Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 31

For me, 2016 would be the Year of the Deposition. As part of my defamation case against Maxwell, my lawyers would depose her twice in 2016, and her lawyers would depose me twice, both times in Denver. Also in 2016, many people I’d known when I was in Epstein’s orbit would be deposed: my mother; my father; my former boyfriends, Michael and Tony; another Epstein survivor, Johanna Sjoberg; Juan “John” Alessi, Epstein’s house manager in Palm Beach; and, of course, Epstein himself. (Of all these people, Epstein alone invoked the Fifth, refusing to answer so as not to incriminate himself.)

What is it like to be deposed? No matter the subject matter, it is grueling. And as you can imagine, when the questioning revolves around years-old sexual abuse, it is especially painful. During one deposition, I would become so agitated that when we took a brief break, I went to the restroom and vomited. In that same deposition, I would also flinch as a lawyer flung photos of my children on the table in front of me—as close to a Mafia-style intimidation tactic as I’d ever seen. The lawyer claimed to be making a point about my use of Facebook (and about how I couldn’t be in fear for my life, as I’d claimed, if I posted pictures of my kids there). But I saw only malevolence. Maybe it’s because the lawyer’s behavior brought Epstein to mind—the memory of him tossing that photo of Skydy on his desk, telling me never to go to the police, had never left me. I interpreted this brazen display of my babies’ faces as a direct threat.

Please don’t hear this as a plea for sympathy. No one ever promised me that challenging my abusers would be easy. I had chosen to take these vile people on, and I’d always known that would mean an uphill fight. I was still talking to my psychologist, Judith Lightfoot, every Monday on the phone. In addition to recommending meditation and breathing exercises, she was encouraging me to speak out, saying she thought that the more vocal I became, the stronger I would feel. Still, this would be a hugely tiring year. Part of that was logistical: between depositions I gave and depositions I witnessed, I traveled from Australia to the United States and back four times in 2016. (Robbie’s parents were living with us, which was the only way my absences were possible. Nonno ferried the kids to and from school and Nonna cooked and kept the house tidy while Robbie did his shifts at the hospital.) But what really wore me out were the emotions all this stirred up. In her deposition, which I did not attend, my mother was asked why I’d stopped working at Mar-a-Lago. She said she didn’t know anything about it but that my father had told her that I was being educated by Maxwell, who Mom described as my “new momma.” In his deposition, my father said that when he met Epstein at El Brillo Way, the pedophile “seemed just fine to me. I mean, you can’t tell people by looking at them.” But then Dad added that he didn’t like my then boyfriend Michael: “Of course, what parent cares for your daughter’s boyfriend?…I didn’t think anybody was good enough for my daughter, but that’s just me.” Both my parents’ testimony revealed that, as usual, they were driven by a desire to protect themselves. That wasn’t news, but it was still painful for me to read.

Sjoberg’s deposition transcript was easier to digest because she confirmed what I had experienced. Sjoberg described how Maxwell approached her on the main campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University, where she was a twenty-one-year-old student. Maxwell said she was looking to hire someone for twenty dollars an hour to answer phones, get drinks, and help around the house. She compared the job to that of a butler but said butlers were “too stuffy.” Sjoberg accompanied Maxwell to Epstein’s mansion and did as she asked. But the next time Maxwell asked her to come, Sjoberg was told she would be making a hundred dollars an hour “rubbing feet.” Sjoberg, who has said her relationship with Epstein was platonic at first but that later he pressured her into having sex, also traveled to Little Saint James—she remembered her and me massaging Epstein together on the beach there. And she recalled the night in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse when Maxwell gave Prince Andrew the puppet that resembled him and then put the puppet’s hand on my breast.

“Did Maxwell ever share with you whether it bothered her that Jeffrey had so many girls around?” Siggy asked Sjoberg.

“No,” Sjoberg replied. “Actually, the opposite…She let me know that she was—she would not be able to please him as much as he needed and that is why there were other girls around.”

Sjoberg also confirmed that Maxwell always said she wasn’t bothered by how many girls Epstein slept with. And she described how Epstein once requested that she bring a female friend of hers—a physical trainer—to his house. When the friend of Sjoberg’s arrived, Epstein asked the woman, “You see that girl over there laying by the pool?…I just took her virginity.” Sjoberg said her friend “was mortified” by Epstein’s lecherous boasting. But me? When I read this account, all I could think was, “Yep, that’s Epstein, to a tee.”

I couldn’t attend all these depositions—I’d been away from the kids enough as it was. But there was one deposition that I knew I needed to be there for: Tony Figueroa’s. I hadn’t spoken to Tony since I was in Thailand, so I wasn’t sure what he’d say. He knew so much that could confirm what I’d been through. But I knew Tony was upset by my disappearance from his life fourteen years before. The deposition had been scheduled by Maxwell’s lawyers. Why would they seek out Tony, my lawyers wondered, unless they thought he’d give testimony that would help their client and hurt me?

Brad had a preliminary call with Tony, who gave him an earful. Tony said I’d ditched him, embarrassed him, and left him in an apartment whose rent he couldn’t afford. When Brad told Tony all we needed was for him to tell the truth, Tony replied, “I’m not doing shit until I talk to Virginia. I need some explanation about why she fucked me over.”

So two days before his deposition, I dialed Tony’s number. When he answered, I told him I was sorry—for the way our relationship had ended in 2002 but also for causing him to be dragged into this mess in 2016. I knew he was just trying to live his life, I said, and I understood it was no fun to rehash our difficult history. Because we’d once tried to break free together to make a life outside Epstein’s orbit, when I escaped on my own, I knew Tony felt abandoned. On the phone, I acknowledged that. We’d been kids together, I said. I didn’t want to cause him pain—not then, and not now.

Forty-eight hours later, Brad and I headed to a Florida law office for the deposition. Tony and I said hello in the hallway, but he was nervous and looked away. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. I needn’t have worried, though. Under questioning from Maxwell’s lawyer, Tony recalled that while we were living together, I traveled with Epstein two weeks per month or so. He confirmed that I’d told him I was forced to have sex with Epstein, Maxwell, and their friends. He remembered me talking about being forced to recruit other girls and about the sex toys Epstein and Maxwell liked to use on us victims. Tony recalled that when he and I tried to leave Epstein behind, I relished the freedom. “Like, she did not want to go back there,” he said. Asked what I was trying to get away from, he said: “to stop being used and abused.” Tony remembered me saying I’d been forced to have sex with Prince Andrew, and he described worrying about my safety while I was in London. When asked why, he responded, “Just the way she was talking to me. Like, she just sounded scared.” He recalled that when I returned from that trip, he saw the photograph of Prince Andrew with his arm around me. And he remembered that after I escaped, Maxwell called him and asked if he could find any other girls for Epstein. “She just said, ‘Hi. This is Ghislaine. Jeffrey was wondering if you had anybody that could come over,’ ” Tony said.

But the most poignant part of the deposition, for me, was when Maxwell’s attorney asked Tony if we’d seen each other since I’d told him goodbye in 2002. “Nope,” he said, and his face looked truly sad. It didn’t feel real, he said, that I was sitting across a table from him. “It’s like talking to a ghost, or seeing one,” he said. Later, Brad said he thought Tony simply needed to see me to put our unresolved breakup behind him. I hoped Brad was right.

The most important person my lawyers needed to question under oath, of course, was Maxwell herself. A first deposition was scheduled, but would it happen? Maxwell had avoided being deposed before. In 2010, for example, Brad had served Maxwell with a subpoena related to his CVRA case. Just hours before it was due to start, however, Maxwell’s lawyer called to say that she was leaving the country, with no plans to return, because her mother was ill. Weeks later Maxwell was back on American soil as one of four hundred guests at Chelsea Clinton’s July 31 wedding in Rhinebeck, New York. Still, Brad’s deposition never took place.

Now, six years later, Brad was looking forward to finally putting Maxwell in the hot seat at the Boies Schiller Flexner offices in Manhattan. But less than twenty-four hours before, Maxwell’s lawyers challenged what’s known as pro hac vice—a temporary grant of permission for Paul Cassell and Brad, who were licensed in Florida, to represent me, their client, in New York. The judge ruled that Siggy would be the one questioning Maxwell. This was an unexpected curveball. “Pro hacs,” as these requests for temporary permissions are known, are rarely challenged. Siggy was counsel of record and had been working day and night on my case including helping Brad prepare for the depo. But still, she told me, “it’s different when you’re the one in the box.”

“Don’t worry, Sig, Maxwell is going to take the Fifth,” Brad predicted. “I mean, we know all the crimes that she’s committed—there’s no way she can not take the Fifth.” Still, just to be safe, Siggy stayed up all night preparing two things: a lengthy list of questions she didn’t expect to get substantive answers to and a strategy to deal with the master manipulator she knew Maxwell to be.

The deposition began just after 9:00 a.m. on April 22, 2016. After Maxwell was sworn in, Siggy asked her to state her address and her date of birth. Then, Superwoman asked her first substantive question: “When did you first recruit a female to work for Mr. Epstein?” Maxwell acted confused. “I don’t understand what you mean by female,” she said. “I don’t understand what you mean by recruit.”

Siggy didn’t blink. “Are you a female?” she asked. Maxwell said yes. Then Siggy repeated her question. It would take several back-and-forths before Maxwell finally said she’d first hired a woman who was forty or fifty years old to work for Epstein, probably in 1992. This was going to be slow going, it seemed, but that was all right because, amazingly, Maxwell wasn’t taking the Fifth.

“Did you ever hire someone who was under the age of eighteen?” Siggy asked.

“Never,” Maxwell said.

“Did you invite Virginia Giuffre to come to Jeffrey Epstein’s home when she was under the age of eighteen?” Siggy continued.

Maxwell shot back, “Virginia Roberts held herself out as a masseuse and invited herself to come and give a massage.” Siggy repeated her question, word for word, which prompted Maxwell to quibble: “Again, I did not invite Virginia Roberts. She came as a masseuse.” And so it went, for hours. Maxwell said she didn’t recall meeting me at Mar-a-Lago and denied participating in that first “massage” that she’d recruited me to give Epstein. In fact, she denied ever giving a massage in my presence.

Siggy forged ahead. She’d begun noticing that Maxwell got agitated every time she looked down at her notes, ignoring Maxwell. So she continued not making eye contact, getting under Maxwell’s skin. “Have you heard Mr. Epstein use the phrase ‘the younger the better’?” she asked. Maxwell said she had no such recollection and called me “just an awful fantasist.” When Maxwell didn’t want to answer something, she was dismissive. “Let’s move on,” she demanded at one point, haughty as ever. Siggy remained calm. “I’m in charge of the deposition,” Siggy said. “I say when we move on and when we don’t.”

When Siggy asked, “Did you have a basket of sex toys that you kept in the Palm Beach house?” Maxwell obfuscated. “First of all, what do you mean?” she asked. In response, Siggy repeated the question. She would soon have to repeat it again. And then again. And then again . Maxwell kept issuing denials and asking Siggy to define even simple words ( puppet, party, school , regularly— the list went on and on). “I never ever at any single time at any point ever at all participated in anything with Virginia and Jeffrey,” Maxwell said. “I barely would remember her if not for all this rubbish.” Over and over, when Siggy asked Maxwell if she was aware of some particular detail in the case, Maxwell was nonresponsive, saying instead, “I am aware that Virginia has lied repeatedly.”

But there were signs that Maxwell was starting to crack. “You are trying to trap me. I will not be trapped,” she admonished Siggy. Maxwell denied being able to recall flying on Epstein’s plane with me and then, when given flight logs that listed her initials next to mine, protested, “How do you know the GM is me?” After Siggy asked if Maxwell had ever taken photographs of naked or seminaked girls at Epstein’s homes, Maxwell snapped, “I know where you’re headed with this, and it’s nowhere appropriate.” Siggy held her ground again: “I’m not heading anywhere. I’m just asking the questions.”

After a lunch break, the tightly controlled Maxwell finally lost her temper. She had repeated that she didn’t remember meeting me at Mar-a-Lago, prompting Siggy to ask, “Are you saying that it was an ‘obvious lie’ that you approached Virginia while she was under age at Mar-a-Lago?” Maxwell’s lawyer objected, but his client went off. She was particularly worked up about me getting my age wrong in my first civil suit against Epstein, way back in 2009. As I’ve explained, when I’d said I was fifteen when I met her (when I was actually sixteen) it had been an honest mistake. But Maxwell described it as “a lie that was perpetrated between all of you to make the story more exciting. Can we agree on that?!” she bellowed.

“That is not my question,” Siggy responded, but Maxwell kept going, and now she began to slam her fists on the table as she spoke. “Can we agree she was not the age she said, and you put that in the press? That is obviously”—slam!—“manifestly”—slam!—“absolutely”—slam!—“totally a lie.”

Apparently, Maxwell was a fearsome sight; as she pounded the table, the court reporter—a usually unflappable woman whom Siggy had known for years—looked more terrified than Siggy had ever seen her. But Siggy? She was a woman of steel. “I am going to put on the record,” Siggy stated, “Ms. Maxwell very inappropriately and very harshly pounded our law-firm table…I ask she take a deep breath and calm down.” The lawyers agreed it was a good time for a break. It was 1:56 p.m.

Seventeen minutes later, the deposition resumed and went on—with Maxwell denying all wrongdoing, denying that she knew I’d gone to Thailand, denying that she gave me instructions to meet a girl there, denying, denying, denying—until Siggy ran out of time at 6:43 p.m. In the end, the deposition (including breaks) had stretched over ten hours, and Siggy had interrogated Maxwell for seven of them. Since then I’ve read that some lawyers who’ve faced off against Siggy compare her to Uma Thurman’s sword-wielding assassin in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. (“Unexpectedly deadly” is how an adversary once described her.) To me, Siggy’s performance with Maxwell only confirmed that.

David Boies would also shine a few months later, when he deposed Maxwell in a second session. All my lawyers—David, Siggy, Brad, and Paul Cassell—were working so hard for me. Brad and Siggy were both by my side during my two depositions, conducted by Maxwell’s lawyers in Denver. And my lawyers were also deposing scores of others who had knowledge of Maxwell’s behavior. For example, they’d taken the deposition of Rinaldo Rizzo, a former chef of an Epstein associate and his wife. Rizzo said that on one occasion, Epstein and Maxwell had brought a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl to this couple’s home and then left her in the kitchen with Rizzo and his wife, who were cooking dinner. At first, the girl stayed quiet, but she was quivering and shaking and appeared to be terrified. When Rizzo asked about her connection to Epstein, though, the girl began weeping and blurted out that she had been on Epstein’s island with Maxwell and another woman. The girl claimed that the three adults had pressured her to have sex, but she’d declined. “Ghislaine took my passport,” Rizzo recalled the girl telling him and his wife. The girl also said Maxwell had threatened her, Rizzo said, and told her not to tell anyone about their sexual advances. As someone who’d frequently had my passport held by Maxwell, I read this deposition with a queasy feeling. I knew how scary it was to be controlled by that woman. Rizzo’s account was an important corroboration of my own experience.

But if I had to point to a single example of my team’s excellent work, it would have to be the response to Maxwell’s motion for summary judgment that Siggy filed on January 31, 2017. Maxwell’s team was claiming that I’d raised no genuine issue to be tried; they had asked the judge to rule in Maxwell’s favor and make this case go away. Not so fast, wrote Siggy. First, she tore apart Maxwell’s argument that she could not have abused or trafficked me when I was a minor. Summarizing Maxwell’s contention that “employment records show that Ms. Giuffre was either sixteen or seventeen when Defendant recruited her from her job at Mar-a-Lago for sex with Epstein, not fifteen-years-old as Plaintiff originally thought,” Siggy asserted, “Call this the ‘yes-I’m-a-sex-trafficker-but-only-of-sixteen-year-old-girls’ defense.”

In response to Maxwell’s claim that she didn’t “regularly participate in Epstein’s sexual exploitation on minors,” Siggy wrote, “Call this the ‘yes-I’m-a-sex-trafficker-but-only-on-Tuesdays-and-Thursdays’ defense.” In response to Maxwell’s argument that I couldn’t have been a sex slave because I was not confined or made Maxwell’s legal property, Siggy quoted an expert on sex trafficking who explained that people didn’t have to be “chained to a bed” to be considered victims of contemporary forms of slavery. Siggy then characterized Maxwell’s stance, “Call this the ‘yes-I’m-a-sex-trafficker-but-I-didn’t-use-chains’ defense.” When Maxwell claimed that she did not create child pornography and that the government knew she didn’t, Siggy quipped, “Call this the ‘until-you-find-the-photos-I’m-innocent’ defense.” And when Maxwell asserted that she did not act as a “Madame” for Epstein, Siggy responded that the gist of Maxwell’s argument “seems to be that Defendant believes trafficking one girl to Epstein does not a Madame make. Call this the ‘yes-I-was-Virginia’s-Madame-but-no-one-else’s’ defense.”

In conclusion, Siggy wrote that if Maxwell was involved in my abuse, as we were arguing, then her January 2015 statement accusing me of “obvious lies” was defamatory. Siggy asked the court to deny Maxwell’s motion for summary judgment, and on March 22, 2017, Judge Robert W. Sweet did exactly that. Trial was set for May 15.

The next few months were a frenzy of activity. Siggy and Brad and Paul were furiously preparing for trial, wrangling countless witnesses and putting more than a thousand exhibits in order. They booked us all hotel rooms for the four weeks they thought the trial would take, as well as a large war room across the street from the courthouse. And they scheduled the final deposition they needed: a third grilling of Maxwell. Because she had refused to answer certain questions in her previous depositions, this one was going to take place in the courtroom, with the judge as referee, a week before trial.

By this point, a few settlement discussions had been held and gone nowhere. My lawyers believed we were headed to trial. Still, I flew in a few weeks beforehand for a final mediation, scheduled for May 3, which David Boies and Brad’s then partner, Stan Pottinger, were handling since Brad and Siggy and Paul were so swamped with trial prep. A few days later, on the eve of Maxwell’s final deposition, my team and I agreed to settle, and a few weeks after that, the case was dismissed.

I am not allowed to discuss the terms of the settlement, as they are confidential. But I can talk about why I settled. We’d prepared so diligently to expose Maxwell’s lies in open court, and it would have been deeply satisfying to watch her squirm. I also would have loved to watch Epstein be called to the stand, as my lawyers had planned. Even if he’d taken the Fifth, as he’d done before, it would have done me good to see him interrogated like the criminal he was.

But remember this was a civil case, not a criminal one. There was never going to be an outcome that sent Maxwell to jail—at least not directly. In the end, if we’d taken it to trial and won, the victory was always going to be about money. For me, the settlement meant I could return to my family sooner than I’d planned, and I looked forward to using my payout to take care of them. I was not the first Epstein victim to be criticized for settling, and I would not be the last. But to those who think less of me for doing so, I’d ask you to remember the devastatingly accurate assertion I’d made in my first lawsuit, Jane Doe 102 v. Jeffrey Epstein —the one that said I’d permanently suffered not only loss of income but “a loss of the capacity to enjoy life.” Maxwell and Epstein had stolen something precious from me. Sometimes I could rise above that loss, but other times, even still, I could not.

Financially, my family had struggled. While I would’ve liked to reenter the workforce, I felt as if I were unemployable. At times, I grew so desperate to explain my spotty work history during the years I was trafficked that I made up fake jobs and employers to list on my résumé. All anyone had to do was Google my name to know who I was and, as I’d said in one of my depositions, “No one wants to hire a sex slave.” Meanwhile, as I’ve said, ongoing threats to my family’s safety meant that, more and more, Robbie felt he could no longer work outside the home. Especially since I’d sued Maxwell, the paparazzi were back, circling our family like vultures, and he felt he needed to deliver the kids to and from school each day.

In the end, there was this: For months now, preparing for trial had been my primary occupation. Motherhood had taken a back seat, and that had cost me in ways that are difficult to quantify. During the first half of 2017, I’d been distracted at best (and, at worst, absent). I never missed a birthday or a holiday, but anyone who is a parent will understand that I often went without something much more important: the day-to-day mundane moments that make up a mother’s life: pouring bubbles in the kids’ baths, making sure homework preceded playtime, even having simple arguments (“No, Alex, you may not race around our neighborhood at night in a souped-up go-cart”). Only because I had a great husband and understanding in-laws had the wheels not fallen off the bus that was the Giuffre household. When Maxwell defamed me, she’d eroded my credibility and thus my ability to help other victims. If I could use some of her money to help me heal, to let me focus on my kids, and to fuel my attempts to do good, then I was happy to take it.