Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 36

What I needed, my friend said, was some time in the great outdoors. This was a new buddy of mine—the first mom I’d met when we moved to Cairns—and she had a daughter Ellie’s age. This friend—her name was Blaise—knew how much I loved animals, and she’d seen the luminescent blue butterfly on my Twitter account, which was also the logo for my foundation, Victims Refuse Silence. “Let’s take both our families to Butterfly Valley,” Blaise said, describing a creekside sanctuary, about two hours south of our house, where visitors slept in rustic cabins and kept their eyes peeled for Cairns birdwings, whose six-inch wingspans make them the largest butterflies in Australia. The trip sounded like a perfect chance to rest and recharge in nature, and Robbie said he and the kids would come too.

So, off we went, and initially it was heaven. Butterfly Valley lived up to its name: we must’ve seen thousands of Cairns birdwings in all shapes, sizes, and colors. But when I returned home, I spiked a temperature and my head hurt like hell. When I became delirious, Robbie took me to the doctor, who did some tests and concluded I must’ve been bitten by a mosquito, because I had meningitis. I couldn’t believe it: during the trip, I’d been the only one in our group slathering myself with bug spray. I was admitted to the hospital, where things got so much worse. Not realizing how delirious I’d become, at one point I got out of bed to go to the toilet and lost my footing. When I fell to the floor, I heard a cracking sound. I’d broken my neck.

I soon recovered from the meningitis, but now doctors said I needed surgery to repair my neck, which hurt constantly. They weren’t quite ready to operate, however, so we waited. To cheer me up, Robbie got me a French bulldog that I named Juno, and once I was up and walking around again, I took Juno everywhere. But in April, I was back in the hospital again with pneumonia. It was as if one mosquito bite had let loose a waterfall of health problems.

I wasn’t the only one struggling, of course. In spring 2020, the world was shutting down as the coronavirus raged. But still, surreally, my face and my story seemed to be everywhere, as the interviews I’d given over the previous months began to air. Even as I nursed my neck injury, in May 2020, Netflix launched its four-part series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich , which told the saga of Epstein and Maxwell’s reign of terror. In the final episode, a healthy-looking me reiterated that Epstein had not acted alone and repeated my belief that all his coconspirators needed to be held accountable. “The monsters are still out there abusing other people,” I said. “Why they have not been named and shamed yet is beyond me.”

Right after Epstein’s death, Maxwell had disappeared. Unconfirmed reports placed her in California, Massachusetts, France, and Israel, but all anyone knew for sure was that she was in hiding. Even her own lawyers said they did not know her location, and they refused to accept service, on her behalf, of three lawsuits filed by Annie Farmer, Jennifer Araoz, and a third Survivor Sister identified only as Jane Doe. That meant that even as federal prosecutors assembled a case against Maxwell, she couldn’t be arrested until someone actually found her. Finally, investigators used a tracker on one of her mobile phones to zero in on a remote, 156-acre property in Bradford, New Hampshire. On July 2, 2020, the FBI broke through her locked gate and announced themselves at her front door, telling her to open it. Instead she fled to another room, so they broke in. She was arrested and charged with six counts that included transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and perjury. The perjury charges were personally satisfying for me because I’d enabled it—the government was alleging Maxwell had lied under oath in her depositions we’d taken in my defamation case against her. The other charges alleged that from 1994 to 1997, Maxwell helped Epstein recruit, groom, and sexually abuse girls as young as fourteen years old. These initial charges mentioned three unidentified minor victims, though I was not among them.

Because of the pandemic, Judge Alison J. Nathan held a virtual bail hearing for Maxwell in July 2020, with all the participants appearing remotely. Two victims spoke: Annie Farmer called Maxwell “a sexual predator who groomed and abused me and countless other children and young women.” And a prosecutor read aloud a statement from the other victim, referred to as Jane Doe. “Without Ghislaine,” this woman said, “Jeffrey could not have done what he did.” Prosecutors had made clear that Maxwell knew how to evade detection; while still in hiding, she had changed her email address and registered a new phone number under the name “G Max.” She also held passports from France and Britain—and had bank accounts that totaled as much as $20 million—so she would have a relatively easy time fleeing if she wished to. Judge Nathan denied Maxwell bail.

The day after Maxwell’s bail hearing, I was interviewed on CBS This Morning by Gayle King. I said that Maxwell could “smell the vulnerability” of the young girls she recruited, and I asserted that the way Maxwell used her femininity to give girls a false sense of safety made her worse than Epstein. While Epstein was a sick pedophile, Maxwell “was vicious. She was evil,” I said. “Put it this way: Epstein was Pinocchio, and she was Geppetto. She was—”

King interjected: “Pulling the strings?”

“Yes,” I answered. “She was pulling the strings.”

King asked, “What would justice look like for you?”

“I would like to see Ghislaine stay in jail forever,” I said. “I would like her to apologize for what she’s done to me and so many others.”

“Does the buck stop with Ghislaine Maxwell, in your opinion?” she asked.

“No, the buck stops when every single monster gets held accountable and our children are safe,” I said. “Not just my monsters. But all the monsters. And we need everyone’s help.”

Two weeks later, Judge Loretta Preska, who was presiding over ongoing decisions related to my defamation suit against Maxwell, gave us a little help when she made public a second batch of documents from my case. This batch included flight logs from Epstein’s private jets; police reports from the 2005 to 2008 investigation of Epstein in Florida; a set of emails, dated January 2015, between Epstein and Maxwell; and emails from me to the FBI in 2014, including one in which I expressed interest in pursuing a case against Epstein and proving, as I put it, “how much pedophilia occurred.” The email was just another reminder of how much time had passed while I, and other Survivor Sisters, begged law enforcement to bring these people to justice.

In August 2020, I had what’s called an anterior cervical discectomy; doctors at Sunnybank Private Hospital in Brisbane went in through the front of my throat and removed a shattered disk, then attached metal swivels in my neck to allow me to continue to have some mobility. As I healed, I posted about the ordeal on Instagram, showing my postsurgery bruises and thanking my supporters for helping me get through it. “I’m too tough for something like this to take me down—and I got a bionic spine out of it,” I wrote. I was not permitted to fly afterward, so when I was released from the hospital, Robbie and I drove six hours back to Cairns.

But as my body mended, everything hurt. I was taking strong painkillers but trying not to rely on them too much. Knowing how drugs had helped me escape from reality in the past, I worried about their allure. My determination to resist that temptation, however, would soon waver. In September the Broken podcast that I’d helped report went live, but I didn’t listen to it. I was too zoned out on oxycodone.

I grew up a tomboy, climbing trees, making mudpies, and splashing in ponds, so I know what happens when you turn over rocks that haven’t been disturbed in a long time: when daylight hits the creepy-crawly things underneath, it makes them squirm. When the deposition in which I named the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky among my abusers became public, for example, a colleague of Minsky’s blasted out an email to a mailing list for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the email, renowned computer scientist Richard Stallman suggested that I had been a willing participant in my encounter with Minsky. Stallman questioned whether Minsky “applied force or violence” and seemed to be arguing that if he did not, I must have opted in. “The most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman wrote of me.

Stallman was criticized by some who received this email, but still it was clear that not everyone agreed that the girls and women whom Epstein and Maxwell trafficked to others were victims who deserved compassion. “They took the money, didn’t they?” was the most common refrain from people in this camp—as if someone can’t be victimized while being paid two hundred dollars. While I wasn’t pen pals with people who believed these things, their opinions reached me through social media and, occasionally, through email. My point: Stallman wasn’t alone in his skepticism.

Just as Stallman defended Minsky, many friends and colleagues of MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito defended him after it was revealed that he had cultivated a close (and lucrative) relationship with Epstein. Ito apologized, and for a little while, it appeared he’d keep his job. Then The New Yorker revealed just how extensively Ito had worked to cover up Epstein’s visits to the MIT campus, as well as Epstein’s direct donations and donations that Epstein had helped prompt from other people. One day after that article ran, Ito resigned.

The chips were beginning to fall for other men who’d been connected to Epstein too. A month after Ito’s downfall, Brown University—who’d hired an MIT fundraising official who’d worked with Ito to cultivate Epstein—put that official on leave to make sure his behavior could be reconciled with Brown’s “core values.” Harvard University—which had received over $9 million in gifts from Epstein—would soon shut down its program for evolutionary dynamics after investigating the link between its director, Martin Nowak, and Epstein.

The ripples of Epstein’s public shunning were soon being felt outside academia as well. Leon Black would resign as chief executive of Apollo Global Management and Jes Staley would resign as CEO of Barclays Bank—both after inquiries into the two men’s relationships with Epstein. And it wouldn’t be long before Melinda French Gates would tell CBS’s Gayle King that while there were a number of factors that led her to divorce her husband of twenty-seven years, Bill Gates, his work with Epstein was definitely one of them. “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” Melinda would tell King, adding that she herself met with Epstein “exactly one time” because she “wanted to see who this man was.” Her reaction: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.”

If only everyone felt such empathy for Epstein’s victims. In December 2020, The Telegraph ran a story about me that was headlined “Prince Andrew’s Accuser Was a Prostitute Paid Off by Jeffrey Epstein, Court Papers Allege.” Based on a recorded conversation between a New York publisher and the tabloid journalist Sharon Churcher, who was trying to sell a book, those court papers implied that I was making up allegations as a form of blackmail, only seeking to get paid off.

In my darkest hours, especially when the pain in my neck immobilized me, reading headlines like those cut me to the quick. The fact that I suspected this was my critics’ intent—Call her a whore! That’ll shut her up!—didn’t make it any easier to read. Ten days before Christmas 2020, when I was really struggling, I recorded a video of myself that I shared on Twitter. “I’m not asking for a pity party,” I told my followers, who numbered more than one hundred thousand. “I don’t want that. I just want to know I’m on the right path and helping people. Some days, it’s just—” At that point my voice cracked, and tears filled my eyes. I’d spent so long believing that it was my responsibility to demand accountability from those who’d hurt me. But to the extent that meant repeating what happened to me again and again and again, as if on a tape loop, I wasn’t sure how much more of that I could take. “It’s hard,” I said to the camera. “I just feel quite alone.”

Still, there were other, less lonely times that I sensed I was part of a movement that was forcing positive change. On January 14, 2021, L Brands shareholders filed a complaint alleging that Leslie Wexner, among others, created an “entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment” at the company. They also said Wexner, who had stepped down as CEO the previous year to return to his mansion in New Albany, Ohio, had breached his fiduciary duty because he was aware of abuses being committed by Epstein. Among other things, Epstein was alleged to have preyed on Victoria’s Secret models, and shareholders claimed this caused a devaluation of the brands under the company’s umbrella. Six months later, in July, the company settled, pledging to invest $90 million to clean up its act, improving sexual harassment and antiretaliation practices and ceasing to enforce nondisclosure agreements that had silenced women victims in the past.

Not even a year later, a singer and former American Idol contestant named Jax released an ode to body positivity that quickly climbed the pop charts. “I know Victoria’s secret,” she sang, “And, girl, you wouldn’t believe / She’s an old man who lives in Ohio / Making money off of girls like me / Cashin’ in on body issues / Sellin’ skin and bones with big boobs / I know Victoria’s secret / She was made up by a dude.” Victoria’s Secret’s new female CEO soon wrote Jax a letter, thanking her for raising “important issues.” One by one, some in Epstein’s inner circle were being called out. If I had played even a small part in that, I thought, maybe I could keep going.