Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 29

Picture a family of five, mugging for the camera in their annual Christmas portrait. Every December since their first child was born, Mom has gotten Dad to take their whole brood to the local shopping mall to wait in line for a photograph with Santa Claus. Even in years that money was tight, Mom saved up to pay for this image, insisting it was worth every penny. Now, though, her two sons and one daughter are older. No one believes in Santa anymore, and so everyone—including Dad—grumbles when asked to pose each year with a chubby, bearded man in a red suit and hat. Still, Mom won’t relent. She’s willing to die on this holiday hill.

“You’ll thank me for this later,” I say. It’s important, I tell my family, to revel in life’s most joyous moments. Call them silly rituals all you want, I say, but we must preserve happy memories because there will be times ahead when we will need them. Happy memories can keep a person going. I know this better than most because I once had so few of them.

The house Robbie and I rented in Penrose, Colorado, sat on five acres of flat, dusty farmland. To get there, you turned off J Street and drove down a curved dirt and gravel road that led only to our front door, which was white with a large oval leaded window that afforded a glimpse into our small entryway. When we moved in, I thought the see-through door had a certain country charm. But the main reason we picked it was that my mom and her husband, Stan, lived close by.

Suddenly, I was spending more time with Mom than I had since my childhood. For more than a dozen years, she and I had lived eight thousand miles apart. Now we were neighbors. It meant the world to me that she was finally getting to spend time with her grandchildren—ages eight, seven, and four. When she visited us, she doted on them. Especially when she played with Ellie, I remembered what Mom had been like with me when I was small. My mother could be so loving. It was good to see that again.

The other day, I saw an Instagram video of one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Pink, on The Today Show , promoting her album Trustfall . Describing the difficult relationship she’s had with her own mother and how they’ve tried to reconcile, Pink said: “Love is a lifetime of coming back to the table.” Boy, does that resonate with me. By moving to Penrose, I had come back to the table where my mother had been sitting for years. She was not exactly the same woman I’d grown up with, although a part of her always would be. When I was a teen, she’d kept me at a distance. Now she wanted to be part of my life.

Mom proved to be an inexperienced babysitter—the single time she offered, it lasted just twenty minutes, until Tyler somehow got his finger stuck in the trigger of a plastic Nerf gun and she called me, begging me to come back. But I wasn’t eager to leave my kids alone with her anyway. And yet I was comforted knowing that she was close by. I don’t want to give the false impression that we somehow resolved all our past disputes during this period. When I told her, for example, a few of the names of the men I’d been trafficked to by Epstein, she repeated what she’d said to me before: that she didn’t want to hear about any of my past abuse—it made her too upset. My mother definitely doesn’t believe in talking things out. Nonetheless, a girl needs her mom, and I’d gone without mine for a long time. I was feeling more attached to her than I had in forever—a feeling that only intensified when scary things started happening, things Robbie and I couldn’t explain.

Since my joinder motion had been filed in the CVRA case, we had come home more than once to find evidence that strangers had been inside our house. Robbie was vigilant about placing wooden “drop bars” in the sliding windows and doors to prevent them from being opened, and he always deadbolted all our locks. Nonetheless, it was becoming routine for us to return home to find the deadbolts unlocked. One afternoon, we came back from a trip to Walmart and discovered the front door wide open. Our malamute, Bear, who we’d left inside, was out in the street. We called the sheriff’s department, and when we told the deputies who responded that nothing had been stolen, they speculated that the intruders might have entered in order to install some sort of spyware on our computers. They recommended that deputies place surveillance cameras outside to record the make and model of every vehicle that drove up our driveway. Of course, we said yes, and soon, they’d rigged an elaborate system aiming every which way.

They also suggested that we obtain a means of self-defense. And so we headed to Warrior Kit, a law-enforcement supply store about twenty miles from our house, in West Pueblo. We bought two guns (and a gun safe to keep them in): a five-shot revolver known as “The Judge” for me, and a nine-millimeter handgun for Robbie. For a few months after that, we were regulars at the shooting range in Warrior Kit’s basement. Both Robbie and I wanted to feel confident that if the time came, we’d know how to defend our family.

Paparazzi followed us everywhere in and around Penrose. Once, I walked out our front door and smacked right into one of them—he asked me a question, I declined to comment, and he took my picture. Soon that photo of me, with a beige coat, a black scarf, and a knit beanie on my head, was ricocheting around the world with a caption that said I was “hiding out” in Colorado. On another occasion, when the kids were sick, paparazzi snapped images of me leading them out of a doctor’s office. I wanted to scream, “Get away from my family, you pricks! Leave my bloody kids out of it!” (Even in my imagination, I swear like a true Australian.) But instead of letting loose like that, I just hustled my children to the car.

All this was more than intrusive—it was dangerous. I got run off the road once by what I presumed were tabloid journalists. I sat in the locked car on the side of the road, shielding my face and trying not to panic, until they finally left me alone. We were chased so often that Robbie became adept at turning down side streets at the last moment, pulling speedy U-turns, and driving more like we were in a war zone than a rural hamlet. This was crazy-making. I would scream at Robbie to slow down. He would scream at me that the United States was a ridiculous, lawless country. I would yell that paparazzi existed everywhere on earth. He would yell that maybe it was time to put our family’s welfare ahead of my desire to seek justice. I would fume. He would slam his foot down harder on the gas pedal. At times, it felt like we were skirting the outer limits of our sanity.

In April 2015, two important things happened—both of them frustrating. On April 7, Judge Kenneth Marra, the judge presiding over the CVRA case, ruled that I could not join as Jane Doe 3 because my filing was “duplicative” of the existing lawsuit. Moreover, Marra ruled that my allegations about Prince Andrew and others should be struck from the record. “At this juncture in the proceedings, these lurid details are unnecessary,” Marra wrote. While he made no ruling about the veracity of my allegations, Marra said the “factual details regarding with whom and where” I had been forced to have sex were “immaterial and impertinent.” However, he noted that I might yet appear as a witness in the case. Brad and I released a statement that said my legal team absolutely respected the judge’s ruling. “I’m happy to get to participate in this important case,” the statement quoted me as saying. But I was disappointed.

That disappointment evaporated, though, when Brad and Siggy brought me good news. For months, they’d been putting out feelers to all the major TV networks, gauging whether they wanted to interview me. Every one had said yes. I was finally going to tell my own story to a news organization that was held in high esteem. We weighed our options and, in the end, chose ABC—I was a fan of the anchor Amy Robach, and her producer Jim Hill was a top-notch investigative reporter. When the interview date was set, Robbie and I decided he would stay in Colorado and the kids would come with me. I wanted them to understand why Mommy was always either on the phone or, too often, leaving on a plane. The four of us flew to New York City from Denver, and the next day, ABC hired two nannies to take Alex, Tyler, and Ellie to the Central Park Zoo while I got prepped in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South.

Sitting in that elegant room, getting wired with a microphone, I was excited. This could be a game changer, I thought. I was eager to talk about how the US government had looked the other way when it came to Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes. I wanted to describe the anger and betrayal I felt and that all of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims felt. After years of seeing the media as my enemy, I wanted to believe that the media could also help our cause.

Robach and I took our seats, and the interview began. I felt immediately at ease. Robach was prepared, and her tone signaled to me that she was after the truth. “This is a story about a guy who’s still walking around New York City, free as a bird, who’s done all these atrocious things to me and to so many,” I remember telling her, “and we’ve never gotten any kind of justice.” Robach asked, What about the fact that Epstein had admitted that he’d procured girls for prostitution in Florida? “I don’t count that as justice,” I said. “I don’t think labeling those minor girls ‘prostitutes’ and then him getting only thirteen months in jail—with him leaving the jail every day—is justice. Do you?” For probably ninety minutes, I told Robach everything I knew about how Epstein and Maxwell had organized their sex-trafficking ring. I told her the names of several men I’d been trafficked to. I wept a few times when she asked me to go into detail about particular incidents of abuse. But that was okay. I felt as if I spoke from the heart.

When the interview concluded, there was a celebratory feeling in the room. People from the network told Brad and Siggy it had gone great. A segment from the interview would air on Good Morning America , we were told, and then the rest would appear on one of the network’s longer-format shows. I felt relieved and proud. When I reunited with my kids that night, I told them, “Your mom did a good job today.”

But then the waiting began. We were strung along for weeks with no explanation for the delay. Finally, someone from the network told my legal team that because I’d told Robach about being trafficked to Prince Andrew, the network had to reach out to Buckingham Palace and an attorney for Epstein. Why that was causing such delays was unclear. Robach and her producer were outraged. But for whatever reason, ABC never aired the interview. [*]

I’d been defeated once again by the people I was trying to speak out against. And I couldn’t help but wonder, if a media giant like ABC could be shut down in its attempts to reveal the truth, was there any hope for survivors like me?

Skip Notes

* Four years later, on November 5, 2019, a video of Amy Robach speaking on a “hot mic” was made public that shed a bit more light on what had happened. Robach said that “every day I get more and more pissed” that her interview with me didn’t air and that “what we had was unreal.” In the recording, Robach said that she was told by higher-ups, “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.” She also said Epstein’s lawyers and the British royal family had applied pressure to nix the interview, suggesting that the network caved because it feared losing access to Prince William and Kate Middleton in the future.