Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 27

On our eleventh wedding anniversary, in October 2013, Robbie and I moved our three kids and two dogs—Champ and Bear, a hundred-pound Alaskan malamute we’d gotten just after Ellie’s birth—from Australia to Titusville, a city of about forty thousand people in east-central Florida. Titusville is probably best known for its proximity to the Kennedy Space Center, and it’s less than an hour from Orlando. At first we stayed with my brother Danny, his wife, Lanette, and their daughter, Sara. Then we bought our own house on half an acre nearby.

Our new house had two stories, with a screened-in porch and a two-car garage. But my favorite part was the backyard; dominated by a gargantuan oak tree, draped in Spanish moss, it backed up to a canal. Every day, I’d take the kids down to watch the turtles and feed the ducks. Robbie and I made friends with our neighbors, a retired minister and her husband. And our location was ideal: I was a three-hour drive from Brad Edwards’s Fort Lauderdale office and just ten minutes from Danny. Soon my little brother, Skydy, and his girlfriend moved in with us for a while, which I was thrilled about. It was amazing how quickly we fell back into our old teasing routines (I’d call him Stupid Head, he’d call me Sissie). It felt good to have my family around me again.

We enrolled the kids in school, and for a moment, it seemed they couldn’t have been happier. I began looking for work as a bartender and briefly took a job at a closed-down restaurant that someone was trying to reopen. That’s about the time we discovered that the local schools were terribly overcrowded. Our kids kept coming home and talking about how they weren’t allowed to ask questions in class; the teachers were struggling just to maintain control. I took a leap of faith: we’d try homeschooling. I threw myself into keeping the kids engaged. We’d go to the beach or explore the local tidal pools. We were regulars at the nearby Manatee Observation Deck, where we watched those huge mammals eat seagrass. Some days I’d play classical music in the kitchen until the kids finished their lessons. Other days would be all Eminem, all the time. Alex in particular loved Eminem. Even at seven years old, he’d run around the living room rapping. “I’m not afraid,” he’d squeal, and I’d echo him, just as in the song. “To take a stand,” he’d call out, and I’d repeat it.

Moving back to the Sunshine State also put me nearer to my dad, who had come back to Florida from California. He now lived in a triple-wide mobile home in Summerfield, about a hundred miles to the east. I tried to see this as an opportunity: for all Dad’s faults, I wanted my kids to know their grandpa. Robbie was down on the idea, but I promised him I could manage my father. “He has good qualities,” I said. My husband was skeptical, but he went along with my plan at first. For a while, I thought I was making it work—taking the kids to visit Dad and letting them see the playful, fun side of him. Alex loved being a passenger when my dad fired up his riding lawnmower and took it for a spin around his yard. Tyler was transfixed by Dad’s PeeWee 500 minimotorcycle. When we bought Ellie her first horse—a cantankerous animal we called Angel, although she was anything but—we kept her in Dad’s barn. I was flooded with memories of how Dad and I had bonded over horses, and I wanted Ellie to love horses too. When we got a second horse, Copper, he also stayed at Dad’s.

At this point, I asked Brad Edwards to be my lawyer, and as I got to know him, I began to feel as if he were my third brother. Brad had been locking horns with Epstein for years, and man, did he have stories to tell. Once in a court-ordered mediation session, Epstein had tried to be buddy-buddy with him, suggesting conspiratorially: “We should just start breaking the shit out of all these glasses”—he waved at several drinking glasses laid out on a table—“and make everyone think we’re killing each other.” Brad believed there was a part of Epstein that enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game of being investigated; he wanted the world to know what he’d done (but only if he still got away with it). Whenever anyone zeroed in on his culpability, however, Epstein would turn snide. Brad told me that when he’d deposed Epstein in 2010, he’d specifically asked him if he knew a woman named Virginia Roberts. Epstein’s response was to ask condescendingly if Brad would spell my name. Facing more questions about me, Epstein at one point invoked the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees that an individual cannot be forced to provide information that might incriminate him or her. But when Brad asked Epstein, “Is it true you asked Virginia Roberts to have sex with numerous friends of yours?” Epstein couldn’t resist a smug response. “Are you kidding?” he asked, his voice full of disdain.

Much of my early work with Brad and his associate, Brittany Henderson, was a bit like piecing together a puzzle. Like Sharon Churcher and the FBI before them, they assembled an even larger rogues’ gallery of faces to help me identify the men I’d been trafficked to. Again I didn’t recognize many of the men. But others, it was as if I’d preserved their faces in an airtight vault in my head—one that had been waiting to be unlocked. The former governor of a Western state. A respected US senator. And so many scientists. As I’ve said, usually when I was trafficked to these men, Epstein didn’t introduce us or tell me their names or their titles. Some critics have insinuated that there’s no way I could remember these men, given the Xanax and the alcohol that I sometimes relied upon to survive in those years. But to them, I say simply this: When a man has been on top of you, his face just inches from your own, you remember him. You may not remember the exact day, date, or time that the man abused you, but his face stays in your mind, even when you wish it wouldn’t.

For example, I told Brad and Brittany that I recognized Marvin Minsky, the prominent MIT cognitive and computer scientist. It hadn’t been hard for my lawyers to find Minsky’s connections to Epstein. In mid-April 2002, five months before I escaped Epstein’s clutches, the two men had hosted a gathering of twenty scholars in the field of artificial intelligence on Little Saint James. The goal of the three-day conference, called “The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium: Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence,” was to contemplate building a computer resourceful enough to have what the group called “common sense.” Minsky had published a paper about it.

This could have been when I was trafficked to him for the first time. I’m not sure of the date. What I do know is that Minsky was in his seventies then, precisely fifty-six years older than me (we shared a birthday). And I remember what happened: Epstein sent me to a cabana on the beach and told me to service the man inside. I will never forget Minsky’s bald head, and the way his face seemed to have shriveled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples. Throughout my time having sex with Minsky, I could hear the waves lapping outside the little room. I tried to focus only on that sound.

Another prominent man I recognized from his photo was a heralded statesman. He was the oldest person Epstein ever trafficked me to, and I have memories of servicing him in both New York and Palm Beach. I remember this man didn’t talk to me much. He also had trouble getting a full erection, so we did not have intercourse. I performed oral sex on him instead. I had no inkling of this man’s stature (I assumed he was just another scientist). But I knew the man was important to Epstein, because Epstein made a memorable fuss about how gently I was to attend to him. When I was with this man, I never succeeded in getting him to ejaculate, but he enjoyed being touched. Afterward, I massaged his chest, working my way up to his head, and gave him a scalp massage.

For months now, I’d been continuing my sessions with Judith Lightfoot over the phone, and the psychologist had encouraged me to start journaling again. When I told her I was still having recurring nightmares—in one, Epstein sat in a chair, watching me, as I endured something painful—she had an idea. I was to transcribe my worst dreams, ideally right after I woke up from them. Then, when I’d filled up the green spiral notebook she knew I was already scribbling in, I should burn it. Lightfoot believed that recording my worst memories and then destroying what I’d written might help keep my predators’ faces from breaking through my subconscious mind each night. Robbie agreed. He’d always believed in the power of ritual. Soon my notebook was full, and Robbie was building me a bonfire in our backyard.

“Honey, let’s put an end to all that evil,” he said, on the evening we’d chosen to light my worst torments on fire. The kids were in bed, and it was dark in the yard. The orange light of the blaze reflected off both our faces. I was ready. Holding the notebook in my left hand, I used my right to rip out each page. First, I read what I’d written aloud; then, I threw that page into the flames. Eighty-five pages later, I was done. “These men are only in my nightmares,” I said over and over. “They no longer own me.” I could only hope that was true.

In July 2014, Brad and I prepared to fly to New York to meet the famed litigator David Boies. Boies’s firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, was considering joining forces with Brad on his CVRA lawsuit, but before it did so, Boies wanted a face-to-face meeting. Robbie and the kids stayed in Florida—I booked them into a fancy resort in Fort Lauderdale so they could relax while Mom did her job “fighting bad guys.” More and more, I was talking to Alex, Tyler, and Ellie about the wrongs I was trying to right. The details, of course, were too much to share, but I wanted them to know that I believed it was important to stand up to bullies but that, at times, that would mean I would have to be away from them.

When Brad and I arrived in Manhattan, we were four hours early for our meeting, so we had lunch and wandered around the Upper East Side. “You know, we’re pretty close to Epstein’s mansion,” Brad said at one point. “Do you think there’s anyone still working there who might talk to you?” I said the only person might be Epstein’s New York butler, Jojo Fontanilla. I remembered him fondly—he’d helped get me to the hospital that time in 2001, just before I turned eighteen, when I felt as if I were being torn in half. Brad held up a tape recorder with a remote microphone that he’d brought. If we pinned the mic to my blouse, he suggested, maybe I could gather a little intel. “You could just knock and see if Jojo is there,” Brad said. “Want to give it a try?”

I nodded obediently. I so wanted to play a meaningful role in Brad’s campaign to make Epstein pay. But as we got closer, I started to feel sick. It was a beautiful mild day, but my palms were sweating. Standing on the corner of Seventy-First Street and Fifth Avenue, I gathered myself, breathing deeply in and out. “I can do this,” I told Brad. “I’d do anything to push this case forward.” But while bringing pedophiles to justice was an honorable goal, I hadn’t fully realized how hard it would be to return to the epicenters of my trauma. I had been acting tough for Brad because I wanted him to believe I was worth including in his campaign. But I could feel my panic rising, and I realized, “I can’t keep pretending I can lock these feelings away.” Burning my nightmare journals was a good start, but clearly I needed to find more ways to process my worst fears.

As we neared the front door, Brad said it was probably best if he waited across the street. He gave me the recording device, and I turned into the entryway where Epstein’s brass initials, JE, were affixed to the wall and headed up the steps toward his massive front door.

Robbie says sometimes my balls are bigger than my brain, and this was an instance that proves, yet again, that he is right. What was I doing returning to this place where, treated like a piece of meat, I had suffered so much? I wanted to be brave—to have my mere presence assert: “I’m no longer your victim. You didn’t break me.” But now I was nauseous; I could hear my heart beating in my ears. What if they let me in? What if someone inside somehow hurt me again?

I rang the bell, and after a moment, a blond, curly-haired girl who looked nineteen or so answered. I asked for Jojo and gave my name. “He was my driver for a while,” I said. “I just wanted to catch up and see how he’s doing.” The girl closed the door and returned a moment later. Jojo wasn’t there, she said. I’ll never know whether that was true or whether he was just afraid, as I was. Epstein’s employees were all required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and they all knew, as I had known, that there were consequences to disobeying the boss. But while I was relieved to walk back out to the street, at the same time, it stung to get the brush-off. I’d thought that Jojo’s heart might be big enough to at least say hello.

When I rejoined Brad where he was waiting, he could see I was upset. But the look on his face said he was proud of me. “You were willing to go into the lion’s den, Virginia,” he said. Looking back, I’m not sure this exercise was worth the trauma it caused me. But I was determined to be helpful, even to my own detriment.

It was time to go see Boies in his seventh-floor office on Lexington Avenue, near Fifty-First Street. We checked in with the receptionist, and a few minutes later, Boies himself walked through the glass doors behind us. After we all said hello, Boies led Brad and me and another lawyer, named Stan Pottinger, into a large conference room.

I’d heard Boies was a big deal. He’d taken on Microsoft in a landmark antitrust case, represented Al Gore in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, and stood up for the National Basketball Players Association during the 2011 NBA lockout, among a zillion other high-profile cases. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous in his presence. As he took his seat at the head of the table, I started in, thanking him for considering helping us. As for my own motivations, I told him, “I’ve stayed silent for too long, but not anymore. I’m here to help stop Epstein once and for all.”

Boies asked me several questions in his methodical way, and I told him my story. I said my goal was to undo Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement, and Brad chimed in about how he planned to make that happen. When we were done with our spiel, Boies said, “It appears obvious Brad has everything well under control. Where do you see me fitting in?”

It was Brad’s turn to talk. “Epstein should be in jail,” he remembers saying. “My goal is to put him there. He will do anything to stop me. He has a powerful team behind him and unlimited resources to go after me, and Virginia, and anyone who stands up to him…. We’re going to need a heavyweight legal team to counter their attacks.” We needed Boies’s reputation, his clout, and his firm’s resources and expertise. “There will be plenty of room for you,” Brad promised.

Boies didn’t hesitate. “Okay,” he said. “Then I’m in.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a transformative moment, not just for Brad, but for me.

Later that night, Brad and I flew back to Fort Lauderdale, and I rejoined Robbie and the kids. It had been a successful trip, but I was bone tired. Over the next several days, Robbie would tell me I seemed to have regressed, as if by briefly reentering Epstein and Maxwell’s world, I’d reverted to the mindset I’d had when I was their captive. Back home in Titusville, I slept a lot, and Robbie said I didn’t seem able to communicate with him or the kids. I apologized, but in truth, I wasn’t aware of how I was acting. I wanted to be strong—to be a fighter—but part of me was leveled by the effort that required. I guess it made sense: I’d been diagnosed with PTSD. And indeed, I felt shell-shocked, like a soldier who goes back into battle before fully recovering from an earlier ambush.

Other parts of my life, too, were sapping my energy—my attempt to make peace with my dad, for example. I’ll never forget the day Robbie, me, the kids, and my dad went to the Busch Gardens amusement park in Tampa. Usually, Robbie wouldn’t allow me to be alone with Dad—it was an agreement we’d made that we both felt was for the best. But Robbie hates roller coasters, and Dad and I love them, so on this day, the two of us headed off to get in line for the biggest one, which famously went through a lion’s pen before it did twelve upside-down curlicues in the air. It was starting to rain, and the line was moving slowly, when suddenly Dad turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I’m sorry for what I let Forrest do to you. It was wrong. You were just a kid. You’re my baby girl. I always want you in my life. I’m so sad that I put you through everything that you went through.” I remember we were half-standing under an awning then, and it was raining harder, so when I started crying, I wasn’t sure if Dad could see it.

In the days that followed, I felt almost high: Dad had acknowledged what he’d never been willing to before. It didn’t make up for the damage he and Forrest had done to me, but it was still validating. I wanted that to mean a door to reconciliation had opened for the two of us. But then I began to think seriously about my father. He now had several grandchildren, three of them little girls—my Ellie, then Sara, the daughter of my older brother, and my younger brother’s newborn daughter. Even as I had allowed my kids to spend time with Dad, I’d watched over them like a hawk and never left them alone with him—especially Ellie. I wouldn’t take the risk that Dad might hurt her in the way he’d hurt me. Now, all at once, I realized: my brothers didn’t know to take those precautions because I’d never told them what Dad had done to me. I needed to break my silence about Dad.

“We need to have a sit-down,” I told my brothers. I think I met with them separately—that’s what they remember, too. I told them what Dad had done to me when I was seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven years old. Neither one of my brothers wanted to believe me at first, but they could see in my eyes that I couldn’t be making it up. By the end of the night, all of us were in tears.

My revelations caused things to change. First, my older brother confronted Dad. “You’ve got some pretty heavy charges on you in this family,” Danny said. My dad just looked at him with a mousy expression that Danny would later describe as “really weird, embarrassed, but perverted.” Dad neither confirmed nor denied what he’d done—to Danny or to Skydy, who raised the topic soon afterward, when our dad disappeared with Skydy’s daughter while at a Tampa Buccaneers game. Skydy was furious. “Don’t ever walk away with my kids again,” he told Dad, adding, “and you know why, right?” Dad’s response: a blank stare.

Danny told me later that he felt he’d seen a monster inside Dad for the first time—that’s the word he used: monster . After Danny told our dad he would never see his granddaughter Sara again, Dad showed up at the workplace of Danny’s wife, Lanette, and cornered her, blocking her exit. He told her he knew where Sara went to school. “You can’t take her away from me!” he threatened. My older brother was so worried that Dad might try to snatch Sara that he called his daughter’s school and told them that Dad should never be allowed to pick her up ever again. And that was the end of Dad and Danny’s relationship. To this day, they do not speak.

Of course, Dad was mad at me too. Why was it taking me so long, you are probably wondering, to expel him from my life once and for all? That was definitely what Robbie wanted, but I was having trouble setting a firm boundary. I’d warned my brothers, telling them what Dad was capable of. Wasn’t that enough? Then came a telephone call so disturbing that I will never get over it. I remember I was standing on our back porch in Titusville, looking out at the Spanish moss hanging off our big old tree, when the phone rang. When I stepped outside to answer, the caller (who I knew and trusted) told me they had heard that evidence existed indicating that Epstein had paid my father a sum of money way back in 2000, when I was first being trained by Epstein and Maxwell on El Brillo Way. As that was sinking in—had Dad profited from my pain?—the caller asked if I remembered my father getting a financial windfall around that time, but my mind was blank. I did not want to believe this.

After I hung up, I went to tell Robbie what I’d heard. The thought of a father knowingly accepting hush money from the middle-aged predator who was abusing his teenage daughter was horrifying. I felt like I’d gone into shock. But for my husband, this moment was the last straw. If he saw my dad on our property again, he said, he wasn’t sure he could restrain himself. “I want to kill that man,” he said. While I’d fantasized for years about a happy family reunion in Florida, the state was proving too small for the Roberts-Giuffre clan. I’d always told Robbie I wanted him to understand where I came from. Well, now he did, in ways we’d never anticipated. It was time to leave.

When Robbie and I put our minds to something, we get it done. I called a moving company. We rented a minivan and packed our bags. I remember the furniture was already on a truck, heading to Colorado, when I called my father and confronted him. “Dad, I know Epstein paid you off,” I said. There was a brief silence, and then he started yelling at me about being an ungrateful daughter. “Here’s the thing, Dad,” I said. “If one of my kids, God forbid, ever accused me of something as disgusting as this, I would tell them the truth. If I hadn’t done it, I’d say I hadn’t done it. But I’m not hearing you say that. You’re not saying a thing.”

I don’t know if he hung up or I did. I was seething. How many times could this one person fail me? A little more than an hour later, Robbie headed to the backyard to mow our lawn one last time. We were putting our Titusville house on the market, and he wanted it to show well. That meant I was standing inside our empty house alone, looking out at the street, when I saw Dad pull up and get out of his sports car.

I opened the front door, and I could see from the way he was swaggering toward me that he was ready to fight. But I put my hand on his chest and told him he wasn’t coming in. “Dad, I need you to stop,” I said. “Think for a second. Do you want your grandchildren to see you and Robbie down on the floor, trying to kill each other, with blood everywhere? Because that’s what is about to happen. If you don’t turn around right now, I’m calling the police.”

I must have scared him, because he stopped pushing me. I could see Dad looking over my shoulder, registering the lack of furniture in the living room. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We’re moving,” I said. “You’re never going to see us again. This is the last time.”

The look on his face then—I would like to erase it from my memory, but I can’t. It was like his features were collapsing inward, like he was being flattened by an invisible force.

“Can I see my grandchildren?” he stammered.

“No,” I said. “No, you can’t.”

That’s when he started sobbing. My dad has always been good at making me feel bad for him. “You’re my baby girl!” he wailed. “You’ll always be my only baby girl.” That’s Dad: even in the worst situation, he can manipulate things to seem as if they should go in his favor. “If you leave, I’m gonna have no one to look after me,” he said. “Who’s going to take care of me?”

“Dad,” I said, and now I was crying too. “Robbie doesn’t know you’re here. You need to get in your car, and you need to go before he finishes cutting the grass. Because if he comes in and finds you here, I won’t be able to hold him back.” Dad’s eyes darted around, as if he was listening for the sound of the lawnmower. Then he turned, walked to his car, and drove off. And that was the last time I ever saw my father.

A few minutes later, Robbie put the lawnmower in the garage (we were leaving it for the realtor, in case the house took a while to sell). And within an hour, our family was crowded into the minivan, and we were heading west. Our destination: Penrose, Colorado, just south of Colorado Springs. My dad had broken my heart. I was done with him. Now I would try reuniting with Mom.