Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 32

Whether talking to journalists, working with law enforcement, or filing lawsuits, so many brave women have stood up to Epstein and Maxwell. But when each of them first decided to do so, I can guarantee every single one felt terrified and alone. While I’d been in Epstein and Maxwell’s world, they’d safeguarded their evil enterprise by stoking rivalries, strategically keeping girls from forging alliances. In their presence, then, we’d been kept at odds with each other, and even after I’d escaped, I still felt isolated, for a long, long time.

Now, however, as I learned of other women who had come forward, that solitary feeling was starting to lift. I knew about Courtney Wild from the CVRA case. And it turned out there were two sisters, Annie and Maria Farmer, who’d been trying for nearly two decades to expose what Epstein and Maxwell had done to them. As word spread that there were a handful of lawyers representing a growing number of Epstein’s victims and getting results, more women were choosing to break their silence.

In October 2016, for example, a South African woman named Sarah Ransome called Paul Cassell. She told him that she, too, had been a victim of Epstein and Maxwell in 2006 and 2007. She said she’d been following my story in the media and had found the Facebook page of my nonprofit, Victims Refuse Silence—the one Brad had helped me found in 2014. Ransome said she wanted to assist my case in any way she could. Paul gathered my legal team in a room at Boies Schiller Flexner, and they called Sarah back in Barcelona, Spain, where she was living. She said she’d been abused by Epstein and Maxwell in various locations beginning when she was twenty-two. Specifically, she said that Epstein had raped her repeatedly while on his island and that Maxwell facilitated it, while also starving, berating, and swindling her. Like me, she had photographs of herself with them. She hadn’t been a minor during this period, but what had happened to her was still wrong. In early 2017, right before a ten-year statute of limitations was about to expire, Boies Schiller Flexner filed a lawsuit on Sarah Ransome’s behalf against Epstein and Maxwell. The charge: violation of the federal sex-trafficking statute, which prohibits the recruiting, enticing, transporting, or soliciting of someone for sex by means of fraud, force, or coercion. Before I settled with Maxwell, Ransome had flown to New York to serve as a witness in my defamation case.

While the mounting number of cases against Epstein and Maxwell was heartening, however, there were indications that public awareness of their crimes was either fading or had never been very high in the first place. Donald Trump was now president, and in early 2017 he nominated Alexander Acosta—the former federal prosecutor based in Miami who had approved Epstein’s shameful, secretive nonprosecution agreement—to be secretary of labor. Acosta was confirmed in April 2017.

At the same time, accounts describing the mistreatment of women in America were multiplying: Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual-harassment suit against her boss, Roger Ailes; Uber employee Susan Fowler went public about toxic masculinity at the ride-sharing company, causing its CEO to resign. It was as if all this bad behavior were a surging river and a dam was about to break. Then it did. On October 5, 2017, The New York Times ran the first of several articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s serial harassment and assault of women, and their sources’ allegations were backed up by on-the-record quotes. Five days later, The New Yorker ’s Ronan Farrow wrote of several more women who Weinstein had victimized, and Farrow, too, was just getting started. He would soon shine light on several of Weinstein’s associates who sought to silence Weinstein’s victims—among them, one of my own attorneys, David Boies, who had represented Weinstein and had personally signed a contract directing a private investigative firm to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a New York Times story about Weinstein’s abuses. (Boies later said this had been a mistake. While his firm didn’t select or direct the investigative firm, he said, and he characterized the arrangement as “an accommodation for a client,” he took personal responsibility for the error, which he said was not “thought through.”)

Back in 2006, when an activist named Tarana Burke had founded a nonprofit to serve survivors of sexual harassment and abuse, Burke had called her movement “Me Too.” Now, eleven years later, the actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter and encouraged survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #MeToo as a status update. The response from women around the world was enormous. Two days later, the first of more than 150 gymnasts who’d been abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar went public. It was hard not to hope that real change was coming.

On the home front, things were good. Robbie and I used part of my Maxwell settlement to buy a four-bedroom house in a gated community just north of Cairns. After more than two years as renters, we were homeowners once again. We lived on a street named Iridescent Drive, which was fitting because at times the place, which had a lovely swimming pool in the backyard, seemed to shimmer. We had an outdoor kitchen, and during hot, muggy weather (which there is a lot of in Cairns) we pushed open our accordion doors and let the breeze cool the house.

In mid-2017, my kids were no longer babies. Alex was eleven, Tyler was ten, and Ellie was seven, and more and more I was noticing that each was special in his or her own way. Alex was beginning to write rhymes that he would eventually turn into rap music. Tyler was an artist who could draw anything. And Ellie loved to regale us with fanciful stories. While she aspired to be a firefighter more than a writer then, she was becoming a great raconteur. I admired my kids and was grateful for what they taught me every day. Which is why I got it into my head that we should make our family bigger.

In Cairns at that time, there was a campaign to streamline the process of finding homes for children in Queensland’s foster-care system. I’d seen brochures about the program, called “foster to adopt,” at the kids’ school, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to be part of it. Our family was so fortunate and had so much to give. Having slept in foster homes during my time at Growing Together, I knew how bad it felt to lack a safe, permanent home. I proposed the idea of adopting to Robbie, who I suspected would be open to it, since his own father had been adopted as a child. When my husband said yes, we submitted an application, and before we knew it, we’d passed the home evaluation. Robbie and I took a required class to get educated about the challenges some foster kids might have. And right away, we were matched with a three-year-old girl. Her father was absent, we were told, and her mother was in prison and had decided to give her up for adoption. I knew with all my heart that we should give this little girl a home.

But then Siggy called. She needed me to travel to the United States again. I can’t remember what the reason was—it’s possible that it was for a deposition in one of my Survivor Sisters’ cases—but I do remember it was urgent: I had three days to get there. As I began packing, Robbie said we needed to talk. “Jenna, you know I love kids, but you’ve been the one pushing us to adopt,” he said. “I’m on board, but it’s you who really wants to give back like this. But if you’re not going to be here…” He hesitated, which is rare for him. Finally, he said: “It’s just not fair. You need to commit to one thing or the other.” I understood the choice he was laying out for me: keep on fighting to expose Epstein’s cabal or step back, adopt a new daughter, and stay home with my expanding family. “It’s either this or that,” he said.

I knew Robbie was right, even though I didn’t want him to be. The tension between my desire to be an activist and my desire to put my family first was always there for me, but in this instance, it required that I make a stark choice. I wanted to do both. Especially now that I knew of a particular child whom we could help, I yearned to do so. But at the same time, what I’d started with Siggy was nowhere near done. And seeing it through, wherever it took us, would potentially help other young women and girls. So I made my choice, and a few days later got on the plane to the States. To this day, I think about that little girl I never met and wonder how all our lives would be different if she had joined our family.

It was during this period that Julie K. Brown, an investigative journalist at the Miami Herald , began digging into the Epstein case. She has said that she was prompted, in part, by Alex Acosta’s elevation to Trump’s cabinet—and by the fact that during Acosta’s confirmation hearings, Epstein’s name had barely come up. The Miami Herald ’s investigations editor gave Brown the go-ahead and assigned a videographer, Emily Michot, to work with her to capture interviews with Epstein’s victims on tape. In early December 2017, they recorded their first emotional on-camera interview, with Michelle Licata, who’d been sexually assaulted by Epstein when she was just fourteen. They would later conduct similar videotaped interviews with Courtney Wild and Jena-Lisa Jones, who was fourteen when Epstein fondled her during a “massage” and paid her $200 afterward. And Brown and Michot wanted to record a conversation with me.

In early 2018, David Boies and Siggy met with Brown, who told them she was determined to get the sealed court records of my defamation case against Maxwell unsealed. In her experience, victims of sexual assault often wanted to keep the details of what happened to them private, so she was expecting pushback. But my lawyers told her she’d get no opposition from us. The more light she could shine on the darkest corners of Epstein’s evil world, the better, we said. In March 2018, I sat down for a video interview with Brown. We’d meet more than once, but at the end of that first interview, I told her I was fighting not just for myself, but for every Epstein victim. “I’m not going to stop,” I said, “until all these girls get justice.”

When I said “all” the girls, I was quite consciously including those I was sure Epstein was continuing to abuse in the present day. Remember: he was a free man who, despite being a convicted sex offender, was still unrepentant about his taste for minor girls. We know this without a doubt because in mid-August 2018, Epstein invited a New York Times reporter named James Stewart to his Manhattan townhouse for a chat. The meeting was “on background,” which meant Stewart could only use whatever information he gleaned if he didn’t attribute it directly to Epstein. [*] During their conversation (ostensibly about Elon Musk, whose business dealings Stewart was investigating), Epstein offered an off-topic aside, calling the criminalization of sex with teenage girls a cultural aberration. He supported his belief by noting that at certain times in history, it had been seen as acceptable. Epstein compared the vilification of men who had sex with minor girls to the way gay and lesbian people had been treated for decades—homosexuality, he noted, had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world. Clearly, Epstein still felt righteous about having sex with whomever he pleased, regardless of age.

In November 2018, Brown’s series of articles, accompanied by Michot’s videos, went live. The series was called “Perversion of Justice,” and in it, Brown revealed the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that had led to Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement, zeroing in on Acosta’s role in it. She uncovered eighty victims of Epstein, some as young as thirteen when the abuse occurred, and revealed the campaign of terror that Epstein and his cronies had used to try to silence those victims. (Remember when that car shined its headlights on our front door in Colorado? Well, Brown found a victim in Florida who’d endured the same kind of hazing.) Finally, the series documented the experience of eight survivors in detail, with on-the-record interviews. I was among them.

The series was fantastic, in no small part because of Michot. Her videos forced readers of Brown’s hard-hitting reporting to see all of us who’d survived Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse as human beings. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, the videos acted as “something of a force multiplier, creating a three-dimensional platform for Epstein’s teenage victims to tell their harrowing stories.” Brown’s series drove over 9.5 million unique visits to the Miami Herald website, while Michot’s videos were watched 850,000 times on the paper’s website alone and millions more times on YouTube.

“You’re just thrown into a world that you don’t understand,” I said in one video, describing what I and so many others had gone through with Epstein and Maxwell. “And you’re screaming on the inside. And you don’t know how to let it come out. And you just become this numb figure who refuses to feel and refuses to speak…All you do is obey. That’s it.”

Brown has rightly been credited with refocusing the attention of the public and of law enforcement on Epstein and Maxwell’s heinous acts. We now know that not long after the Herald ran Brown’s first story, the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York opened an investigation into Epstein. I will always be grateful for what Brown and Michot did for the countless women who’d been victimized—first by Epstein and Maxwell, but then again by their own government.

I also have to thank Brown with helping me understand that despite the problems I’d had with members of the tabloid media, working with good journalists could do a lot of good. More and more, I began to make myself available to reporters who reached out. Maybe if I spoke more about what all of us had been through, I thought, I could help increase awareness and prevent other young girls and women being abused.

It’s been said that no good deed goes unpunished, however, and apparently someone thought it was high time I be punished. At some point in this period, the FBI called me in Australia to say there had been a credible threat on my life. The agent told me that Robbie and I should contact the Australian Federal Police immediately. I called right away but kept getting transferred from one person to another. I was so scared that I was shaking. Robbie stood next to me as I waited on hold, determined to stay on the phone until someone helped us. But after explaining myself over and over, only to be transferred again, I was out of patience. That’s when Robbie stepped in. “Start packing,” he told me. “I’ve got a plan.”

From the earliest days of our relationship, Robbie had been my protector—my savior, even. Now, he was going to deliver us from danger once again. He rented a large mobile home and loaded the kids, the dogs, and me into it. Within a few hours, we had hit the road, heading north. I didn’t think I could maneuver that big of a vehicle, so Robbie drove for eight hours straight. We ended up in a one-horse town at the top end of Queensland, not far from Cape Melville National Park. The town had no grocery—just a convenience store where we could buy milk and bread. But it was completely off the grid, which was what we needed most. There we would stay, cooking and sleeping in our RV, swatting mosquitoes, and occasionally fishing—for three weeks.

How do you decide when a credible threat to your life is no longer dangerous? The answer is: you don’t. There simply comes a time when you resume normal routines. When we returned to Cairns, we let the local police know what the FBI had told me. Robbie and I tried to make the kids feel safe, even though we weren’t certain that they were. Day and night, I worried that my family would be harmed by the very people who had hurt me when I was a teenager. And in addition to fear, I felt rage. How entitled and selfish do you have to be to continue hounding and threatening the very victims you’ve hurt before? It drove me crazy to think these people could potentially get away with silencing me for good. When someone on Twitter speculated that the FBI might kill me “to protect the ultrarich and well connected,” I felt the need to respond. If I died suddenly, I tweeted, no one should believe that it was an accident.

“I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed hastily but resolutely (making several spelling and grammatical errors that I’ve corrected here). “I have made this known to my therapist and GP—If something happens to me—for the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.”

Skip Notes

* Readers of The New York Times wouldn’t know this, however, until three days after Epstein’s death in 2019. In an article titled, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People,” Stewart explained that his promise to keep their conversations on background had expired because Epstein was deceased.