Jaycee Woods

While talking to Grok about the Epstein case, as one does, a new story idea developed.

Our discussion reframed or altered facts within the case to make the sex legal while still repugnant. Key takeaways: the women can be as young as 16 & occur within a permissive US state, which is most of them, while the sex must appear as social, non-commercial, without evidence of coercion. Easier than one would think.

The gist of the Epstein case discussion was that if a client list existed then the FBI cannot publicly release the names as an end in itself due to the Privacy Act and protection of personally identifying information in federal records. To publicly release the list unredacted, the FBI would have to prosecute everyone on the list; however, it is unlikely that there is evidence that those persons committed a federal crime. The most likely path of disclosure, if such a list existed in federal records from the investigation, would be for Congress to subpoena the records & release the records under congressional rules that still have privacy considerations to waive.

Now for the story idea…

When 14, a Maryland girl in foster care had a wealthy female mentor. As their relationship developed, the mentor helped the girl get legally emancipated at 16. Before that, the mentor helped the girl develop through proper speech and manners plus reading romantic English period literature about women improving their station by marrying wealthy men.

On emancipation, the mentor allowed the girl to live at the mentor’s mansion and provided a job at the mentor’s charity. The mentor had several such girls 16- or 17-years old living at her mansions in Maryland and Connecticut. For the former foster care girl alone in the world, it was an idyllic situation of luxury that had seemed only possible in novels.

The mentor’s husband (or as I called him the reprobate) was a hedge fund manager. Early in life he had been a low level but competent salesman. Winning a lottery jackpot changed his life as his fortune introduced him to powerful wealthy men in politics and finance. He learned two things about such men: 1) they know valuable secrets, and 2) he was smarter than them. Using his fortune and his new friends’ secrets, he created a successful hedge fund profiting from illegal insider trading.

To support his trade of information between his friends in NYC and DC, the reprobate threw private parties for these powerful men in which discrete  sex with 16- and 17-year-old girls was on the menu. The girls were not paid for sex, nor was there coercion. Instead the girls willingly participated for access to wealthy men whom they hoped to seduce into marriage. Additionally, the reprobate allowed the girls to invest the income from their charity jobs in his hedge fund so that the girls could become independently wealthy, or at least the girls who engaged in the social parties with sex could. Within MD and CT, such a social teen sex ring could be legal. As for the extra legality of the insider trading, the reprobate’s powerful Washington friends, including the head of the SEC, would protect him from scrutiny as they valued the indulgence of their private fetishes.

While the story is salacious, it is about young women who in pursuit of wealth eagerly participate in their own debasement; figuratively, it relates to a culture of OnlyFans, online influencers, and hookup culture…as a concrete, the young women who go to Dubai for you know what. The story examines the consequences of moral relativism, hedonism, and materialism in this young woman’s life.

As this is the initial premise plus, I don’t know how the story would end yet. Maybe the young girl is murdered by the wife of one of her sex partners who had fallen in love with the young girl. While a be-careful-what-you-want-because-you-might-get-it ending, which I haven’t done one of those yet, it would likely be me being lazy as no happy ending was possible for the situation. Except I just thought of that ending as I was typing the idea and it now makes sense to me in the context of choices, values, and consequences and as a tragedy. Call me Old School for thinking that tragedy is still a valid form of story.

Vibe-wise it could be like a high society R-rated Showgirls with an English period romance feel and a shellac of contemporary offal. Ironically, I haven’t watched “Showgirls” nor binged on English period romances, but by their reputation, I think my story would be like that.

One thing that I like about the proposed ending is that it frames the fatal conflict as between two women who want the same thing but only one can have him.

As part of the story, these young girls should be shown as less promiscuous by body count than their peers. However, they are also trading their bodies for a value more significant than a soda & some fast food. This is not to condone the behavior but to contrast it with the new normal in a way that extends the criticism of the behavior in the story to a new normal that demeans sex through promiscuity.