NPR reports the exact mechanism by which Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell set up a trafficking base inside a children’s camp.

Epstein donated over $400,000 to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan and the largest portion built him a sex trafficking operations center on the campus. The recruitment pipeline is clear:

Ghislaine Maxwell would contact a school administrator. We’d like to come and stay in the cabin. The administrator would say, yes, great. What do you need? And Ghislaine would get back and say, I want — we want these things, and we’re coming. Once they’re there, they really were on their own… This lodge was his base there. And while he was there, he was walking around campus, and he had a little dog with him with Ghislaine Maxwell. And that’s where he ended up meeting two — a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old girl.

Maxwell handled base logistics with an administrator. The donation bought them a whole building inside the security perimeter of a school for children. The dog gave them a pretext to roam the grounds and approach minors. The institution’s own staff facilitated every visit, then disappeared.

Interlochen’s stated policy of course prohibited unsupervised donor-student contact, but the infrastructure they built for Epstein was designed to produce exactly the opposite. At least two teenage girls ended up trapped in Epstein’s orbit for years. One testified at the Maxwell trial about prolonged sexual abuse.

The story is not just about this operating base for trafficking teenage girls into prostitution, it’s now how and why a school held the door open, and who Epstein’s customers were for his offers of sex with 13-year old girls.