Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 11

After dinner in Perth, Australia, I’m biding my time in my favorite local shopping mall, which stays open late on Thursday nights. Our twelve-year-old daughter, Ellie, who is already taller than me and still growing, needs new clothes. “Mama, do you think these will fit me?” she asks, holding up a pair of black cargo pants.

Having weathered the fond taunts of two older brothers her entire life, Ellie often presents as a tomboy: athletic, capable, unafraid. Just a moment ago, she turned our shopping cart into a race car—first sprinting to get momentum, then jumping aboard with both feet on the back axle, grinning as she flew across the mall’s main rotunda.

Now we are in a boutique that caters to tweens. When we first walked in, I spotted an orange sundress that I knew would look wonderful on her, but when I said so, she shook her head and scowled like I was out of my mind. I didn’t push it. That never works with Ellie. So it makes me happy when I see her circle back, checking out the dress again. She’s already picked out two pairs of pants and an oversized Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, but I can see her considering whether maybe a pretty sundress wouldn’t be so bad after all. Without looking at me, she adds it to her growing pile and moves to the next rack.

After a few more minutes, our cart is full to overflowing. “You ready, Ellie?” I ask, and she nods, blazing our trail to the checkout line. That’s when I see the display of oversized orange-and-yellow-striped beach towels. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist. I grab six of them and head to the cash register, even though I can predict how exasperated my husband will be when we get home.

Since becoming a mom, I’ve developed a near-addiction to buying crisp new sheets, pillowcases, and towels. I could say what motivates me is the simple desire to feather my family’s nest, to make my kids feel cozy and loved. But Robbie believes there’s something else at work, too—something so powerful that I’ll risk him rolling his eyes and bellowing: “Jenna! No! We have enough towels in this house to keep an army dry!” Whenever he protests like this, I always promise to “do a quick closet cleanse,” as Robbie sighs, resigned. I understand his frustration, but it can’t be helped. My perpetual need to fill our home with new, fresh things is driven by a feeling I can’t shake: Even after all this time, I remember how dirty I once felt. I will do anything to make my world feel clean.

So many young women, myself included, have been criticized for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us. How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away? If you didn’t like feeling dirty, you could simply have never gone back. But that stance wrongly discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable to him. Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless. Before meeting Epstein, one of his victims had watched her father beat an eight-year-old boy to death; another was present when her boyfriend killed himself. We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care. At times I think he even believed he cared. A master manipulator who excelled at divining the desires of others, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better. If they wanted to be dancers, he offered dance lessons. If they aspired to be actors, he said he’d help them get roles. If they said the only thing they yearned to do was paint, he bought them canvases and introduced them to key people in the art world. And then, he did his worst to them.

When I met Epstein just before my seventeenth birthday, all I wanted was to learn a skill that would give me the means to live an independent life. At least that’s what I told myself. With hindsight, though, the grown-up me can see that the teenage me also wanted something else. What had Epstein said that first night? That I was “a keeper”? By now you know how long I’d hoped to hear words like those—and to believe I was worth keeping. Every time I went to Epstein’s mansion in those early days, he or Maxwell would pay me, peeling two or sometimes three hundred-dollar bills off the huge stack in his black duffel bag. But money wasn’t the only thing that lured me into their twisted world. For so many years, I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing. Even as a girl on the precipice of womanhood, I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For ten years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of “love.” Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.

The day after my “job interview,” I did as Maxwell requested and returned to the pink house behind the high wall. On this, my second visit to El Brillo Way, I again followed Maxwell up the pink stairs, around the king-size bed, and into the room with the green massage table. Again, Epstein was lying there naked. Again, Maxwell walked me through the steps that a professional masseuse might follow. And again, after a few minutes, Epstein—who had a thick gray head of hair and a long face that reminded some people of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren and others of actor Richard Gere—rolled over and the “massage” turned into sex. You may wonder why the two of them kept up the pretense of a massage lesson at all. Why didn’t they take me straight to the bedroom? I think the charade was meant to keep me off balance. Hadn’t I said I wanted to learn this skill? But also, abusing me in a therapeutic setting jibed with how Epstein thought about sex. He would soon explain that he needed to climax at least three times a day. It was a biological imperative, he said, like breathing or eating. For him sex wasn’t connected to intimacy or love. It was a purely physical release. Epstein viewed sex almost as a procedure—one that he preferred to be performed by nubile young girls like me.

My second visit to the pink house differed from the first, however, because this time, Maxwell and Epstein formally appointed themselves my sexual tutors. Much like Ron Eppinger had when I was his captive, they stressed the importance of learning what men liked and said this was the beginning of my “training period.” If I performed oral sex on Epstein, for example, he would tell me to slow down. “You want to bring a man to an orgasm, not just give him an orgasm,” he corrected. Maxwell cautioned that no man wanted a woman to talk during foreplay. “Asking ‘How do you like this?’ is okay,” she said. “But you should mostly be quiet.”

Afterward, Maxwell joined Epstein and me in the steam room. As Epstein talked about himself—he was a successful financial manager who used his talents to benefit only the most select clients, he said—Maxwell ordered me to massage her feet and legs. I knelt before her and obeyed. Apparently, Epstein wasn’t my only responsibility. I had to meet Maxwell’s needs too.

A day later, Maxwell called me at Mar-a-Lago. “We need you to come again tonight,” she said, her voice more curt than before. Having successfully recruited me, Maxwell had turned off the charm. I said I’d be there, and a few hours later, Dad dropped me off at the house. The butler took me into the kitchen and offered me a drink and some fruit that was prettily arranged on a small plate. I was starving, so I sat down and was about to take a bite when Maxwell appeared, shooting me a cold look. I jumped up, as if I’d had my hand in the cookie jar.

“I’ve got plans, so you’re on your own tonight,” Maxwell said. “Jeffrey is waiting upstairs. Don’t disappoint him.”

My skin prickled with nervousness as I climbed the spiral stairway by myself for the first time. Maxwell hadn’t protected me from Epstein—far from it. But without her there, I’d be alone with him, and that felt scary. My senses were heightened. I could smell the cleaning fluids the housekeepers used. The light in the house was turning golden as the sun set, and I allowed myself to look more closely at the photos displayed on the walls. There were so many of them: topless girls, bottomless girls, girls with shy expressions, girls from the back, their faces obscured.

In the massage room, Epstein was face down, as usual. He turned and gestured toward a schoolgirl outfit—pleated skirt, white starched button-down, knee socks—and told me to put it on. “Leave your underwear off,” he said. I did, then had sex with him as he demanded. On this day, he continued to critique my performance. “Stop. Stop!” he told me more than once. “That’s not how we taught you to do it. Start over again.” He also ordered me to seem more “into it.” Men liked it when women appeared to love sex, he said. In that area, I needed to do better. “Relax,” he demanded, and I tried to comply. A half hour later, our “session” complete, I again bathed Epstein with two warm washcloths.

From that point on, when Epstein and Maxwell were in Florida, I was a daily presence at El Brillo Way. Some days Epstein and I were alone in the massage room. Other days Maxwell joined us; or another young woman, a brunette named Sarah Kellen, who was introduced to me as Epstein’s assistant. Epstein liked to watch women together, so sometimes he ordered me to have sex with Maxwell or Kellen. I had never had a sexual experience with a woman, but I soon found forced sex with women was less threatening than with men. I didn’t look forward to it, but it was less intrusive and therefore less terrifying.

Little by little, I was welcomed into the sorority of Epstein’s girls. One day, for example, Maxwell led me upstairs as usual, but then turned left, away from the massage room, to a yellow guest room where Emmy Tayler, Maxwell’s blond, blue-eyed personal assistant, stayed. Tayler, a Brit whom Maxwell jokingly referred to as her “slave,” was already there, smoking a cigarette on the balcony. By then I knew Epstein hated cigarettes. Like drugs and alcohol, which he also shunned, he saw tobacco as a poison and forbade it in his house. But here Tayler stood, puffing away, and Maxwell now joined her, lighting up and taking a long drag. When the women offered me a cigarette, I took it, anxious to fit in. I wasn’t much of a smoker, though, so I inhaled too deeply and started coughing.

“I guess you’re inexperienced,” Maxwell teased as she and Tayler giggled. I don’t know what got into me, but when I caught my breath, I teased her right back. “I’d rather be inexperienced,” I said, “than be an old lady with a chronic hack.” Maxwell wasn’t used to being challenged, but she could enjoy it if she had the last word. “Touché,” she said, tapping her ash over the railing and onto the patio below. Talking back to Maxwell was risky, but that day I must’ve threaded the needle perfectly, because for the next few minutes, she, Tayler, and I chatted and laughed like girlfriends playing hooky from school. Then I excused myself to brush my teeth and douse myself in body spray to eliminate all traces of nicotine. Epstein was waiting for me. There was work to do.

As I became a regular at Epstein’s house, it was difficult to avoid the demeaning nature of this transactional relationship. Epstein took delight in explaining to me, for example, that he had painted his house pink because “I love pink. Pink is for pussy!” But so many of my connections to men had been humiliating that I think I saw this one as a challenge; maybe for once, I thought, I could make it work for me. This only makes sense, of course, when you consider how little I’d grown up hoping for. As Epstein used me to satisfy his perverse appetites, I rationalized that perhaps he might also help me to better myself. If he and Maxwell made good on their promise to get me trained as a masseuse, perhaps that would set me on a path to freedom and prosperity. I told myself it was worth the gamble.

But then, probably two weeks after I’d met them, Epstein upped the ante.

I was upstairs, cleaning up after another “massage,” when Epstein told me to come to his office. “How about you quit your job at Mar-a-Lago,” he said, “and work for me full time?” Unsure what to say, I admitted I was worn out from pulling double shifts each day—the first at the spa, the second at El Brillo Way. Epstein nodded. He wanted to make things easier on me, he said. But he had a few conditions. As his employee, I would be at his beck and call, day and night. No exceptions. When he said, “Jump!” my response would have to be, “How high?” And another thing: I could no longer live in my parents’ trailer. Seeing me come and go at all hours might make them suspicious, he said, and he didn’t want that. He held out a wad of cash—probably $2,500. “Use this,” he said, “to rent yourself an apartment.”

I was stunned. I’d never held that much money in my hand before. I thanked him, even as a twinge of worry crept into my head. By this point, I had seen dozens of girls coming and going from his house. Many came once and never returned. If he got rid of them so quickly, would Epstein eventually throw me away too? It felt foolish to rely on him for my livelihood. Epstein must’ve sensed my qualms, though, because he walked around his desk, picked up a grainy photograph, and handed it to me. The image had been taken from some distance, but it was unmistakably my little brother. Skydy was walking away from the camera; I could see his backpack, and the outline of the side of his face. I felt a stab of fear. Why did Epstein have a photo of the person I loved most in the world?

“We know where your brother goes to school,” Epstein said. He let that sink in for a moment, then got to the point: “You must never tell a soul what goes on in this house.” He was smiling, but his threat was clear: should I ever be tempted to betray him and go to the authorities, he would hurt Skydy. I stared at him. He stared back. “And I own the Palm Beach Police Department,” he said, “so they won’t do anything about it.”

That threat was still rattling around in my head days later, when Epstein casually mentioned that he knew Eppinger—not well, he said, but they’d met once, at a party. The news only confirmed my emerging understanding of how the world worked. My approximately seventeen years on the planet had taught me that some grown men forced children to have sex with them and suffered no repercussions. So the idea of Epstein and Eppinger socializing made perfect sense. It was simply the way of things. I had no choice, I believed, but to accept that and make the best of it—for Skydy’s sake, if not my own.