Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 25

Convinced by Petra’s prediction that our third child would be a girl, I set about decorating a nursery I’d dreamed of creating since I was a child. One wall was painted watermelon pink, and the crib was surrounded by fairies and teddy bears. In contrast to Alex and Tyler, who’d slept in borrowed bassinets and worn hand-me-down clothing, this baby had a mom who had the ability to splurge. Walking into a baby store near our house, I told the salesclerk I was looking for “everything princess.”

In January 2010, seven days after my due date, we left Tyler and Alex with Robbie’s parents and headed to the hospital so they could induce labor. The next morning, at 2:54 a.m., Ellie Grace Giuffre was born. She had a lot of dark hair and bright blue eyes. When the midwife placed her in my arms, I burst into tears. My daughter was just that beautiful to me. Three days later, we came home from the hospital, and in February, we moved into the new house we’d bought on 50 Bundeena Road. At the age of twenty-six, I was now a homeowner and mother of three, with all my kids under the age of four.

Ellie came into the world determined to take charge. When she got hungry or tired, she didn’t cry, as most babies do. She screamed in a way that sounded as if she were giving orders. “You’ve definitely taken after the Giuffre side of the gene pool,” I wrote in her baby book. “Aye Aye Aye you’re 95% Sicilian, I’m sure of it! The loudest, most head strong baby, just like Daddy.” I breastfed her for just three weeks before it was too much on top of taking care of her older brothers, but that was okay with her. From the start, she was eager to grow up. Even as an infant, it seemed, she wanted to be seen as equal to her older siblings. When I put all three of them in the bathtub together, and Tyler and Alex would help me wash Ellie’s hair, she held court. She’d sit in the middle, not even half their size, and use her brothers’ much-bigger bodies to bolster herself, but if she set her sights on a particular bath toy, they both knew better than to deny her. When we’d batted around ideas for what to name her, I’d read that the Greek origin of Ellie meant “shining light.” That fit. She was impossible to ignore. I’d been eager to have a princess, but my daughter behaved like a queen.

I know all parents think their babies are beauties, but Ellie really was one. She had impossibly long eyelashes and an impish smile, and as I held her in my arms, I realized I felt different becoming the mother of a girl. I adored my sons, but their births hadn’t sent me on a trip down memory lane. Ellie’s did. Looking at her, I could picture myself as the vulnerable girl I’d once been. I knew what could happen to Ellie because it had happened to me. From the start, having a daughter changed me, awakening something fierce down deep inside.

I began talking to Robbie about wanting to do more to stop powerful men like Epstein from victimizing others. Ever since I’d met the lawyers who’d filed my civil claim against him, anger had been building inside me. For so long, I’d tried to forget—to throw my memories in the back of the garbage can in my head. “I wanted to move on with my life—to move past those memories,” I told Robbie. “But you know what? They won’t go away. And now Epstein has gotten away with everything, and I’m pissed off.” I wasn’t sure what, exactly, one woman could do. But just as I’d discussed with the Josefsbergs, I was now talking to Robbie more and more about my stepping forward in some public way. We knew too well what some daughters were forced to endure. What could we , the parents of our own daughter, do about that? I remembered how Ruth Menor, my childhood mentor, had started her nonprofit Vinceremos with just one horse. Could I create something like that, but for people like me? Sometimes after the kids were in bed, Robbie and I would whisper our fears and hopes to each other before falling asleep. Increasingly, I was feeling I needed to play a more active role in holding those who had abused me accountable.

At the same time, I was trying to heal the rift with my father. I know that may sound counterintuitive, or even insane—that at the very moment I was pondering how to be more assertive in taking on predators, I was reaching out to the first man who had preyed on me. I now know that it is common for survivors of abuse to try to “fix” their pasts by continuing to engage with their abusers. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I wanted things to be okay with my dad—and with my mom too.

Just before his granddaughter turned three months old, in March 2010, my dad came to Australia for a second time to meet Tyler and Ellie. But this visit was rockier. Knowing my dad was good at fixing things, I suggested he and Robbie build a deck around the tiny pool in our backyard, and that kept the peace for a few days. Robbie’s birthday was coming up, and I was determined to get him a small fishing boat because he’d told me how much he’d loved fishing as a kid. So I asked my dad for help picking out the right boat. So far, so good.

But then Dad started crossing little lines. I tended to avoid his touch, but he would come up to me in the kitchen while I was cooking and try to hold my hand or would insist on dancing with me. Robbie was seething. “I wouldn’t do that with my daughter,” he said, through gritted teeth, when we were alone. I didn’t defend my dad but asked Robbie not to make a big deal of it. Then, one night, my dad started showing us sexually explicit photographs on his phone. The people in the photos appeared to be adults, but the images were still disturbing. Seeing my father smirking and trying to get me to look, Robbie completely lost it. “Why are you showing naked pictures to my wife?” he demanded, and when my dad got huffy, Robbie went off. “I know you’re a fucking pedophile, and you need to get out of my house.” Were it not for me, standing in the middle, they would have hit each other. Robbie was screaming, and my dad was screaming back, refusing to retreat. Finally, I took hold of my dad’s arm and dragged him to the front door. “Robbie, please calm down!” I begged. “I will get rid of him.” Somehow I got Dad in the car and drove him to a lake, ten minutes from our house, where I knew there were cabins for rent.

I booked Dad into a cabin and told him to stay put. I probably should have slammed the door behind me as I left for home, but I didn’t. Instead, I promised to visit him again before his flight back to the United States. I paid to change his itinerary, since he was leaving before he’d planned, and of course paid for the cabin too. I guess I still was trying to prove that I was a good daughter. Even then, I needed his approval. Only after Dad finally left did Robbie and I breathe easier.

To commemorate Ellie’s birth, Robbie had gotten a new tattoo on his ribs—an affirmation, he said, of the family we’d built. I’d watched him design it for months. At the top, just under his left armpit, were the words “Twin Flame,” because we were a team, he said. Two large figures, a man and woman, embraced below—“yin and yang,” he explained—and they were surrounded by fire. “The flames signify the intensity of our love,” Robbie told me, “but also the hardships that test any relationship that is based on the truth.” At the bottom of his rib cage, right above his waist, he’d added in beautiful script, “In Love With Jenna G.”

Life went on. Every once in a while, I’d be reading the news or watching TV when I’d stumble across a name or a face that I recognized. Numerous other well-known men who Epstein and Maxwell had forced me to service sexually would pop up in my newsfeed. Almost as disorienting was when I’d see a photo in the newspaper of some other boldfaced name who hadn’t abused me but whom I clearly remembered meeting. Bill Clinton would be in the news—traveling to Haiti with George W. Bush, say, to coordinate recovery efforts after a terrible earthquake—and I’d flash on the hard-to-believe fact that once, in what felt like a former life, I had actually met this man who’d served as commander in chief.

Unbeknownst to me, meanwhile, a journalist named Sharon Churcher had begun trying to determine the identity of Jane Doe 102, the pseudonym I’d used in my civil suit against Epstein. First, she reached out to a Florida attorney named Brad Edwards, who was representing several of Epstein’s victims. Edwards had figured out my identity because my name appeared repeatedly on various pieces of evidence he’d collected. He also knew from his sources that I’d been lent out for sex with others. In his 2020 book, Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein , Edwards wrote that he believed that because I’d traveled extensively with Epstein, and had been trafficked broadly by him, I “held the key to unlocking another level of Epstein’s depravity.” He wanted to speak with me, so he passed along the few leads he had to Churcher. “If some dogged reporter was willing to take a chance traveling across the world to knock on her door,” he wrote, “I was happy to share what I knew.”

Churcher, who worked for the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail , was nothing if not dogged. First, she tracked down Tony Figueroa, who was then living in Georgia. Tony told her my father’s name and where he thought Dad resided in Florida. My father had temporarily returned to California at this point, but Churcher eventually found him. She called and left a phone message, which Dad then passed on to me.

Discovering that a reporter wanted to hear my side, after all this time, was at once validating and terrifying. Robbie and I had been talking for months about what my role could be if I shed my anonymity and spoke out against Epstein and Maxwell. More and more, I thought I was ready. I had done so much healing, and I thought other victims of sexual abuse—those hurt by Epstein and Maxwell, of course, but also by others, too—might benefit from hearing what I’d experienced and how I’d survived. Also, I was furious about how small a price Epstein and his crew were paying for what they’d done. And yet I hesitated. I’d worked so hard to build a life that wasn’t tied to Epstein and Maxwell. I was still afraid of them and the other abusers they had enabled. Unsure whether I could go through with an interview, I sent Churcher an open-ended email.

“Hi Sharon,” I wrote on February 4, 2011. “My Father, Sky Roberts, informed me of your call and I thought I’d send you my contact details so we can get in touch.”

Churcher called right away, and from the start, she has said, my voice sounded “shaky but determined.” We were speaking off the record, and I warned her I might never switch from off to on. She said she understood, even as she kept pressing me. She asked about how I’d been recruited into Epstein’s world and probed for other details about my experience with Epstein and Maxwell, but it was clear she was particularly interested in which of their friends I’d been forced to have sex with. In my lawsuit, I’d referred to Epstein’s “adult male peers, including royalty.” Because Churcher worked for a British tabloid, anything royal was catnip to her. Who, she asked, was that a reference to? Prince Andrew, I said.

“Do you have anything to back this up?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I think I still have a photo of him and me together.”

That was all Churcher needed to hear. She booked flights from her home in New York to Sydney. From there, she rented a car and drove ninety minutes to our front door. She’s said she didn’t sleep during the entire twenty-four-hour journey because she worried I wouldn’t be able to find the photograph I’d mentioned. But her jet lag evaporated when I greeted her at my front door with an envelope that I’d stashed in one of our bookcases. Inside were several snapshots from my time with Epstein and Maxwell. The photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around me was among them.

Churcher had asked me over the phone to write down what I could remember of my time with Prince Andrew, and I gave those handwritten pages to her when she arrived. Then she and I sat outside in the backyard and began talking. I was still on the fence about whether I would give her permission to use the material I was sharing, but I figured I’d tell her what I knew, and she could tell me what interested her most. While much of the chronology was disturbing to talk about, it felt good to lift the veil on so much that had been hidden. Churcher had brought about forty photos of various men in Epstein’s circle, and she asked me which ones had abused me. I have always been a visual person, by which I mean that my mind attaches to images more than it does to words. Being presented with these photos, then, felt surreal. Some of the men were utter strangers to me, but my abusers’ faces I recognized instantly, as if I’d seen them yesterday, and I pointed out several.

Churcher acted like a friend who cared about me. I felt as if I could trust her. On one of our days together, I remember we went to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Terrigal, where Churcher was staying, and met up with a photographer, Michael Thomas. He took about thirty frames of the Prince Andrew photo, front and back. He also took several portraits of me posing at a nearby park. Still, however, I wasn’t sure I would give my permission for the Mail to publish either my story or my likeness.

Robbie and I saw both the pros and cons of letting the Mail run my story. It galled us how Epstein had gotten off nearly scot-free. But we both knew our lives would change forever if I revealed that I was Jane Doe 102. I told Churcher that I had already seen shady characters hanging around our house and that I believed Epstein had sent them to intimidate me into staying silent. The stalkers had had the desired effect: I was scared. I didn’t want to let Epstein win, but I couldn’t decide what to do.

Then I stumbled upon a photo of Epstein walking in New York’s Central Park with Prince Andrew. Another British tabloid, News of the World, had taken the photo after a days-long stakeout, and on February 20, 2011, they published it for the first time under the headline “Prince Andy and the Paedo.” Soon the photo was being reprinted around the world—including in the former British colony where I lived: Australia. I was of course revolted to see two of my abusers together, out for a stroll. But mostly I was amazed that a member of the royal family would be stupid enough to appear in public with Epstein. When Maxwell had first arranged for me to have sex with Prince Andrew in London in 2001, Epstein was still largely concealing his predilection for young girls behind closed doors or on his private island. But by 2011, everyone knew that Epstein—though he’d gotten off with a light sentence—was a convicted sex offender. Seeing this new photo of Prince Andrew at Epstein’s side made “Randy Andy” seem even more arrogant to me.

The Central Park photo had been taken during a four-day visit Prince Andrew had paid Epstein at the end of 2010. The prince stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, where Epstein had even thrown the prince a party, which I also read a squib about. A powerful publicist named Peggy Siegal had helped wrangle the guest list, which included CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric, the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the talk-show host Charlie Rose, the Good Morning America coanchor George Stephanopoulos, the director Woody Allen, and Allen’s wife (the daughter of his former partner, Mia Farrow), Soon-Yi Previn. It seemed that being a sex offender had not eroded Epstein’s social cachet one bit. [*]

The one-two punch of the photo in Central Park and the details of that A-list party knocked me off the fence I’d been straddling. I told Churcher I’d go on the record. Her first article based on our interviews ran in the Mail on Sunday on February 27, 2011, under the headline “Prince Andrew and the 17-Year-Old Girl His Sex Offender Friend Flew to Britain to Meet Him.” That article made clear that I was Jane Doe 102 and accused Epstein of trafficking me to several unnamed men—“a well-known businessman (whose pregnant wife was asleep in the next room), a world-renowned scientist, a respected liberal politician and a foreign head of state”—but stopped short of explicitly including Prince Andrew in that list. I’d told Churcher all the details of my time with Prince Andrew, but the Mail ’s lawyers worried they’d be sued if she included them. Instead, Churcher repeated my lawsuit’s claim of my having been trafficked to “royalty,” then described everything about my first meeting Andrew in London except the sex. I guess she figured the Mail ’s subscribers could read between the lines. Churcher also noted I’d met the prince a second time in Manhattan and a third time in the Caribbean. Alongside the article, the Daily Mail published the photo Epstein had taken of the prince and me.

I accepted $160,000 for the use of that photo and agreed that I wouldn’t talk to anyone else for three months. Later, after the Daily Mail syndicated the photo, I received about $4,000 more. Today I understand what I didn’t then: that taking money from a tabloid publication for an interview or for use of a photo discredits the story even if it’s entirely accurate. The fact that I received that Daily Mail payment has been used against me repeatedly to undermine the truth of my story. I’ve been cast as a person who made things up for profit, when in fact I naively thought that being paid for telling your story was typical. I’ve never been paid for an interview again.

Reading that first story Churcher wrote was hard for me. On the one hand, the tone of the piece sometimes made me sound as if I loved being in Maxwell and Epstein’s rarefied world. I was quoted talking about the jewelry Epstein bought me—“Diamonds were his favorite”—and I was described as “delighted” (a word I’d never used) to be asked to travel with him. At one point, Churcher quoted me as having said, “I was a pedophile’s dream”—which is a spicy soundbite, I guess, but something I would never say. On the other hand, though, it felt good to be standing up for myself. I’d told the story of how Maxwell recruited me at Mar-a-Lago, and I’d made it clear that she was a key player in Epstein’s sexual pyramid scheme. Calling out Epstein and Maxwell after so many years felt a little like flinging open the windows to air out a musty, foul-smelling room. I hoped it might do some good. Speaking about the recent photograph of Epstein and the prince in Central Park, I’d told Churcher: “I am appalled. To me, it’s saying, ‘We are above the law.’ ” Talking to Churcher was my first attempt to try to bring these people back down to earth with the rest of us.

Several days later, the Daily Mail published a second story based on my interviews with Churcher. The headline: “Teenage Girl Recruited by Paedophile JE Reveals How She Twice Met Bill Clinton.” Right away, the article noted that I had never been “lent out” to the former president. But I guess the Mail found it newsworthy simply that I’d witnessed Epstein and Clinton together. “Jeffrey had told me that they were good friends,” I’m quoted as saying. “I asked, ‘How come?’ and he laughed and said, ‘He owes me some favors.’ ” The story also named other well-known acquaintances of Epstein’s, including Senator George Mitchell, then President Obama’s Middle East peace envoy, and Ehud Barak, then Israel’s defense secretary. Barak’s spokesman confirmed to Churcher that Barak “did attend several small functions in Mr. Epstein’s home in New York.” The story also mentioned that I’d met Al and Tipper Gore while in Epstein’s company, as well as Naomi Campbell and Donald Trump. The article was something of a grab bag of random facts, but it featured some of the portraits Churcher’s photographer had taken of me, next to a stock photo of Clinton.

After the two Daily Mail stories ran, on March 9, 2011, Maxwell issued a statement through her publicist denying “the various allegations about her that have appeared recently in the media.” The statement called the allegations “abhorrent and entirely untrue.” Epstein remained silent.

The British tabloids are fiercely competitive with one another, so despite the fact that Churcher had omitted my married name from her reports, soon other reporters tracked me down. Paparazzi too. (In fact, the media frenzy was so crazy that after Churcher’s first story broke, Robbie and I had to get out of town, taking the kids to stay in a rented bungalow farther north.) They still found me, eventually, but I told everyone, No, thanks, I’d had my say for the time being. Churcher and I were still in touch, though, and she urged me to consider writing a book about my life. The idea appealed to me, and somehow, while running around after our five-year-old, our four-year-old, and our one-year-old, I managed to start writing a draft. Eventually, I completed a 139-page typewritten manuscript I titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club,” in which I told some but not all of my story. I didn’t reveal that my father had abused me, for example. And I fictionalized parts of the narrative because Churcher told me if I did so, I couldn’t be sued. That was entirely false, I now know, but this accounts for why some details in the manuscript—which was never published but which later became part of the public court file—do not align with what actually happened. (I wrote that my third encounter with Prince Andrew, for example, occurred at Zorro Ranch, not where it actually occurred: the Caribbean.) I changed those details on purpose, thinking (wrongly) that I was protecting myself.

Some critics have used my 2011 manuscript—just as they used the fact that I accepted payment from the Mail— to imply that I was telling my story (or exaggerating and making things up) to profit from my misery. Instead, my goal was and has always been to try to free myself of some of the memories that haunted me, while also focusing attention on the wrongdoing of my abusers. Just as the teenage me had when I was journaling at Growing Together, the adult me felt better when I grabbed hold of the memories that ricocheted inside my head and got them down on paper.

Back in 2007, Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter had taken his department’s findings about Epstein to the FBI. As I’ve said, I soon heard from someone I thought might be posing as an agent, but I heard nothing more after I hung up on him. Now, four years later, the Daily Mail ’s stories about me led the Bureau straight to my door. On March 17, 2011, the FBI interviewed me for the first time about Epstein at the US consulate in Sydney. The meeting lasted several hours; I wanted to help the investigators, but it was a stressful experience. It was difficult for me to talk about all that I’d experienced in one sitting; I got through it, though sometimes tearfully. Like Churcher, the FBI agents showed me photographs of men’s faces and asked me if I recognized any of them or had been trafficked to any of them. Again, I identified several men who had abused me. Robbie insisted on being by my side during the interview, which was both a plus and a minus. As always, he made me feel safe, but when I described being passed around from man to man to man, my husband got almost as upset as I was. At one point, as the line of questioning got more and more detailed, Robbie completely lost it, lashing out at the federal agents. “You sick perverts,” he yelled. “Do you really need to know every fucking thing that happened in each and every room?!”

I tried to calm him down. “Robbie, they have to ask all their questions,” I said. But when I mentioned even tiny details Robbie hadn’t yet heard, he was gutted. You may wonder why I’d kept things from him. But the truth was that at a certain point in our marriage, he’d said he didn’t want to hear more about my time with Epstein. Now, though, he felt blindsided. “Why didn’t you tell me those things before?” he asked when we got home from the consulate. “Because I don’t want you to know every awful fact,” I told him, stroking his head. “When you close your eyes and go to sleep or when you look at me across the kitchen table or when we are making love, I don’t want you to see some of the things I see.” Robbie was fuming. “I don’t need you to protect me,” he said. “I need you to be straight with me.” But I was adamant. “Robbie, at the end of the day, I’m your wife. And I’d like to remain your wife.” By which I meant: if you let me leave out some things, we will both be happier.

The day after the interview, two FBI agents came to our house, where I handed over twenty photographs taken during my time with Epstein and Maxwell. The photo with Prince Andrew was among them. I also gave them the massage certificates I’d received in Thailand from ITM. The FBI would later send me a compact disc with digital copies of all these items, but I would never get any of the originals back.

Skip Notes

* Only later would it become clear that Epstein had been shunned by at least one powerful person he’d previously wooed: Donald Trump. In their 2020 book called The Grifters’ Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency , journalists Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff, and Jay Weaver reported that Trump ended Epstein’s membership at Mar-a-Lago and banned him from visiting in October 2007, after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member. That was a month after Epstein had entered into the secret nonprosecution agreement with the government but eight months before he made a plea deal.