Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 2

“Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared.”

Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Just a few hours ago, a visit to the Louvre seemed like a brilliant way to cheer myself up. But now the sadness overtakes me. I am so far from home.

It is June 2021, and I am on the second floor of the world’s largest art museum, surrounded by strangers and yet very much alone. It is a weird time to be in Paris, which has just reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, and the streets are largely empty of tourists, who have only now been allowed to fly into France. I look like a tourist—another blond American mom in blue jeans and ballet flats. But I did not come to Paris to sightsee. I am here to do a job that never gets any easier. I’m here to stand up to those who have hurt me. I am here to reclaim my life.

Leaving my hotel this morning, I felt strong. The sun sparkled and the air was warm, as if to make fun of all the sweaters I’d packed. I thought of my husband, Robbie, back in Australia, where we live. I knew he was hosting a sleepover for our three kids and three of their friends, and I could imagine him, frazzled as he telephoned our favorite pizza place and ordered way too many pies. “You are my little warrior,” my husband likes to tell me, and he said it again before I boarded the plane from Perth to Paris. I can’t always see myself as Robbie does, but today as I set off on foot and headed toward the Seine, I felt connected to his fierce ideal of me.

From my hotel on Rue Scribe, I easily found my way to the Avenue de l’Opéra and headed south toward the Louvre. It had been twenty years since I’d walked these streets, but it seemed as if I knew the route. Visiting the museum was a gift I’d decided to give myself: a few hours away from my lawyers and their questions. For days they had been grilling me, and I understood why. In order to maximize the impact of the testimony I was here to give, I had to be focused—ready for anything. But I badly needed a break. When a morning off presented itself, I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Now I made a beeline for the Louvre’s iconic metal and glass pyramid, scanned my ticket, and rode the escalator down. My plan was to relax and wander the galleries, escaping my ugliest memories by immersing myself in pure beauty.

For a while, everything went as I’d imagined. I lost myself in the larger-than-life bronze and marble sculptures, texting my husband photos of The Four Captives , a quartet of soldiers in shackles, and of Hercules fighting an oversized snake. I was in no rush. I figured I’d get to the Mona Lisa eventually. But then, unsure exactly where I was going, I climbed a flight of stairs, turned a corner, and froze. I know this room , screamed a voice inside my head. I’d been in this precise spot before—two decades ago, when I was just seventeen.

The room I am in is painted bloodred and is dominated by a huge tapestry: a depiction of Louis XIV’s garish bed chamber. In 2001, when Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell took the teenage me into this room for the first time, they had been sexually abusing and trafficking me for months. Now I am a thirty-seven-year-old wife and mother—a full-fledged adult—and it’s been two years since Epstein died in jail. Still, I can practically see him standing next to me, admiring the tapestry, whose dark palette he was determined to mimic in the decor of his opulent Manhattan townhouse. In my mind’s eye, I imagine Maxwell beside him, as always. A molester with posh manners and an aristocratic pedigree, “G-Max,” as she called herself, played den mother to Epstein’s dysfunctional family of underage girls. I was one of those girls, and I spent more than twenty-five months in their house of shame. Even decades later, I can still remember how much I feared them both.

My ears are ringing. As I stand here, my rational mind knows that they cannot hurt me anymore: a year after Epstein’s lifeless body was found in his cell, Maxwell was arrested, and at this moment, in 2021, she remains in jail awaiting trial on various charges, including sex trafficking a minor. Yet still I feel haunted by their hungry ghosts. Fighting dizziness, I focus my eyes on the elaborate wall-hanging in front of me. It depicts a young man kneeling before the king, begging forgiveness as a crowd looks on. I glance at my feet, rooted to the parquet floor. My breath catches, and the familiar thrum of a panic attack rolls over me.

Even as a child, I never liked to cause a scene. I would rather envelop my pain, holding the turmoil in my chest, instead of risking more danger by screaming and letting it out. So I stay quiet, trying to soothe myself. I look down at my pretty fingernails—freshly manicured and painted a glossy ivory. I read the bracelet on my left wrist, a gift from a dear friend, that spells out “B-A-D-A-S-S” in lettered beads. I take one careful step and then another. My stomach churns, but I keep going. “ Please ,” I beg without speaking. “Please don’t let me faint in this exquisite place.” I find a bench and sit, looking around for exit signs. “I can make it,” I tell myself—a mantra I’ve relied on so many times before. I know from experience that I should not yet try to run.

Trauma is such a cunning enemy. Those of us who’ve survived its terrors often marvel at how quickly it can recede, at least at first. Once you get to safety, your visible wounds—your cuts, your bruises—heal and fade. Your psyche, too, revives, like a drowning man who, pulled from the depths, somehow spits up dark water and opens his eyes. But recovering victims like me know too well how trauma lurks in the shadows, always there. No matter how many years go by, or how many therapists you see, it can rise, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere. A song on the radio may summon it. Or the scent of a stranger’s cologne. For you, the trigger probably won’t be a wall-size tapestry in the Louvre, but you never know.

I have come to France to stand up to one of Epstein’s coconspirators, the modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. During his years in the modeling business, Brunel became a scout of some renown—he boasted of launching the careers of Jerry Hall, Milla Jovovich, Rebecca Romijn, Sharon Stone, and Christy Turlington. But he was also known to solicit sex from young women whose careers he managed. Now, Brunel is in custody and is awaiting trial on charges of rape, sexual harassment, and human trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation. But lately he’s been asking if he can be free in the months before his court date. That’s why I’ve traveled here from Australia: to help keep Brunel, who procured so many young girls for Epstein, behind bars.

In the sworn testimony I’m here to give, I will assert, as I’ve asserted before, that Brunel repeatedly raped and abused me. While in Paris, I will also connect French prosecutors with other victims of Brunel who have sought me out after seeing me on TV and on social media, and I will turn over my handwritten notes about what he and Epstein and Maxwell put me and others through. French prosecutors tell me I am a critical witness because, unlike many Epstein victims who were abused in a single location, I spent more than two years traveling the world with him and Maxwell. I knew their cruel habits, and those of the men, like Brunel, to whom they trafficked me. I saw these men—endured them—up close.

Can it be any wonder that I struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? But speaking out as I’m doing now costs me more than an anxiety attack or an interrupted outing to an art museum. Coming to Paris to reveal the past means missing out on my life in the present. My fifth grader, Ellie, has her first school dance this weekend and has dyed her gorgeous dark hair purple to protest my absence. (Robbie texted me a photo, and I have to admit it looks pretty good.) Just now, Ellie texted me that she wants to complete her “grunge” outfit with a pair of fishnet stockings, and despite the six-hour time difference, we have scheduled a FaceTime call so I can weigh in, yes or no. When I was a teen, I, too, was a grunge fan, but still: I think fifth grade is a little early for fishnets. While I’m glad that Ellie and I have plans to discuss it, I feel sad our debate will have to be over the phone. If I were home in Perth, I’d commemorate Ellie’s first dance by taking a million photos. Instead, I’ll be fighting loneliness and jet lag in a tiny hotel room nine thousand miles away.

I have to believe, however, that my trip to Paris benefits my kids. Years ago, after a teacher asked one of our children what their mother did for a living, Robbie and I put our heads together and decided that the truth was too complicated, so they should simply answer: “My mom fights bad guys.” Since then, more than one teacher has wrongly assumed I am a cop. I’m not a cop, and I’ve never claimed to be an angel either. But I hope I have done some good. Seeking to silence me, my powerful enemies have threatened to bankrupt me and even to have me killed. I haven’t stopped talking. When I was a sex slave, I had no say. I have promised myself that I will never have “no say” again.

So, did my demons cause me to flee a world-class museum today before I could see my favorite paintings? Yes, they did. Did I retreat afterward to my hotel room to engage in one of my favorite calming rituals: binge-watching that most satisfying of TV’s police procedurals, Law & Order ? Yes, that happened too. But I won’t let demons win. Three days from now, I will return to the Louvre, to sit across from that spooky tapestry and take back possession of that red-walled room. I will ground myself in my hard-won strength. Then afterward I’ll finally track down the Mona Lisa to say a quick hello.

A few days later, I will face off with Brunel in an eight-hour, closed-door hearing, answering the most dehumanizing questions you can imagine about what he—then a man in his midfifties—did to me when I was seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old.

In an interview with NBC News later that same day, I will explain that I gave testimony against Brunel because I wanted him “to know that he no longer has the power over me, that I am a grown woman now, and I’ve decided to hold him accountable for what he did to me and so many others.” Then I will deliver a call to arms that will soon be broadcast around the world. “I’m urging more witnesses—even if it is outside of the statute of limitations—to come forward,” I’ll say, explaining that even something as simple as confirming Brunel’s whereabouts on a particular day can help those who are seeking to convict him of his crimes.

“The judge is listening,” I will say. “The authorities are listening. I’m listening. We want to help put this monster away where he belongs. We can’t do that unless we all work together.”

I know about monsters. As a child, I suffered nearly every kind of abuse: incest, parental neglect, severe corporal punishment, molestation, rape. As a teen, I had been sexually trafficked by another pedophile even before I met Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But these two doubled down on my suffering. In my years with them, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people. I was habitually used and humiliated—and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied. I believed that I might die a sex slave. Then, just after my nineteenth birthday, I met someone who seemed to give a damn about me. I took a chance, and in 2002 I escaped.

As I write this, I have enjoyed twenty-two years of freedom. That period has not always been easy, but I am beyond grateful for it. My life since 2002 has been marked by several turning points, none more important than when, unexpectedly, I became a parent. Doctors had told me that was highly unlikely, but they were wrong. My son Alex came first, then Tyler. I loved being the mom of two boys. But when Robbie and I had our third child, a daughter we named Ellie, I felt something shift inside me. Given what I’ve been through, I know that sexual predators don’t stop until they’re made to stop. For years, however, I’d hung back, hoping someone else would take the lead in holding abusers accountable. Ellie ended that period of passivity. Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I knew I had to act to keep other girls from suffering the way I had. Not long after that, I began to fight.

One of the first things I did was try to answer some hard questions: Was the abuse I suffered merely the result of bad luck? Had my family’s shameful secrets marked me for tragedy? Or is there something going on in our culture that contributed to my bad situation? There has always been evil in the world. But human trafficking—the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act—is particularly venal, especially when the victims are minors. Underreported and understudied, child sex trafficking is not just a problem that exists in Third World countries, as many people mistakenly assume. In America, incidents have been reported in all fifty states. And in recent decades, the internet and social media have made it easier for traffickers to make contact with their victims. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, during the COVID-19 pandemic, predators took advantage of children being even more online, which resulted in a 106 percent increase in cyber-tip-line reports of suspected child sexual exploitation in just one year.

My point: while Jeffrey Epstein is dead and gone, there are many others around the world who are still committing the same kinds of crimes that he did. There are countless victims of sex trafficking who have not yet escaped their exploitative situations, as I was fortunate enough to do. Those girls and boys, women and men, will likely attempt to flee between three and seven times before they succeed, according to recent research. Many of them will not be offered help by a single caring stranger. In America, where only 4 percent of law-enforcement agencies have personnel dedicated to exposing human trafficking, most victims must rely on their own wits, and on luck, to survive.

I want to change that. I want not just to hold abusers accountable but also to challenge the ways that all too often our legal system protects those abusers. It is estimated that most victims of childhood sexual abuse don’t come forward and share their experiences until they are in their forties or later. In my view, survivors of sex trafficking and abuse should be able to seek justice whenever they are ready to do so, but many states have statutes of limitations that make that impossible. These are systemic problems that no single person can solve, which is why it’s so important for survivors to unite. As I said in that NBC interview in Paris in 2021, no matter how weak survivors of sexual abuse are made to feel, we will always be stronger when we work together.

In recent years, bits and pieces of my story have been told and retold by others in countless books, podcasts, interviews, articles, movies, miniseries, and televised specials. But until now, I have never told my whole story. Doing so allows me to fill in gaps, to provide context where it has been sorely lacking, and in key places to set the record straight. Young girls (and boys, too) don’t end up being sexually trafficked in a vacuum. Serial sexual abuse doesn’t happen to them—to us—out of the blue. In many cases, we are first abandoned by those who claim to love us. By describing my history, I hope to help others prevent it from being repeated.

Nobody experiences extreme trauma and emerges unscathed. I certainly haven’t. Even before I met Epstein, I’d experienced awful things that made some observers label me his “perfect victim.” But I was also resilient, or I wouldn’t be here now. I still have night terrors and panic attacks. I still have moments of feeling worthless. Perhaps I always will. But on many days—especially when I’ve been able to help another survivor—I thrive. My hope is that this book can aim some light at the darkness and force it to crawl back into its cave.

Once I was silent, but now I have found my voice. This book is a result of that metamorphosis. Because my husband is right about me: I am a warrior. A warrior with a story to tell.