Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 12

I turned seventeen on August 9, 2000, and used Epstein’s money to lease and furnish a third-floor apartment in Royal Palm Beach, about three miles from Rackley Road. Michael moved in with me, even though our connection was now one of mere convenience. We sometimes ate Domino’s pizza on the couch together. We took care of our animals—which now included a miniature Chow Chow puppy I’d named Mary-Jane. But we didn’t talk much. Notably, Michael never questioned why anyone would pay me to do a job I didn’t know how to do.

From the start, Epstein and Maxwell held me to my promise to be available at all times. Some days, the call would come in the morning. I’d show up, perform whatever sex acts Epstein wanted, then hang out beside his vast swimming pool while he got some work done. After a few hours, I’d usually be summoned to have sex with him again. If Maxwell was there, I was often told to attend to her sexually as well. She kept a bin of vibrators and sex toys handy for these sessions. But she never demanded sex from me one-on-one—only when we were with Epstein. Sometimes there were other girls there, too, and I’d end up staying at El Brillo Way all day.

Other times, my phone wouldn’t ring until Epstein was preparing to go to bed. “Come over,” Maxwell would command when I answered. “He’s requesting you.” When that happened, I’d tell Michael I had a work emergency and head out the door. Michael didn’t bat an eye.

My relationship with my family, meanwhile, was both better and worse. My mother had confronted me early on, asking what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials. I’d laid it on thick, crowing about the doors Epstein had said he’d open for me. I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before. But also I wanted to believe I didn’t need saving. I’d survived my early childhood, hadn’t I? In those initial weeks with Epstein and Maxwell, I told myself I could weather this, too, and maybe even come out ahead.

I remember my first break from servicing the two of them came in what was probably late August, when they went on a trip to two of Epstein’s far-flung properties. Zorro Ranch was an eight-thousand-acre spread near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Epstein said he’d custom built a three-level thirty-three-thousand-square-foot “castle” decorated with rococo flourishes: ten-foot-tall marble fireplaces, sculpted moldings, trompe l’oeil frescoes, and iron chandeliers. In addition to manicured grounds and gurgling fountains, a tennis court, and a grass airstrip and hangar, the property had its own miniature town that housed his servants and groundskeepers. The town also had an eight-stall stable and tack room, a firehouse, a large glassed-in kitchen garden, and even a general store. It sounded like Disneyland to me, and I told Epstein so.

“Wait until you see my Manhattan townhouse,” he replied, and then proceeded to brag about his Upper East Side mansion. Formerly a K–12 academy for well-to-do children, the seven-story, thirty-room manse at 9 East Seventy-First Street was one of the city’s largest private homes. I’d never been to New York and knew very little about fine art, so when he told me his house sat right across from the Frick Collection, it meant nothing to me. But I could still read the message Epstein seemed determined to deliver: he was a Very Important Man.

As for Maxwell, who told us girls to call her G-Max, I was figuring out she was important too. In October 2000, she jetted off to New York to meet up with her old friend Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II’s second-born son, who was then fourth in line to ascend the British throne. On Halloween, along with other guests that included Donald and Melania Trump, Maxwell and Prince Andrew attended a party hosted by German supermodel Heidi Klum at The Hudson, a swank hotel. Maxwell boasted that she knew the man who’d just renovated it—hotel impresario Ian Schrager.

Maxwell was proud of her friendships with famous people, especially men. She loved to talk about how easily she could get former president Bill Clinton on the phone; she and Epstein had visited the White House together when Clinton was in office. Maxwell also enjoyed repeating that once, at some random event, she’d taken the actor George Clooney into a bathroom and given him a blow job. Whether that was true or not, we’d never know. She was less forthcoming about her upbringing, but I began to piece that together too. I remember that Epstein once showed me a mural she’d had painted of a happy-looking family sitting on a bench overlooking a pond, as a hunting party chased foxes nearby. In a hushed voice, Epstein said to me, “This is a portrait of Ghislaine’s childhood—the part she can be proud of.” The youngest of nine children, she’d been born in France but was raised in a fifty-three-room mansion in the south of England, and she held both French and British passports. Her late father, Robert Maxwell, had been a media mogul in England before he was accused of embezzlement and then found dead, perhaps by suicide, after falling off his yacht in the Canary Islands. That was nine years before I met Maxwell, but his death clearly haunted her. In happier days, she had been his favorite child (he’d named the yacht he was sailing when he died the Lady Ghislaine ). I gathered that she’d met Epstein not long before her father passed, and I suspected that had something to do with their connection.

And what was that connection like? While they usually slept in separate bedrooms, and rarely kissed or held hands, it seemed to me that Maxwell and Epstein lived in complete symbiosis. Epstein, who described Maxwell as his best friend, valued her knack for connecting him to powerful people. Maxwell, in turn, appreciated that Epstein had the resources to fund the lavish life she thought she deserved yet had trouble affording after her father’s death. In social settings, Maxwell often appeared vivacious, entertaining, the life of the party. But in Epstein’s household, she functioned more as a party planner: scheduling and organizing the endless parade of girls who she and others—particularly Sarah Kellen—recruited to have sex with him. I remember that at one point I asked her why she wasn’t bothered by Epstein’s desire to have sex with so many others. She said that it was a relief. Epstein’s sexual appetite was so relentless, she said, that no one person could satisfy him. Her lack of jealousy seemed odd but genuine. Over time, I would come to see Epstein and Maxwell less as boyfriend and girlfriend, and more as two halves of a wicked whole.

During my first months working for them, I learned more about Epstein as well. He’d studied physics at Cooper Union and math at New York University, then dropped out two years shy of graduation. Still, Epstein saw himself as an intellectual prodigy, and that self-confidence propelled him forward. The story went that as a young man in the 1970s, he’d talked his way into more than one job he lacked the qualifications for—first as a teacher of high school–level math and physics at the esteemed Dalton School in Manhattan (he told me he gave pretty girls there good grades if they agreed to sleep with him), then as a floor trader at Bear Stearns, the global investment bank where he eventually became a limited partner. In the 1980s, he’d run a consulting firm that assisted clients recovering stolen money, then formed a firm to manage the assets of people whose net worth, he claimed, was no less than $1 billion. This was a point of pride for Epstein: that he, raised by a groundskeeper and a homemaker in Coney Island, only did business with the wealthiest people. For all his cultivation of the upper crust, however, he often appeared unsophisticated and even oblivious. His enormous brainpower couldn’t hide his working-class Brooklyn accent. And though he wanted people to know he had money, he usually wore a Harvard sweatshirt and jeans or sweatpants, even when attending fancy events.

The incongruities didn’t end there. Epstein was strictly disciplined about what he ate, subsisting on tofu, salmon, chickpeas, ginger, and other foods he deemed healthy (and insisting that the girls around him do so too). A germaphobe, he was equally meticulous about what he touched. He mostly refused to shake hands, and he required his sheets be changed every other day. And yet he relentlessly sought sexual contact with young girls who were strangers to him—some who lived rough, terrible lives outside his gated compound—and he never wore a condom. While he required girls like me, who he forced to have intercourse with him regularly, to be tested every three months for sexually transmitted diseases, no one could guarantee the health of all the girls who streamed in and out of El Brillo Way. I guess this lack of caution can be chalked up to arrogance; Epstein believed he didn’t have to follow the rules everyone else did.

In the fall of 2000, Epstein and Maxwell announced that it was time for me to accompany them for the first time on a trip. We were celebrating that I’d successfully completed my “massage training,” they said, as they unveiled the itinerary. First, we’d take one of Epstein’s private planes—he owned a Gulfstream IV, a Boeing 727, and a helicopter—from Palm Beach to New York. Then, after a few days in New York, we’d fly south to the most luxurious of Epstein’s properties: a seventy-two-acre island he owned in the US Virgin Islands, right next to Saint Thomas. The private sanctuary was called Little Saint James, but Epstein liked to call it “Little Saint Jeff’s.” The place sounded exotic, especially to a girl who’d never left the mainland United States, and I told Epstein and Maxwell that I looked forward to seeing it. I remember when Dad dropped me off at El Brillo Way on the day we were to depart, Epstein came out to the driveway and introduced himself. “We’ll take care of her,” Epstein told my father.

In the decades since, flight logs made public in various lawsuits show that during my time with Epstein, I accompanied him on his private jets, both domestically and internationally, at least thirty-two times (on twenty-three of those trips, Maxwell was there too). But that tally represents just a tiny fraction of my travel with them. For one thing, we often flew together (or I flew solo to meet Epstein) on commercial airlines. Maxwell always booked those flights through the same travel agency—it was called Shoppers Travel—but those records are not public, so I have no access to them. When it comes to our travel on Epstein’s jets, meanwhile, only one of Epstein’s pilots, David Rodgers, has turned over his records to authorities. This first trip I took with Epstein and Maxwell was on a plane flown by another pilot, Larry Visoski Jr., who’d worked for Epstein since 1991.

Visoski and Epstein were close. In addition to maintaining Epstein’s planes, Visoski built Epstein’s home theaters in the Caribbean and in Palm Beach and advised Epstein on which boats and cars to purchase (he once said he helped Epstein with “anything that moves”). At one point, Epstein gave a Hummer he owned to Visoski for his personal use, and when the pilot’s wife wanted to build a house in New Mexico, Epstein gifted Visoski forty acres near his ranch’s western boundary on which to do so.

So when exactly was my first trip with Epstein? Without Visoski’s logs I can’t be sure, but I think it was in the latter part of 2000. I’ll never forget how, on our first flight, Epstein told Visoski to let me sit in the cockpit during takeoff. I’d been on a plane just twice before: when I flew to and from Salinas for my exile in California. But on those trips I sat in a coach seat in the back. Being up front, with a 180-degree view, was thrilling. I told Visoski it felt like riding a roller coaster, and I loved roller coasters.

The rest of our flight was less exciting. When I returned to the cabin, where Maxwell and Kellen seemed to be napping in their reclined seats, I saw that Epstein was wide awake and had his socks off. He looked at me expectantly. I would spend the next two hours massaging his feet.

After landing at a private airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, we were picked up by a trim Filipino man in a sober black suit: Epstein’s New York butler, Jojo Fontanilla. Jojo and his wife, June, took care of Epstein in Manhattan, managing a housekeeping staff that numbered in the dozens. Always dressed in suits and pristine white gloves, these servants waited hand and foot on Epstein and his guests. Who knows what the Fontanillas’ real first names were, since Epstein—like Maxwell—insisted upon calling servants by American-sounding names of their own choosing.

Jojo loaded our luggage into an SUV and got behind the wheel, and it wasn’t long before we arrived at Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse. Some have said the place looked more like an embassy or a museum than a private home, and I would have to agree. Outside the entrance—a fifteen-foot-tall double door made of solid oak and adorned with a huge brass doorknob shaped like a knotted rope—two polished brass letters were affixed to the stone facade: JE. The sidewalk there was heated, Epstein told me, so no snow could pile up. To enter, we passed under a stone archway topped with a gargoyle’s grimacing face, then climbed eight steps to an enormous marble foyer. Inside, caramel-colored tiles—Epstein said they were imported French limestone—covered the first floor, which was lavishly furnished and brightened by arched windows. Everything inside seemed bigger than necessary—the chandeliers could’ve lit up a train station; the dining-room table, surrounded by chairs upholstered in a loud leopard print, seated twenty. The walls were lined with massive shadowy paintings and tapestries depicting violent scenes. A staircase led up to Epstein’s office, which housed a gilded desk, a nine-foot ebony Steinway concert grand piano, and an antique Persian rug so big that, as Epstein liked to say, it must’ve been made for a mosque. There was also more than one elevator. For a girl from Loxahatchee, such grandeur was almost impossible to process. I felt as if I had stepped inside an architectural monument the likes of which I’d only seen in books: the Vatican, say, or the Taj Mahal.

Announcing that he was tired from the flight, Epstein led me down a hallway lined with art and antiquities. He favored sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious statuary, including a bronze casting of the half-human, nymph-loving Greek god Pan, whose goatlike horns and haunches, Epstein told me, symbolized fertility. I followed Epstein into a black-marbled alcove with a massage table at its center—a place so gloomy that I would nickname it “The Dungeon.” He pointed at a hutch on one wall that housed a collection of massage oils and a CD player, which he told me to load. By this time, I was used to choosing the music before each day’s “session.” Back in Palm Beach, I had gotten good at reading Epstein’s mood to determine which of his favorite albums to play. Sometimes he wanted opera, other times classical. The only popular artists he favored were female vocalists such as Whitney Houston and Celine Dion.

I don’t remember what CDs I chose that day. I only remember that when I had satisfied Epstein sexually, I was escorted to an apartment in a building owned by his brother, Mark, on East Sixty-Sixth Street. The one night I slept there I luxuriated in having my own space, but that freedom would be short-lived. The next day, I foolishly went out for a long walk, discovering New York City for the first time. But because I had no cell phone, Epstein and Maxwell couldn’t reach me as I walked around for hours, filled with awe. I remember that the skyscrapers ringing Central Park looked like toy soldiers standing at attention. There were so many people on the sidewalks, bundled up to enjoy the chilly afternoon. I had some money in my pocket, and I bought a disposable Instamatic camera—the first of many I’d purchase over the coming months. I didn’t know how much longer I would be seeing the world as part of Epstein’s entourage, so I wanted photos to remember where I’d been.

When I returned to Epstein’s townhouse, however, both he and Maxwell were pacing in the entryway, frantic. “Where have you been?” Epstein demanded angrily as Maxwell glared at me. That was the last time I saw the Sixty-Sixth Street apartment. From that day forward, whenever we were in New York I would occupy a fifth-floor bedroom in Epstein’s house: an enormous loftlike space, its carved moldings coated in gold paint, that was dominated by a menacing wall-hanging that gave me the creeps—it showed wild boars feeding on the carcasses of other animals as a few screaming children looked on. There was also an intercom that Epstein used to summon me. I quickly learned not to keep him waiting.

Today when I recall the sumptuous trappings of Epstein’s homes, I feel conflicted. In too many media accounts, descriptions of Epstein’s over-the-top lifestyle have fueled the perception that the girls Epstein victimized were lucky to find themselves in such surroundings. I don’t want to add to that degrading narrative. To be sure, traveling with Epstein meant being introduced to a level of luxury I would never have experienced otherwise. And I will not dispute that it feels nicer to sleep under sheets made of premium Egyptian cotton, not low-rent polyester. But the comforts of Epstein’s glamorous life—while I noticed and even enjoyed them—would come at a horrible cost to me. What made me feel most at home in this pedophile’s world? Far more than Epstein’s riches, it was the prior abuse I’d endured on humble Rackley Road.

It’s taken me a long time to understand that Epstein and Maxwell solidified their power over me by offering me a new sort of family. Epstein was the patriarch, Maxwell the matriarch, and these roles were not merely implied. Maxwell liked to call the girls who regularly serviced Epstein her “children.” She and Epstein once took me to a boat show in Palm Beach and spent the afternoon introducing me as their daughter, just for kicks. As bizarre as that sounds, it felt kind of good to me. Less good, given my history, was that Epstein sometimes insisted that I call him “Daddy” during sex.

While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents. The first time we ate a meal together, for example, they were appalled by my table manners. So Maxwell taught me how to hold a knife and fork, just so, and to fold my napkin in my lap, the way civilized people do. Soon, she’d be telling me how to do my makeup, how to dress, and where to get my hair cut (the celebrity stylist Frédéric Fekkai groomed many of the girls in Epstein’s world, including me). Even then, part of me knew she was having her dentists whiten my teeth, or sending me to a waxer to remove my body hair, to please Epstein. But the role Maxwell played in my life sometimes felt like more than that. One day in the fall of 2000, we heard “Yellow,” Coldplay’s new love song, on the car radio. I loved it and couldn’t get the tune out of my head. A day later, Maxwell presented me with the CD as a gift. She also gave me my first cell phone. Of course, it served her to have me on a short tether, for her and Epstein’s use. But the gift also felt vaguely protective. I was no expert on mothers, but in those early days, I sometimes imagined Maxwell as mine.

After a few days in Manhattan, and many sessions in The Dungeon, we headed for Little Saint James, which was as beautiful as Epstein had said it would be. Surrounded by crystalline turquoise water, the island had three private beaches and had been enhanced with two swimming pools, a helipad, and its own desalination system. In addition to a massive blue-roofed main residence, there were guest cottages painted in cheerful Caribbean colors: light yellow, minty green, coral pink. There was a sundial as big as a horse paddock and a dock where a thirty-five-foot Donzi powerboat bobbed under a thatched roof. Epstein bragged that the boat had cost him $60,000. Down by the beach, Epstein had built several gazebos for massages and whatever else he required. Were it not for what went on there, the place would have been paradise.

On that first Caribbean trip, when I wasn’t servicing Epstein, I discovered the rhythms of island life. Because there were no A-list guests to entertain, as there would be on subsequent trips, I spent hours on a floating trampoline, just a short swim from the dock, where I marveled at the colorful fish that swam underneath. The group of us also went scuba diving off Epstein’s powerboat. At one point, I swam into a smack of jellyfish and was stung all over my body. My skin was on fire. Maxwell asked our boat captain for vinegar, which was supposed to help with the pain, but none could be found. “Lay down on the deck,” Maxwell said. When I was flat on my back, she pulled her bikini bottoms to one side and urinated all over me. I know it sounds gross, but it worked: my agony subsided. On another day, I discovered that Maxwell and I both loved collecting treasures on the beach. “Pirates used to dock here,” she told me, as we walked together, scanning the sand for sea glass and driftwood. I wanted to believe she was fond of me.

Epstein continued to cast himself as my mentor. Sometimes we’d sit in his steam shower for hours as he held forth on topics I’d never heard of before: game theory, say, or evolutionary biology, financial derivatives, or the mathematical underpinnings of human language. He also gave me books to read. Many of them were sexual in nature, such as Nabokov’s Lolita and Anne Desclos’s Story of O , but his insistence that I read them still felt like a vote of confidence. Frequently, Epstein told me something I needed to hear: that I was smart and full of potential.

At night, Epstein, Maxwell, Tayler, Kellen, and I would gather in front of an enormous TV in the island’s main house, sharing bowls of popcorn, watching movies and TV shows. Epstein particularly liked Sex and the City , which made him laugh. But cozy evenings like this could turn sexual in an instant. A dark, distant expression would move across Epstein’s face, and I’d see it in his eyes: he had to “get off” right then. When that occurred when I was with Epstein and Maxwell, Maxwell would then instruct me to take off my shirt and do whatever else Epstein wanted. In those moments, it was more difficult for me to avoid the truth: that to them, I was nothing but a tool to be used for their pleasure.

Today, I can see how this, too, was an echo from my childhood. I hated the sexual duties that Epstein and Maxwell required of me, but I bargained with myself, just as I had when my father abused me: “Just get the icky part over with so the good parts of life can go on.”

Over the years, I’ve wondered a lot about what made Epstein seem to favor me. As the world has learned from countless others who survived his abuse, Epstein often preferred girls with little to no sexual experience. Many victims have described how he seemed to enjoy watching inexperienced girls suffer the discomfort of being introduced to sex by him, an older stranger. Because I’d been sexually abused before meeting him, I could never give him that satisfaction. I’ve come to believe, though, that I provided something else Epstein needed—something I’d learned from my previous abusers. I knew how to read a room—or Epstein’s face—and to adapt accordingly, becoming what was required in the moment. I could fade into the woodwork, invisible, or I could feign delight. Unlike some of Epstein’s other repeat victims, who got jealous or tried to assert a relationship with him, I was detached and never made demands. Long before I’d met Epstein, I’d been trained to accept whatever affection, if any, I could get. Epstein liked that.

While I have no evidence to prove it, I think it’s also possible that in me, an abused child, Epstein saw a bit of himself. Only once did I question him about his experiences growing up. I knew him well enough not to directly ask: Were you ever abused as a kid? Instead, I carefully inquired whether he’d had a happy upbringing. Sensing where I was heading, I think, he cut me off almost before I finished my question, making clear that was a topic I should never raise again. Years later, when he was asked under oath if he had been sexually abused as a minor, he would refuse to answer, asserting his constitutional right not to incriminate himself. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always believed that during his own childhood, he’d experienced some kind of molestation. If that is true, it doesn’t lessen the awfulness of Epstein’s crimes. But it may help explain them. I know that Epstein was emotionally broken, devoid of any ability to form deep connections to others. But whether he was born that way or was abused in a manner that eroded his capacity for empathy, no one will probably ever know.