Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 33

In July 2019 came a day I’d hoped for but had never thought I’d see. I remember Siggy calling me—it was early Sunday morning in Australia. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “Do you have a chair? Because you’re going to need to sit down.” On July 6, Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested on federal charges related to sex trafficking, she said. He’d been apprehended after his private jet touched down at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport. I could imagine the scene, having flown into Teterboro so many times myself with Epstein. Touching my face, I realized I was crying.

We would soon learn so much more. At almost the same moment Epstein was taken into custody, federal agents had raided his New York townhouse. Inside, they found hundreds if not thousands—an “extraordinary volume,” prosecutors said—of nude photographs of young-looking women. These were the tokens this superpredator had kept to remind himself of all those he’d abused over the years. They also found a safe containing forty-eight loose diamonds, $70,000 in cash, and three passports belonging to Epstein—from the United States, from Israel, and from Austria. That last one, which was expired, appeared to have a photo of Epstein but included a fake name and listed a home address in Saudi Arabia. This was a man who’d prepared a getaway plan.

On July 8, Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, unsealed an indictment alleging that Epstein and his employees brought dozens of vulnerable girls, some as young as fourteen, to his New York mansion and his Palm Beach home between 2002 and 2005. Epstein stood accused of abusing these girls sexually, paying them money, and asking some of them to recruit other girls. Noting that this had gone on for years, Berman said that “the alleged behavior shocks the conscience.” Epstein faced a maximum sentence of forty-five years in prison.

Epstein’s bail hearing was a week later. I wished I could attend, if only to see Epstein in shackles. But Brad Edwards assured me that other survivors would be there to represent us all. Courtney Wild, Michelle Licata, and Annie Farmer did indeed attend, and the judge let them speak. First Farmer and then Wild stood up and briefly described how much harm Epstein had done. If nothing else, Wild said, the judge should keep him behind bars “for the safety of any other girls.” [*]

Epstein’s attorneys offered to put up hundreds of millions of dollars if only the judge would allow him to post bail and go home. But prosecutors argued that he must remain in custody because he had the means and the motive to flee. A financial disclosure form Epstein was required to fill out after his arrest had listed his net worth as $559,120,954, including six properties, stocks, equities, and $57 million in cash. Three days later, Judge Richard M. Berman ruled: no bail for Epstein.

The next day, on July 19, Alexander Acosta—whose role in the 2008 nonprosecution agreement was now being viewed more harshly—resigned from Trump’s cabinet. Four days after that, on July 23, Epstein was written up for “self-mutilation” and was put in a “suicide watch” cell. But thirty-one hours later that assessment was downgraded to something less restrictive (“psychological observation”), and later still, he was returned to a normal cell. Prison records show that on two occasions while in custody, he described himself as a coward and as someone who does not like pain.

On August 9, 2019—my thirty-sixth birthday—a judge made public the first of what would soon be several batches of previously sealed documents in my defamation case against Maxwell. This batch—roughly two thousand pages in all—included excerpts of several depositions, including my own. And these excerpts made clear that in 2016, under oath, I had named not only Prince Andrew and Jean-Luc Brunel among my abusers (as I had in my 2014 joinder motion) but also Marvin Minsky, the MIT scientist; Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico; and others. My sworn testimony naming Billionaires Numbers One, Two, and Three would be made public in various document dumps, and they all denied knowledge of and participation in Epstein’s trafficking scheme.

Siggy and I had a joke we often told each other: if we were frustrated that one of our cases seemed stalled, all we needed to do was send Siggy on vacation. Whenever she tried to take a break with her family, something big would happen. In August 2019, Siggy flew to Africa to take her kids on safari. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when early on a Sunday morning Siggy found a satellite phone and called me in Australia.

Just hours before, on Saturday, August 10, guards had entered Epstein’s cell inside the high-security unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan to bring him breakfast. Instead, they found his lifeless body, a bedsheet tied around his neck. Epstein was dead at the age of sixty-six. The news hit me with an almost physical force. I guess I didn’t believe someone who’d exerted so much power over me could ever die. “I know you’re disappointed,” Siggy said, and she was right. This wasn’t how justice was supposed to work—with the accused avoiding a reckoning by taking himself out. Some might imagine that I’d be happy that Epstein was dead, but I wasn’t. Indeed, it would take time for me to realize that I was in mourning. Not because the world had lost a monster—that was a good thing. No, like all of Epstein’s victims, I was grieving the death of my ability to hold him accountable for what he had done.

As the details came out, nearly everything about Epstein’s death seemed fishy. Even Attorney General William Barr would acknowledge he initially had suspicions that Epstein had been murdered. Instead, he concluded otherwise: that Epstein’s death was a result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” There was the fact that Epstein had tried to harm himself before but then been taken off suicide watch. While he’d had a cellmate at some point, on the night of his death, he did not have one. Two prison guards who sat at a desk just fifteen feet from Epstein’s cell were supposed to check on him every half hour from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. Instead, they’d napped and browsed the internet, then falsified the logs to say they’d completed their rounds. Security cameras that could have captured Epstein’s self-harming behavior—or, if conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the actions of whoever murdered him—were not functioning. Other cameras that were working showed that no one had entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died—so that seemed to rule out the possibility of an assassin sneaking in. But then his brother hired a forensic pathologist to examine the official autopsy report. That expert concluded that the broken bones and cartilage in Epstein’s neck “point[ed] to homicide.”

I can make a case for either suicide or murder. This was a man who bragged about his access to power—by this point in his life, he was known to have relationships with not just pretty young girls and brainiac scientists but also the likes of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, James “Jes” Staley, the CEO of Barclays Bank, and Leon Black, the cofounder and CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. According to court documents, Epstein also knew Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page well enough to have introduced them and others to Staley. In addition to his self-described “biological” need for sex, Epstein needed to feel important, and collecting such high-profile acquaintances had helped him feed that hunger. Now being in jail meant having no access to either the young girls he loved to abuse or the powerful men he yearned to rub shoulders with. That certainly could have made him want to end it all. On the other hand, Epstein was the ultimate narcissist. He believed he was superior to others, and I never saw in him a scintilla of self-doubt, let alone a desire for self-annihilation. He’d always suggested to me that those videotapes he so meticulously collected in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his various houses gave him power over others. He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors. Could it be that someone who feared exposure by Epstein had found a way to exterminate him? I know that the official findings, including an inspector general’s report issued in June 2023, say this is impossible, but I will never be entirely convinced.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: while I’ve read that Epstein was buried in an unmarked grave not far from his parents, in Palm Beach, Florida, I don’t believe that at all. Epstein had repeatedly told me exactly what would happen when he died: his body would be placed in some sort of cryogenic chamber to be preserved until technology advanced far enough to bring him back to life. That’s what he’d always bragged to me, with that satisfied smirk on his face. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I wouldn’t bet against the notion that he somehow got his way on this.

Investigators would soon discover that on August 8, two days before his death, Epstein had placed his entire fortune into a trust—“The 1953 Trust,” apparently named for his birth year—in the Virgin Islands. This legal maneuver would be widely interpreted as Epstein’s final thumbing of his nose at those who’d survived his predation, because it made it much more difficult for his victims to get restitution. Even after death, Epstein seemed to be asserting control.

It was oddly heartening, therefore, when another photo emerged in the public realm that refocused the narrative not on Epstein’s maneuvering but on his perversity. Taken by a party photographer in 2001, the image is ostensibly of Naomi Campbell—the lens zeroes in on her, in a black leather bikini and a mesh black wrap, arriving at her thirty-first birthday bash on that yacht I’ve told you about in Saint-Tropez. But despite her undeniable beauty, the supermodel wasn’t the reason this photo ran in the New York Post on August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein’s death. I was.

“Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Sex Slave’ Seen at Naomi Campbell’s Birthday Party in 2001” blared the headline atop the photo (which had also appeared a day earlier in England’s Daily Mail ). And with that, a single image reminded the world just how childlike the girls in Epstein’s world were required to look. I’m caught in the foreground—clearly by accident—an awkward smile on my face, my long blond hair falling down my back. I am looking away, and my pink sleeveless top reveals a slender arm and a bare shoulder. I am seventeen years old. And right next to me, partially obscured, with only her dark hair and a sliver of her cheek visible, is Maxwell.

Later, I would meet a fellow Epstein survivor who would tell me this photograph was the reason she had broken her silence and come forward with her own story. The photo said something a thousand words couldn’t, she said: “Everyone knew: that was a child.” By “that,” she meant me.

Skip Notes

* Later it would become clear, in case anyone doubted it, that when he was arrested, Epstein had likely still been keeping company with minor girls. Two weeks before Epstein’s arrest, the US Marshals Service had interviewed an air-traffic control employee who reported seeing Epstein as recently as November 2018 disembarking from his jet with girls who appeared to be as young as eleven or twelve.