WyBlog

A young woman named in connection with an alleged sex scandal involving U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez denied in a television interview she was ever involved in prostitution and said she had never met him.

The 21-year-old, who lives in a village in the south of the Dominican Republic, said: "It's completely false. I don't know that man even from the television."

Separately, Vinicio Castillo, a Dominican lawyer and cousin of Salomon Melgen — a major campaign donor now at the center of an FBI investigation that has sparked widespread speculation of Menendez's involvement — charged that Melgen was the target of a "dirty campaign" by drug cartels aimed at discrediting him.

A Dominican prostitute's firsthand account of sex parties allegedly attended by New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez refers specifically to another participant: Vinicio "Vinicito" Castillo Seman, the scion of a prominent Dominican political family who serves as a lawyer for his cousin, Dr. Salomon Melgen, in the Caribbean nation. . . .

At least one of the women allegedly involved has said she was younger than 18 when she first had sex with Sen. Menendez.

In her account, sent via email on April 21, 2012 to the liberal advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the prostitute identified "Vinicito" by name as a participant, along with Melgen and Menendez. . . .

"It was during some yacht outings that I realized I needed to get out of there," the young prostitute wrote in one email included in that collection, "because these people are so important and they do whatever they want with whomever they want."

"Vinicito was there, who goes to many of the doctor's functions and invents things [to do] with the young girls, and then forces them to do the same things with the doctor's friend. And he really liked it and wanted to take them to another place, but I don't know where. They threatened those girls and told them to not talk, and that they couldn.t leave." . . .

In an April 28 email to CREW about the sex parties, the same woman said that "we women are very mistreated," especially "the younger ones between 16 and 18 years old."

You can read the whole thing. The details confirmed by the two Miami Herald reporters are important because — as anyone with experience chasing this kind of story would tell you — if the story were totally bogus, basic facts like names and addresses wouldn't check out.

A bogus story would have make-believe girls at non-existent addresses, but instead this story has the little details right. The fact that the women have now "disappeared," as McGrory and Sanchez report, isn't particularly surprising, nor is it surprising that the landlady (a) thought the hookers were "foreign exchange students" and (b) didn't know the names of their alleged clients.

"Prostitution is everywhere here; on the beach, in the bars, in the clubs," said Antonio Guzman, 36, a hustler who has worked the beach for 15 years and regularly connects tourists with prostitutes. "This place runs on it." . . .

Long before explosive allegations emerged claiming Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and a political contributor flew to the country for wild parties with several prostitutes, the Dominican Republic had cemented its reputation as a hub for sex tourism. . . .

Studies suggest between 60,000 and 100,000 women work in the sex trade in the country, according to the Center for Integral Orientation and Investigation, a health and outreach organization based in the capital, Santo Domingo.