Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 10

Picture a girl in a crisp white uniform sitting behind a marble reception desk. She is sixteen and wears a name tag pinned to her chest. The girl is slender, with the freckled face of a child, and her long blond hair is held back with a tie. A new employee at the Mar-a-Lago spa, the girl is usually in the locker room, handing out towels. But on this blisteringly hot afternoon, the spa is mostly empty, so the girl is at the front desk, which is outside, under an awning that provides shade. The girl is reading a book about anatomy that she’s borrowed from the library. The girl loves to read, and she hopes that studying this book will give her something she’s lacked for too long: purpose. What would it be like, she wonders, to excel at something?

Suddenly, I look up from my book to see a striking woman with short dark hair striding toward me.

“Hello,” the woman says warmly. She looks to be in her late thirties, and her British accent reminds me of Mary Poppins. I couldn’t tell you which designers she’s wearing, but I bet her purse cost more than my dad’s truck. The woman extends her manicured hand for me to shake. “Ghislaine Maxwell,” she says, pronouncing her first name “Giilen.” Her grip is firm. I point to my name tag. “I’m Jenna,” I say, smiling like I’ve been told to smile. Mar-a-Lago employees are required to make guests feel welcome. The woman’s eyes alight on my book, which I’ve jammed with sticky notes. “Are you interested in massage?” she asks. “How wonderful!”

Remembering my duties, I offer this mesmerizing woman a beverage, and she chooses hot tea. I go and fetch it, returning with a steaming cup. I expect that to be the end of it, but the woman keeps on talking. Maxwell says she knows a wealthy man—a longtime Mar-a-Lago member, she says—who is looking for a massage therapist to travel with him. “Do you do massage on the side?” she asks. “Oh, no,” I reply, worried I’ve given her the wrong impression. “I’m not trained, but I hope to learn someday.” My lack of experience doesn’t concern her a bit. “I’m sure you’d be terrific,” she insists, looking me up and down. “Will you come for an interview?”

I glance at my library book, with its illustrations of muscles and tendons. “I don’t think I know the body well enough yet,” I protest, but Maxwell shakes her head. What’s important, she says, is my desire to learn. If I impress her friend, she says, he’ll happily pay to get me trained. He’s a mathematician—a genius with a knack for making money. “He loves to help people,” she says, adding that the rich gentleman’s home is right here in Palm Beach, less than two miles from Mar-a-Lago.

“Come meet him,” she says, her pretty face glowing. “Come tonight after work.”

Even today, more than twenty years later, I remember how excited I felt. Could my dreams of becoming a professional masseuse be on their way to coming true so quickly? Something about how this proper, well-spoken lady focused on me made that seem possible. I told her I had to get permission from my dad first, but that I really wanted to come. So, as she instructed, I wrote down her phone number and her rich friend’s address: 358 El Brillo Way. “See you later, I hope,” Maxwell said, waving her right hand by twisting it slightly at the wrist. Then she was gone.

The next break I got, I ran to the tennis courts to tell my father I was in the running for a potentially life-changing opportunity. He said he could drive me over after work. I used the phone at the spa’s front desk to call Maxwell and let her know we were on. “Great,” she said. “See you soon.”

A few hours later, Dad gave me a lift up South Ocean Avenue to El Brillo Way, a short hedge-lined spur of a road that dead-ended into the Palm Beach Intracoastal Waterway. The drive took five minutes, and we didn’t talk much. No one ever had to explain to my father the importance of making a buck.

When we arrived at the high wall in front of 358, the last house on the left before we hit the water, Dad pushed a buzzer and spoke into the intercom. A security gate rolled open. We eased into a driveway lined with palm trees and found ourselves in front of a sprawling two-story, six-bedroom mansion. In countless TV documentaries, this house has been shown to be painted a tasteful white, as it was years later. But in the summer of 2000, the home we pulled up to was a garish pink, the color of Pepto-Bismol.

Eager to be punctual, I jumped out of the car before my dad could turn off the engine, walked to the big wooden front door, and rang the bell. Maxwell answered and came outside, the door still open behind her. She shook my father’s hand. “Thank you so very much for dropping her off,” she told Dad, all smiles, but in retrospect, she seemed impatient for him to leave. “We’ll get Jenna home safe,” she said, practically shooing him back into his truck. Then she turned and ushered me into an elegant foyer with a spiral staircase and a huge star-shaped chandelier.

“Jeffrey has been waiting to meet you,” she said, starting up the stairs. “Come.”

Walking behind her, I tried not to stare at the walls, which were crowded with photos and paintings of nude women. Maybe this was how wealthy people with sophisticated taste decorated their homes? “Be cool,” I thought. “Don’t let her see how nervous you are.” I fixed my eyes on the stairs, which were covered in pink, plush carpet. When we reached the second-floor landing, Maxwell turned right and led me into a bedroom. We made a U-turn around a king-size bed, then entered an adjoining room with a turquoise-green massage table. A naked man lay face down on top of it, his head resting on his folded arms, but when he heard us enter, he lifted up slightly to look around at me. I remember his bushy eyebrows and the deep lines in his face as he grinned a Cheshire-cat smile.

“Say hello to Mr. Jeffrey Epstein,” Maxwell instructed. But before I could do so, the man spoke to me: “You can just call me Jeffrey.” I nodded at the gray-haired stranger as he lay back down. He was forty-seven years old—nearly three times older than me.

Faced with Epstein’s bare backside, I looked to Maxwell for guidance. I had never gotten a massage before, let alone given one. But still I thought, “Isn’t he supposed to be under a sheet?” Maxwell’s blasé expression indicated that nudity was normal. “Calm down,” I told myself. “Don’t blow this chance.” I wanted to be a good student. Palm Beach was just sixteen miles from Loxahatchee, but the economic divide made it seem way farther. I needed to learn how rich people did things. Besides, while the man on the table was nude, it’s not like I was alone with him. The fact that a woman was with me made me breathe easier. “Fake it ’til you make it,” I thought, as I tried to project a can-do energy.

Maxwell took the lead. “First, you must wash your hands,” she said. “Hot water.” She pointed toward a white, marble-tiled bathroom, complete with sauna and steam shower, where I did as she asked. Then she began the lesson. When giving a massage, she said, I should keep one palm on the client’s skin at all times, so as never to startle him. “Continuity and flow are key,” she explained. She turned to a dresser littered with bottles, pumped lotion into both our hands, and showed me how to keep an extra blob of the stuff on my forearm, so I could reload without interrupting the rhythm. She then positioned us at Epstein’s feet, on either side of the table, and rubbed her hands together swiftly before placing them on the toes of his right foot. She nodded for me to do the same on his left. “Just do what I do,” she said.

We started in on his heels and arches, then moved up his body. “Don’t pull his leg hair,” Maxwell cautioned, explaining that our goal was to circulate the blood by firmly pushing it up his calves. I paid close attention, mimicking her as we moved higher, to Epstein’s thighs. When we got to his buttocks, I tried to glide past them, landing on his lower back. But Maxwell put her hands on top of mine and guided them to his rear. “It’s important that you don’t ignore any part of the body,” she said. “If you skip around, the blood won’t flow right.”

Only later would I see how, step by practiced step, the two of them were breaking down my defenses. Every time I felt a twinge of discomfort, one glance at Maxwell told me I was overreacting. And so it went for about half an hour: a seemingly legitimate massage lesson. As Maxwell encouraged me—“You’re getting the hang of it!”—Epstein asked me questions. “Do you have siblings?” Two brothers, I said. “Where do you go to high school?” I told him I’d quit after ninth grade, but I was only sixteen—I hoped to get my GED. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I said I lived with an older boy in a trailer on my parents’ land. “Do you take birth control?” Epstein asked. Was that a weird question in a job interview? Epstein indicated this was just his way of getting to know me. After all, I might soon be traveling with him. I told him I was on the pill.

“You’re doing great,” Maxwell said, as I kept my hands in sync with hers.

“Tell me about your first time,” Epstein said then. I hesitated. Who’d ever heard of an employer asking an applicant about losing her virginity? But I wanted this job, so I took a deep breath and described my rough childhood. I’d been abused by a family friend, I said vaguely, and spent time on the street as a runaway. Epstein didn’t recoil. Instead, he made light of it, teasing me for being “a naughty girl.”

“Not at all,” I said defensively. “I’m a good girl. I’ve just always found myself in the wrong places.”

Epstein lifted his head and smirked at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “I like naughty girls.”

Then he rolled over onto his back, and I was startled to see he had an erection. I’d seen men’s private parts before, obviously, but I hadn’t expected to see his. Without thinking, I raised both my hands, holding them up in the air as if to say, “Stop.” But when I looked at Maxwell, she remained unfazed. Ignoring his aroused penis, she put both hands on his right pectoral muscles and began kneading. “Like this,” she said, continuing as if nothing were amiss. “You want to push the blood away from the heart.” Unsure whether I was right to feel alarmed, I again followed her example, putting my hands on the left side of his chest, which was covered in thick gray hair. Moving my fingers in circles, I could feel Epstein staring at my face, but I refused to meet his gaze, focusing instead on what I thought I was there to do.

“Not in a circle,” Maxwell corrected. “Don’t be afraid to use pressure.”

Epstein winked at her then and moved his right hand down to his crotch. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked as he began stroking himself.

This is the moment that something cracked inside me. How else to explain why my memories of what came next are splintered into jagged shards? Maxwell peeling off her clothes, a mischievous look on her face; Maxwell behind me, unzipping my skirt and pulling my Mar-a-Lago polo shirt over my head; Epstein and Maxwell laughing at my underwear, which were dotted with tiny hearts. “How cute—she still wears little girl’s panties,” Epstein said. He reached for an electric vibrator, which he forced between my thighs, as Maxwell commanded me to pinch Epstein’s nipples as she rubbed her own breasts, and mine.

A familiar emptiness flooded me. Just minutes before, I had arrived at Epstein’s mansion hoping that I was turning a corner. Now I knew I was right back where I’d worked so hard not to be. How many times had I put my faith in someone, only to be hurt and humiliated? But this time the disappointment was excruciating. I blamed myself. “Is sex all anyone will ever want from me?” a voice inside me shrieked, as another harsher voice chided: “Yes, you idiot. You knew that already.” I tasted the tang of adrenaline in my mouth, and I could feel my brain begin to shut down. My body couldn’t escape from this room, but my mind couldn’t bear to stay, so it put me on a kind of autopilot: submissive and determined to survive.

“Pinch him harder,” Maxwell said, as Epstein moaned. So I did. “Go down on him,” she said. I did that too. Eventually, Maxwell ordered me to straddle Epstein so he could penetrate me. Again, I obeyed. Once he finished, I was told to bring two warm washcloths to clean him up. Then Epstein led the way to the steam room, where he told me to rub his feet. As I did so, kneeling before him, he lectured me about the history of sweat lodges and how opening the pores allows toxins to leave the body. It was important to make healthy decisions, he said, adding, “I can teach you so many things.” From that first meeting, Epstein wanted me to regard him as a mentor, not a predator.

Next, we entered the shower, where Maxwell instructed me to wash Epstein with soap and a loofah. Again, I obeyed. Epstein told me to shampoo his hair and massage his scalp. I did. “She’s a keeper,” he told Maxwell, appraising me as if I weren’t there. When Maxwell left the bathroom, Epstein had me take a towel from a heated rack and pat him dry. I did so, shivering a little in my own nakedness. Finally, he pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and I put my Mar-a-Lago uniform back on and wiped smudges of mascara from under my eyes. Epstein then led me down a back stairway to the kitchen, where Maxwell waited. I remember the gleaming stainless-steel appliances and the black-and-white checkerboard floor. When she handed Epstein a black leather duffel bag, he pulled out two hundred-dollar bills and pushed them across the counter toward me. “This is probably what you make in a week at that spa,” he said. He and Maxwell smiled knowingly at each other, as if this were funny.

“You did great,” Maxwell told me, almost cooing. She said I had strong hands, good instincts, and such huge potential. “You’re a natural. Who knows where this could lead?” She reached for a pen and paper. “Can you come back tomorrow?” She asked for my cell-phone number, but I didn’t have one. I recited my work number. And then the butler, Juan Alessi—the same man who’d been driving Maxwell when she first spotted me at Mar-a-Lago—led me out to the driveway, where I climbed into the front passenger seat of a shiny black Chevy Suburban.

Only after buckling my seat belt did I begin to return to myself. Having escaped from an imminent threat, my brain came back online, but all it wanted to do was scream. During the half-hour drive inland to Loxahatchee, Alessi and I didn’t speak. If I opened my mouth, I just knew I’d start sobbing, so I clamped my lips shut. I didn’t know then what a therapist would tell me a decade later: that when children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together. I didn’t know that abuse victims struggle to see red flags because they’ve become desensitized to inappropriate behavior. I didn’t know that a common coping mechanism during sexual abuse is to distance oneself from what is happening in the moment—to “split” into parts: the obedient body and the walled-off mind. All I knew as the black Suburban headed west was that I felt gutted, as if someone had reached down my throat and scraped out my insides with a silver spoon.

When the butler dropped me at Rackley Road, I went into my parents’ house, not the trailer Michael and I shared. I’d built the job interview up so much that I knew Mom and Dad would expect to hear how it had gone. Given the state I was in, however, I kept the conversation short. I get flushed when I’m upset, so as I ticked off what I’d learned—push the blood away from the heart; always be consistent with a firm, warm touch—I sensed Mom noticing my reddened face and neck. So before she could ask questions, I pleaded exhaustion and excused myself to take a shower. For what seemed like an hour, I sat on the wet tile floor and let my tears mix with the hot water pounding my skin.

So begins the period of my life that has been dissected and analyzed more than any other. I don’t enjoy repeating this story; it hurts to relive what I did and what was done to me. What’s more, as I describe the chronology, transgression by transgression, I worry that the awful details distract from a broader truth. Yes, I was sexually abused. My body was used in ways that did enormous damage to me. But the worst things Epstein and Maxwell did to me weren’t physical, but psychological. From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.

I was about to spend more than two years in Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit. My job: to do whatever they asked whenever they asked it. There were no bars on the windows or locks on the doors. But I was a prisoner trapped in an invisible cage.