Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 14

It was around that time that Tony Figueroa, my boyfriend from middle school, stormed back into my life. I was in my Royal Palm Beach apartment one afternoon when I heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?” I asked, and when he answered, I’d have known that voice anywhere. It had been three years since I’d seen last Tony, before Mom shipped me off to Growing Together, and he’d filled out a bit. His black hair was shorter, and now that he was into rap—Tupac, Biggie, Ja Rule—he dressed in oversized T-shirts and baggy shorts that hung off his ass. But he still had those big brown eyes.

“Damn, girl, you finally answered,” he said, wrapping me in a hug. “I’ve been trying to track you down for months.” Not wanting Michael to find us together, I suggested we go out for a drink. We spent hours talking, easily picking up where we’d so abruptly left off. It’d been a tough couple of years, I told him, but now I had a good job working for a rich guy in Palm Beach. I was intentionally unclear about my duties. Tony listened, then told me about his own struggles. Neither of us seemed to be in a great place, but it felt good to be sitting across from someone who’d known me for so long. When Tony dropped me off that night, I gave him one chaste kiss, but I had a feeling I’d see him again soon.

For months I hadn’t known how to talk to Michael about Epstein and what I did for him, so I said nothing. For some reason, I felt different with Tony. I knew he wouldn’t judge me. As we began spending more time together, I filled in the gaps. Tony wasn’t thrilled to hear what my “job” entailed, of course, but he didn’t blame me for the fucked-up situation. Life had always been hard in Loxahatchee—for him and for me. Weren’t we all just trying to get by? Little by little, just as we had in middle school, Tony and I evolved from being friends to being lovers.

When Michael found out that Tony and I were back together, he was crushed. I made that worse because I didn’t tell him it was over. Instead, he learned the truth when he walked in on Tony and me one night—not my finest hour. Tony and I weren’t in the middle of anything passionate, but still Michael sensed what was up. We had a huge fight—yelling and screaming at each other—and then he left. A few days later, Michael came to retrieve his stuff, and I felt so bad that I let him take all the animals but two: my Chow Chow, Mary-Jane, and a cat named Cougar. Not long after that, Tony moved in.

When I think back on this period, I’m not proud of myself. Even though the adult me knows that the child me was battling just to survive, I wince at how passive I had become. Just like when I was held captive by Eppinger, I was turning more and more to Xanax and other drugs, which were prescribed for me by doctors Maxwell sent me to. Sometimes, when I was really struggling, I took as many as eight Xanax a day. Even then I knew that a girl with more options (and fewer demons) would not be doing what I did for Epstein and Maxwell. And yet I was afraid to break free. Even on days when Epstein was out of town and I had more control over my time, I anesthetized myself by partying hard—drinking, smoking marijuana, and sometimes dropping acid.

Epstein strung me along with the promise that he would introduce me to real massage therapists, who he’d pay to let me apprentice alongside them as they worked on his body. In one instance, when the only massage therapist available on a given day was male, I was actually coached by a talented expert. I remember this man’s showing me how prolonged pressure in a single spot could unknot even the most stubbornly clenched muscle. “Be patient,” this masseur said. “Don’t be afraid to slow down and focus.” I devoured his advice and tried to apply it to my own life. “Maybe if I’m patient, things will get better,” I thought, grateful to be learning.

Except for that single session, however, every other masseuse that Epstein hired to educate me was female, and you can imagine how that went. I remember being in the middle of a session, working beside a woman who seemed to be legit, when Epstein suddenly turned to the woman and commanded: “Take off your clothes.” When she obediently complied, I realized the whole “lesson” had been a sham: one of Epstein’s sick fantasies, brought to life. Epstein had sex with both of us that day, and when I finally got home, I desperately wanted—no, needed—to get stoned. For months now, I’d been doing my damnedest to justify what I was allowing to happen to me—“If I can only endure it, this could lead somewhere good!” Now, I increasingly needed to be numb to get through the day.

My need to feel nothing only grew stronger when Epstein and Maxwell began lending me out to their friends. The first time, Epstein made it sound as if he were launching me on an exciting new phase of my “massage training.” My new “clients,” as Epstein described them, were a man and his pregnant wife. Both needed massages, Epstein said. They were staying at The Breakers, an exclusive Palm Beach hotel not far from El Brillo Way, and Epstein had specific instructions for how I was to treat them. “Be gentle with her,” he said. “Make her comfortable. But save most of your energy for him.” When Epstein said this, I looked up. Did he mean what I thought he meant? “Give him whatever he wants,” Epstein confirmed. “Just like you do for me.” Epstein said he was sending me as an emissary, so how I behaved would reflect on him. It was important that I uphold his reputation.

That night I took a taxi to The Breakers. The man—I’ll call him Billionaire Number One—and his wife were staying in an apartment in the residential section of the vast property. When I arrived, they promptly showed me to the master bedroom, where I would work on the woman first. As a joke, Maxwell had warned me that I could induce premature labor if I massaged the woman’s ankles “in the wrong way.” I believed her and, not knowing any better, was petrified that I might hurt the baby. As the billionaire’s wife undressed, I realized I’d never seen a pregnant woman naked before. Her midsection was swollen, as if she’d swallowed a basketball, and her belly button protruded slightly. I had no massage table with me, so we went to the bed, where I arranged a nest of pillows to bolster her as I rubbed her with the oils I’d brought. I knew nothing about prenatal massage, but I did my best, avoiding her ankles altogether. After about forty-five minutes, the woman said she was going to go to sleep and asked me to turn off the light. I did so and exited quietly, much as I did each night with Epstein.

The apartment was dark when I emerged, and I had to tiptoe around a bit before I found Billionaire Number One in a sitting-room area, taking off his clothes. There was a throw rug on the floor, and he lay down on it naked, facing up. I asked him to turn over, hoping against hope that a massage was all this stranger was expecting. Working on the floor was more difficult than on a table or a bed, but I was intent on doing a good job. Nearly four hours after I’d arrived at the apartment, I was still kneading the man’s muscles when he looked up, groaned, and asked me, “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable working in the nude?” I was disappointed, but not surprised. We had sex on the floor, and afterward, he tipped me a hundred dollars. As I left that night, I felt that familiar scooped-out, empty feeling. But I must’ve been getting used to it because as I sat in the back of a taxi, headed home, the main thing I was thinking about was Epstein: “He’ll be happy that I did what he asked.”

The next morning, my phone rang. I was to come to El Brillo Way for lunch. When I arrived, I headed to the pool, where Epstein sat on a chaise longue, surrounded by paperwork. “How did it go?” he asked, as if having sex with a stranger were a final exam, or a root canal, or some other everyday activity. I told him I’d done everything that anyone required of me and that his friends seemed satisfied. He grinned then, popped a red grape in his mouth, and walked back to his office. I had pleased him. And I was dismissed.

I need a breather. I bet you do too. So I now interrupt our grim chronology to take you to a place that Robbie and the kids and I have gone many times when we needed a fun family outing: Fremantle Prison. You may wonder what could possibly be fun about a prison, but remember, I have two boys and a girl who’s as tough as any boy. My kids know that their country of origin started off as a penal colony when the British, responding to overcrowded prisons in England, began sending convicts to Western Australia in 1850. Alex, Tyler, and Ellie are fascinated by the idea that these earliest arrivals were forced first to build the very walls that would imprison them and later to construct several cellblocks, a gatehouse, and a labyrinth of tunnels too. My kids love it when our tour guide asks for a volunteer to be cuffed to the flogging post, where misbehaving prisoners got lashed with a cat-o’-nine-tails, or when visitors are offered the chance to be locked (just for ten seconds) in a pitch-black isolation cell.

“That does my head in,” Robbie announces, laughing as he and the kids emerge from this claustrophobic chamber. I never accompany them, preferring to wait in the low-ceilinged hallway outside, hugging my French bulldog Juno, who wears an “Emotional Support Animal” harness on these trips. But through my children, I still experience the thrill.

Fremantle Prison is the Giuffre family’s favorite spooky haunted house. All five of us have gone on its Torchlight Tour, which commences after dark and makes my kids all giggle and shiver with its ghost stories about inmates who died inside. No matter what time of day we visit, as we wander around the prison grounds, we shudder at what it was like to live in this stone fortress with no plumbing or electricity. And yet some within those walls found a way to keep their hopes alive—like James Walsh, an inmate who escaped without ever leaving. Locked inside Cell #833 in about 1860, Walsh—who was serving eight years for forging a one-pound note—used the brass buttons of his prison uniform to scrape intricate, classically styled artworks onto every inch of the walls. These detailed drawings were hidden for almost a century, the tour guide tells us. They were only discovered in 1964, when a clumsy prison officer bumped into the wall of the storeroom that had been Walsh’s cell, chipping the whitewash and revealing what lay beneath.

When I stand inside Cell #833 today, looking at Walsh’s drawings of religious figures, scenes from Roman and Greek mythology, and images of Queen Victoria, I think to myself: “This man’s body never broke free of Fremantle Prison, but his soul certainly did.” Looking back on my years with Epstein and Maxwell, I sometimes marvel at how I managed to endure how they treated me. But seeing what Walsh accomplished makes me realize: there’s something within all of us, even when we’re not aware of it, that fights to keep our spirits alive.

Epstein liked to share with me what he insisted were “scientific” justifications for his yearnings for young girls. For example, he would only have sex with girls who had started menstruating. Why? So he could assert that—since they were biologically able to bear children—they were “of age.” I was flabbergasted when he said this stuff, but I held my tongue. No matter how young a girl looked, or how sexually inexperienced she was, if she had her period, he felt he could defend his abuse of her as part of the natural order of things. I was never sure who he imagined making this argument to—the girls themselves? his business associates? law-enforcement officers? himself?—but it was clear that he took a certain glee in what he saw as a loophole in society’s moral code. The fact that different nations and states define the age of consent differently (in Florida it’s eighteen; in New York it’s seventeen; in England it’s sixteen) only gave him ammunition. He said these inconsistencies proved these laws were arbitrary and meaningless; no one could convince him that sex with minors was wrong, because no one could agree on what a minor was! Epstein also claimed that because women, unlike men, can have multiple orgasms, that meant they were supposed to have multiple sexual partners as well. His logic was loopy, propped up by pseudoscience, but he presented it as reality. I never challenged him. It was easier to pretend to believe him.

Early on, he’d made clear that during sexual encounters, I should appear to be enjoying what he did to me or what he made me do to him. “I want bubbly and energetic,” he said. “Nobody wants a dead horse.” So when he’d ask me questions about my body’s response to him—to describe having an orgasm, say—I would do so, even though most times, I had faked it and had to lie. Of course, sometimes there was so much stimulation from vibrators or sex toys, particularly during the orgies that Epstein liked to orchestrate, that I couldn’t help but climax. When that happened, it sparked confusing feelings in me, just as it had in my childhood. Did having an orgasm mean I was a willing participant? I suspected that it did, and that only increased my self-loathing.

A pattern was emerging: during my off-hours, I was so eager to forget what was happening with Epstein that I spent most of the time stoned. I told myself I was just “being a normal teenager,” but the truth was that I was self-medicating. Usually it was Xanax, but now I was occasionally taking Ecstasy as well. In general, Epstein disapproved of nonprescription drugs, but when I told him that Ecstasy decreased sexual inhibition and increased pleasure—“it made me want to pet anything furry,” I said—he pressured me to take it again, but this time in his presence. I remember he was thrilled when, in that day’s session, I acted more enthusiastic than usual. But later, after the drug wore off, I felt even more terrible about myself. Flashes of my own lusty, promiscuous behavior kept popping into my mind, and that made me nauseous and humiliated. For those hours at least, I had become the “naughty girl” he’d told me he wanted the first day we met. What was happening to me?

One thing that was happening, and with increasing regularity, was that I was being sexually trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell. The second person I was lent out to was a psychology professor whose research Epstein was helping to fund. This time I flew commercial to Saint Thomas, then was ferried by boat to Epstein’s island, where the professor met me. He was a quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair, and from his nervous affect, it seemed he wasn’t used to being with women. Alone on the island except for a housekeeper, we spent two days riding Jet Skis and hiking and swimming. The man never asked directly for sex, but Epstein had made clear that was what he expected me to provide. “Keep him happy, like you did with your first client,” Epstein had said.

So when the professor asked at one point for “one of your famous massages that Jeffrey has told me so much about,” I complied, taking him to a cabana and giving him a rubdown that ended with intercourse. We only had sex once, though. The next night, the man told me he wanted to watch movies instead. I showed him how to use the remote control on Epstein’s largest TV and how to turn it off when he was done, and I went to bed. I was glad for the night off, but I remember feeling worried that I’d somehow disappointed the professor in a way that he’d share with Epstein.

The psychologist was only the first of many academics from prestigious universities who I was forced to service sexually. I didn’t know it then, but Epstein had spent years campaigning to keep company with the world’s biggest thinkers and bestselling scientific authors—among them the physicist who discovered the quark, for example, and the computer scientist who consulted with Stanley Kubrick for his iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey . At one point, Epstein would even host the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, among others, at a symposium organized around the question “What is gravity?” Epstein had convinced himself that he—a college dropout—was on the same level as degree-holding innovators and theoreticians, and because he funded many of their research projects and flew them around on his jets, he was largely welcomed into their fold. Then Epstein offered some of them a bonus: sex with one of us girls. In the coming months, I would be told to service many men whom I’d later learn were illustrious in their fields. On any given night, Epstein would tell me to wait in the massage room until one of these strangers entered, clearly expecting sex.

Scientists weren’t the only people Epstein used his vast resources to win access to—which is how I came to be trafficked to a multitude of powerful men. Among them were a gubernatorial candidate who was soon to win election in a Western state and a former US senator. Since Epstein usually neglected to introduce me to these men by name, or introduce them at all, I would only learn who some of them were years later, when I studied photographs of Epstein’s associates and recognized the faces of those I was forced to have sex with.

There were several of these men whose names I knew well, however, because they visited Epstein’s homes so frequently.

For example, the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, an old friend of Maxwell’s, raped me repeatedly in New York and on Epstein’s island. Brunel, who was then in his fifties, was hard to miss—he favored loud clothing in bright colors and polka-dot or paisley prints. Brunel ran MC2, a modeling agency that Epstein had invested in, and he was known not only for preying on the girls he represented but also for providing girls to other men. Epstein liked to boast that he’d had sex with more than a thousand girls supplied by Brunel. On one occasion, Epstein told me, Brunel sent him three French twelve-year-olds—I think they were triplets—for his birthday. Epstein had sex with them, then put them on a plane back to France. On another occasion, Brunel had a group of “talent” scouts fly to Brazil in Epstein’s jet to recruit underage girls off the soccer fields there. They were delivered to Epstein for his use and then returned to Brazil.

Epstein and Maxwell, in turn, gave me to Brunel to use again and again. Sometimes we all had sex together. I’ll never forgot how Epstein and Brunel looked at one another as they abused girls side by side. They were truly gloating, taking a mutual malignant pleasure in our misfortune.

Once Maxwell and Epstein had started trafficking me to strange men, I often wondered what they stood to gain. One theory is that they trafficked girls to some of their powerful acquaintances in the hope of being owed future favors. My impression of many of these men is that they didn’t know how to pursue women. Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people. By giving them obedient girls, Epstein eliminated their need to persuade or entice potential sexual partners, and they were grateful for it. Another theory—which is supported by the fact that Epstein’s houses were all outfitted with video cameras in every room—is that he wanted to record men in compromising positions in order to blackmail them later. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that Epstein kept a huge library of videotapes that had been recorded inside his houses. In the Manhattan townhouse, Epstein himself showed me the room in which he monitored and recorded the camera feeds. [*]

It probably goes without saying that, given what my father and his friend Forrest had done to me when I was a child, being trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell was painfully triggering. To the extent that I saw the two of them as pseudo-parental figures, their disregard for my welfare as they lent me out for sex made me feel a familiar strain of worthlessness. But at times that familiarity was weirdly comforting. This is complicated to explain, but that echo of past hurts was somehow bearable to me because I’d felt it—and somehow endured it—so many times before. It was like finding myself once more in a room I’d lived in for years. I hated that room, but I knew its contours—the shape of its windows, the nap of its carpet beneath my feet, the click of the door lock when it was thrown. I knew I could exist in that room because I’d existed there before. At that point, at least, this made me feel less afraid.

I had other complex feelings. Just as I had as a seven-year-old, the seventeen-year-old me wanted praise from my overseers, and I often got it. Returning from trips to service other men, I’d be greeted not only with money but with something I wanted more. “We’re proud of you,” Epstein would say, and despite my shame and embarrassment, I’d feel something I thought was contentment. That knot of contradictory feelings would take me years to untangle.

Skip Notes

* To date, no one has come forward to publicly assert that Epstein blackmailed them with a compromising videotape he’d taken in his homes (though of course that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen). However, in 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that on one occasion, Epstein did attempt to pressure Bill Gates into participating in a multibillion-dollar charity fund he tried to start by threatening to reveal a past extramarital affair. Gates didn’t do what Epstein asked. But that report demonstrated for the first time what many have suspected: that Epstein was capable of such manipulation. Meanwhile, another woman who was victimized by Epstein, Lisa Phillips, has stated that she once asked Epstein why he’d encouraged a friend of hers to have sex with Prince Andrew. His response, she recalled: “It’s good to have things on people.”