Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 28

There’s a Kelly Clarkson song that she recorded around this time, and whenever I hear it, I think of how I felt leaving Florida. In “Piece by Piece,” Clarkson describes recovering from wounds her dad inflicted in childhood by finding a sustaining love, as an adult, with a kind, protective husband. “Piece by piece, he filled the holes / that you burned in me at six years old,” she sings fiercely to her father, and I think of Robbie, who restored my faith in family by building a new one with me. And, of course, I think of the man who burned me: my dad.

At thirty-one years old, I’d been fighting most of my life to feel like a worthwhile person. I’d made strides, no doubt, but sometimes all that healing seemed to disappear. At those moments, I felt like a house in a pounding hurricane whose breakaway walls float away when the storm surge gets too deep. Sure, by design, such destruction may help the house survive. But there’s still damage, and until it’s repaired, the house is a mess. That was me for a while after we got on the road to Colorado: an unhappy mess.

It didn’t help that the minivan we were driving was full to bursting with both people and animals. In addition to Robbie, Alex, Tyler, Ellie, and me, we also were transporting several Chinese fighting fish, three ferrets, a cat, three dogs (Bear, Champ, and Odie, an utterly insane Jack Russell terrier we’d adopted in Florida), a snake named Athena, and I don’t even know how many hamsters. What I do know is that our first night on the road, once we’d found a cheap motel to sleep in, we left the fish and the hamsters out in the minivan. The fish froze to death, and the hamsters got loose, never to be seen again.

Now we were heading into unknown territory, both geographically and psychically. Mom and I had been in more frequent touch, but I hadn’t seen her in person for years. I knew she wanted me to flourish, and of course I wanted the same for her. When she’d married again, I hadn’t attended, but I told her I was happy for her, and I meant it. Whenever I’d brought up anything about abuse I’d experienced, she would tell me she just couldn’t bear to talk about the past. For months now, I’d been trying to accept that if I wanted a loving relationship with my mother, I’d just have to take her as she was.

My mom and her husband, Stan, lived in a mobile home in Penrose, a farming and ranching community in Fremont County so rural that it’s categorized not as a town but as a “census-designated place and post office.” With our house sitting unsold in Florida, we were in no position to buy a home. Besides, we weren’t feeling like making any long-term commitments. Instead we found a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house to rent, just two miles away from my mom. I was determined to make a go of getting to know her again.

Robbie and I found a great school for the kids, which, looking back, was perfectly timed. While I’d loved playing “teacher,” the kids were missing the camaraderie of having other kids around. And I was getting too busy for homeschooling, spending more time with Brad Edwards and Brittany Henderson, whom I’d asked to help me create a nonprofit organization to help survivors of sexual trafficking and abuse surmount the shame, silence, and intimidation that victims typically experience. I wasn’t sure exactly what my organization could accomplish, but in December 2014, Brad and Brittany helped me file the paperwork to formally get Victims Refuse Silence, as I then called it, registered as a 501(c)(3).

That same month, Brad and a colleague, former federal judge Paul Cassell, put the finishing touches on the motion that sought for me and another victim to join the lawsuit that Courtney Wild had filed against the US attorney’s office back in 2008. As I’ve said, that suit alleged that the government had failed to protect the rights of Epstein’s victims guaranteed by the CVRA: the right to confer, to have reasonable notice, and to be treated with fairness. In response, the government had argued that those rights did not apply to Wild because no federal charges had ever been filed against Epstein. But the judge in the case rejected that position, which cleared the way for Brad to try to get me and the other victim attached to the case.

Brad knew he had to be careful. He didn’t want the judge to think he was unnecessarily expanding the lawsuit’s scope. But he felt it was important to show there were different kinds of victims who’d been impacted. The other woman he was seeking to add, Jane Doe 4, was one of a dozen or so women whom Brad had identified as victims of Epstein’s underage sex abuse but whose existence the government had never formally acknowledged. That was because the government had stopped investigating when it entered into the broad immunity agreement for Epstein that we found so abhorrent. In the wake of that, Brad had pushed the US attorney’s office to consider these unnamed women as opportunities to go after Epstein again. As Brad wrote in his book, “Because the government, having stopped its investigation, did not know their identities at the time the non-prosecution agreement was signed…there could not possibly be any restriction against filing a new indictment against Epstein for those newly discovered crimes committed against these newly discovered victims. Right?” Wrong. Despite Brad’s urging, no new charges had been brought. That was why he wanted Jane Doe 4 attached to his suit.

He wanted me attached, meanwhile, because unlike the case’s original petitioners, who were abused only in Palm Beach, I’d traveled the world with Epstein and been lent out to several prominent men, some of whom Brad was planning to name. I would be kept anonymous, he said, and referred to as Jane Doe 3.

Brad decided we would file our motion for joinder, as it’s called, the day before New Year’s Eve 2014. He hoped the filing would go unnoticed, given the holiday. And perhaps it would have, but for Josh Gerstein of Politico . On December 31, Gerstein blogged about the filing in general, but mostly about me. “A woman allegedly kept as a sex slave by politically connected billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein, who went to jail for having sex with underage girls, is accusing several prominent friends of the financier of having taken part in the debauchery, according to a new court filing,” Gerstein wrote. “The woman—referred to in court papers as Jane Doe #3—leveled the allegations Tuesday.”

Gerstein’s story went on to quote this part of our filing: “Epstein…trafficked Jane Doe #3 for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to describe the events that she had with these men so that he could potentially blackmail them.”

When the Politico story hit, it unleashed a firestorm of press, and for Maxwell, who we’d referenced by name in the complaint, that was particularly unwelcome. Maxwell had been attempting a reputational makeover by founding the TerraMar Project, a self-described environmental nonprofit organization that was vaguely focused on creating a “global ocean community” (whatever that means) based on the idea of shared ownership of the high seas. She was in the midst of fundraising. So it was no surprise when, on January 2, 2015, Maxwell issued a statement through her publicist identifying me by name and calling me a liar.

“Jane Doe 3 [ sic ] is Virginia Roberts,” the statement began. “The original allegations are not new and have been fully responded to and shown to be untrue,” it went on. “Each time the story is retold it changes with new salacious details about public figures and world leaders…Ms. Roberts’ claims are obvious lies and should be treated as such and not publicized as news, as they are defamatory.”

On January 13, 2015, Sharon Churcher—determined to capitalize on my being back in the news—wrote a misleading news story about the handwritten pages about my time with Prince Andrew that I’d handed her the day we first met in 2011. Photos of those pages—my loopy handwriting on lined paper—accompanied a story by Churcher on the gossip site Radar Online, and its headline couldn’t have been more breathless or error-ridden: “Diary Entries of ‘Teen Sex Slave’ Detail Sordid Hook-Up with Prince Andrew—in Her Own Handwriting.” Billed as a “bombshell world exclusive,” the story was inaccurate in that it described the twenty-four pages I’d given her as a “secret diary” and implied I’d written them as a teenager, when I was with Epstein, not a decade later, when she asked me to. Reading those pages again, I was embarrassed by the girlish tone. But more than that, I was disgusted by Churcher. Once I’d believed she was my friend; now I saw she was nothing but a bottom-feeder. How long, I wondered, would she try to dine out on her years-old interviews with me?

It’s no fun being called a liar. It sucks to be the subject of erroneous muckraking. Dr. Lightfoot, my psychologist, had taught me breathing exercises to help with my anxiety attacks, but in these weeks right after the joinder motion, it was all I could do to not hyperventilate.

But then something amazing happened. Boies had a colleague in his firm’s Fort Lauderdale office named Sigrid McCawley. She’d been on maternity leave after having her fourth child, and as she was preparing to return to work, Boies mentioned my case to her. While her background was in contractual and securities litigation, McCawley had volunteered for years on behalf of abused women and foster children. When the CVRA case put me squarely in the spotlight in early 2015, Boies reached out to McCawley and asked her to meet me. I flew to New York, and the moment I met McCawley, a striking, willowy blond with an assertive demeanor, my life changed for the better.

I’d always be grateful for Brad Edwards. He’d been the first lawyer to stand up for me; he’d taught me so much, and he would continue to do so. But in Siggy, as I’d begun calling McCawley after hearing her mom use this nickname, I felt as if I’d found a sister in arms: smart, fearless, relentless. Together, David Boies, Brad, and Siggy were the legal dream team I needed to begin truly holding my abusers to account.

Not that doing so was going to be easy. Can you remember America before the #MeToo movement? As I write this, it’s been less than seven years since three brave reporters and their sources sparked a conversation about sexual harassment, assault, gender, and power by revealing countless bad acts by movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Still, many have forgotten how dangerous it was then for women to confront their abusers. It’s still dangerous, to be sure, but it was way worse then. Even if we wanted to, Siggy and I will never be able to forget.

When she and I joined forces in early 2015, it was more than two years before Weinstein’s depravity would be unmasked, and many people were unaware of the existence of serial abusers like him. Moreover, many were skeptical then of female victims who came forward. Actually, I’m being too polite. Let me rephrase: at that time, survivors of abuse who took on those who’d victimized them were routinely discredited, treated like whores, and beaten up all over again in the press. Siggy and I remember what we call those “dark days” because we lived through them together. And for me, this headline about me—which appeared in the New York Daily News just weeks after she and I first met—says everything about what we were up against:

PRINCE “VIC” IN FALSE-RAPE FLAP

SEX SLAVE SHOCK

ACCUSER’S CLAIM TOSSED IN ’98 CASE

Those words appeared on the Daily News’ front page on February 23, 2015, superimposed on the photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around his “vic[tim]”: me. “Virginia Roberts, who claims she had orgies with Prince Andrew as a sex slave, made rape claim against two teens when she was 14,” read a caption. Readers who turned the page found an article based on a leaked, seventeen-year-old Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office report that had been written when I was fourteen. I’ve already described the disturbing details of what deputies were investigating back then: two teenage boys, one seventeen and the other eighteen, had sexually assaulted me in the back of a car while I was unconscious in 1998. Now I was thirty-one years old, and I had just named a few of my Epstein-related abusers in court filings. In response, someone had dug up this confidential report and fed it to the press.

Juvenile records—especially reports about minor victims—are supposed to be kept under seal. But a legal breach wasn’t the worst thing about this article. The worst thing was that it (and its “false-rape” headline) misinterpreted what the leaked report said, making it look like prosecutors dropped the case because they didn’t believe I was telling the truth. In fact, the reason the case wasn’t prosecuted was murkier: the assault had been reported by a counselor at Growing Together; because I was enrolled there, investigators who wanted to interview me had difficulty contacting me, the report acknowledged; and both boys—while they confirmed they’d had sex with me—insisted it was consensual, so it was the classic he-said, she-said situation. Yes, the documents stated the case was not prosecuted “due to the victim’s lack of credibility and no substantial likelihood of success at trial.” But according to Siggy, that was boilerplate language used by law enforcement when a case was inconclusive.

Reached for comment, Siggy tried to point that out. “For the prosecutors to describe her as not credible means only that they did not think they had sufficient evidence to win. But she was raped,” the Daily News quoted Siggy as saying. “And to be victimized all over again with the leak of sealed juvenile records is disgraceful…Despite the efforts of her critics, she will not be silenced.”

I loved having this strong woman fighting for me, and I told Siggy so. I would soon nickname her “Superwoman.” But even with Superwoman in my corner, the Daily News’ callous rehashing of my awful childhood felt like a low blow. When that first story dropped, Siggy and I got on the phone, and she told me we probably needed to brace for more of the same. In her previous legal work, Siggy said, “No comment” had been her usual response to media inquiries. But we were dealing with something different here, she believed. Reading the article, it seemed the reporter had cherry-picked phrases from the leaked sheriff’s report with the goal of painting as withering a portrait of me as possible. For example, the story quoted the report as saying my mother had told a detective in 1998 “about her daughter’s past drug abuse and also how many kids in Royal Palm Beach are involved in drugs, witchcraft and animal sacrifice.” I mean, talk about guilt by association! I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but animal sacrifice? No one loves animals more than I do.

Five days after the leaked rape report article, the Daily News came after me again. This piece, cowritten by the author of the earlier piece, was headlined “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, but a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, Her Former Friends Say.” The story, which described me as “a hard-partying teen who eagerly traded sex for cash,” relied heavily on a Loxahatchee, Florida, resident named Philip Guderyon, who said he’d been at Growing Together at the same time I was (though I had no memory of him). Guderyon claimed I was Epstein’s “head bitch” and said I never looked like I “was being held captive.” What the article didn’t say was that Guderyon had a rap sheet that included grand theft, trafficking in stolen property, cocaine possession, and resisting an officer. Guderyon would also later be convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for striking a man in the head and causing his death at a bar. [*1] Guderyon was not exactly a reputable source who knew me well. [*2]

Again, Siggy tried to defend me. “To say that our client acquiesced in this abuse, or that the abuse was OK because she was paid for it, leaves out the fact that this is why we have laws in the United States to protect minor children who are groomed and sexually trafficked by adults,” she told the Daily News . “Blaming a minor child who was being sexually trafficked by a wealthy and incredibly powerful individual is irresponsible and works only to silence other victims and reward the abuser.”

But Siggy might as well have been screaming into the wind. She and Brad and I were coming to the conclusion that if we wanted to battle these smear campaigns and focus attention on the truth, we needed to do more than have Siggy comment. After some media reports insinuated that I was an inadequate mother who was setting a bad example for her three children by lying, I wholeheartedly agreed. These stories proved to me that certain critics of mine would stop at nothing to hurt me and my family. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that people affiliated with Epstein, a legendary pedophile, were quick to throw shade on my children. But that was the last straw for me. It was time to take back control of my narrative from those who sought to shame me.

I had come so far. Just thirteen years before, I’d flown to a foreign country with little idea of how I would break free from Epstein and Maxwell. Now not only had I liberated myself, but I’d also fortified my resolve, transforming from a skittish teenager who wished only to disappear into a strong woman whose name and face were becoming linked in the public sphere with the idea that victims should hold their abusers to account. But when my critics took aim at my ability to parent my children, that pushed me to a new level of ferocity.

I’d built a family with Robbie. I’d drawn a line with my father. I’d unpacked some of my worst baggage with Dr. Lightfoot, and with the help of my lawyers, I’d put names to some of my abusers’ faces—faces that I still could see as clearly as when I’d first laid eyes on them. I’d also taken the first steps toward joining a growing community of women who’d survived Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse and who were adamant that this twosome and others in their circle pay for what they had done. On my best days, I could picture myself standing shoulder to shoulder alongside these brave women. While I still had moments of weakness, more and more I was feeling strong. It was time to fight, and for the first time in my life, I felt ready.

Skip Notes

*1 In February 2025, the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial, finding that the lower court failed to give the jury proper instructions regarding Guderyon’s defense.

*2 We would later learn that in the days after my joinder motion that named names, Epstein and Maxwell had communicated about how to convince people to discredit me. “You can issue a reward,” Epstein had written Maxwell in an email dated January 12, 2015, “to any of Virginia’s friends, acquaints, family, that come forward to help prove her allegations are false.”