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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/escort-says-menendez-prostitution-claims-were-made-up/2013/03/04/31299fe2-8514-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_print.html

Escort says Menendez prostitution claims were made up

By Carol D. Leonnig and Ernesto Londoño, Updated: Monday, March 4, 4:57 PM

An escort who appeared on a video claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

The woman identified a lawyer who approached her and a friend to make the videotape, according to affidavits obtained by the Post. That man has in turn identified another lawyer who gave him a script for the tape and paid him to find women to fabricate the claims, the affidavits say.

The escort was one of two women who taped videos that seems to support a tipster’s allegations that Menendez had patronized prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic.

FBI agents conducting interviews in the Dominican Republic have found no evidence to back up the tipster’s allegations, according to two people briefed on their work.

Menendez has denied the prostitution claims and called them entirely false “smears” used by enemies to try to defeat him in his recent re-election campaign and his selection as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“It’s amazing to me that anonymous, nameless, faceless individuals on a Web site can drive that type of story into the mainstream, but that’s what they’ve done successfully,” Menendez said last month. “Now, nobody can find them. No one ever met them. No one ever talked to them, but that’s where we’re at. So the bottom line is all of those smears are absolutely false and, you know, that’s the bottom line.”

The women’s videotaped claims, with their faces obscured, were played on the conservative Web site The Daily Caller. The news site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic...They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

But in an affidavit obtained Monday, one of the women on the tape, who describes herself as an escort, said she and a colleague were offered money by a lawyer to read from a script. The woman said she was surreptitiously videotaped implicating Menendez and Melgen.

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