and metal poles hidden along the street.” But a review of video footage by the Washington Post showed only water bottles being thrown, and no bricks or caustic liquids. Meanwhile, in the Rose Garden, Trump’s rhetoric rose to new heights as he threatened to deploy US armed forces to cities or states that do not take actions to halt the protests, saying the military will “quickly solve the problem for them.” Vice President Mike Pence said that he would have been “happy to walk shoulder to shoulder |
