Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 37

On Ellie’s eleventh birthday, in January 2021, we moved our family across Australia, from Cairns on the East Coast to Perth on the West Coast. Queensland had been wonderful when the kids were younger, but now I wanted them to attend the better schools Perth could offer. I continued to be amazed by my children. Ellie, for example, was a force. Tall for her age and physically strong, she was also insatiably curious about the world and a big reader. Lately, she’d discovered a manga series called Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba about a fourteen-year-old girl and her older brother who have lost their entire family to demons. When the girl becomes a demon, too, her brother becomes a demon slayer and vows to transform his sister back into human form. Ellie told me she loved the idea that demons could be rehabilitated and made good again. I was buoyed by her optimism, even as I sometimes struggled to maintain my own.

In February 2021, my health worsened. First, I developed a high fever, then a place on my thigh where I’d received a steroid injection became inflamed. My doctors speculated that maybe I was having an allergic reaction to the antibiotic I’d been taking after my neck surgery, but mostly they seemed stumped. Soon my inflamed thigh turned into a staph infection that refused to heal. Then, I got another case of pneumonia. It was as if my immune system was overloaded. I couldn’t catch a break.

I was still taking a lot of pain meds, among other prescribed medicines, when I headed to France in mid-June 2021 to give a deposition against Jean-Luc Brunel. The modeling agent had been arrested in Paris the previous December and charged with sexual harassment and the rape of minor victims. No charges of human trafficking were brought initially, but the investigation was continuing, and he had not been acquitted of that charge. Part of the investigation involved taking depositions from people like me, who’d been assaulted by Brunel. So I bought a plane ticket and flew from Australia to Europe to do my duty.

As I described in the introduction to this book, first, I spent several days preparing with Siggy and my French lawyers. Then, for ten hours over a single day, I sat in the same room as Brunel as I was questioned under oath. As expected, his lawyers attempted to impale me on all the sharp words that abusers usually aim at their victims: liar, money-grubber, prostitute. While Brunel wasn’t supposed to speak to me directly, of course he found a way to do so. He sat in the front row, while I sat behind him in the second row, looking at the back of his skull. At one point, when we took a break, he turned and whispered, “You’re a lying bitch.” Looking at me with the same eyes that had once ogled me as he forced me to have sex with him, he hissed, “I’ve never even met you.”

I soothed myself with shopping trips and two visits to the Louvre. On my first visit, I found myself facing off with a huge garish tapestry in a room that might as well have been haunted by Epstein and Maxwell’s ghosts. A panic attack nearly sunk me, but a few days later, I returned to reclaim that beautiful place for myself. On a shelf in my family room in Perth, I keep the replica I bought that day of Winged Victory of Samothrace , the famous headless statue of the goddess Nike that has been on display at the Louvre since 1883. Compared to the nine-foot-tall original, mine—which I found in the museum’s gift shop—stands only about two feet high. But its power is immense in that every day, it serves as a reminder: winning isn’t always possible, but it’s worth striving for.

The highlight of my visit to France, though, was finally meeting a woman named Thysia Huisman in person. In 1991, when Huisman was eighteen and a would-be model, she’d met with Brunel in Brussels at the urging of her new agents. Brunel, then in his midforties, told her that he’d make her a star if she came to Paris immediately. She did, and at his insistence, she stayed in his apartment. But within a week, she was gone. That’s because, on her fourth or fifth night there, Brunel spiked her drink and raped her.

Huisman was too ashamed at the time to bring charges against him. But years later, after seeing me on TV, she had reached out to me on Twitter, and we’d begun a dialogue. She went public with her charges in 2019, joining several models who would accuse Brunel of sexual assault and rape. Now it was two years later, and she was walking into the lobby of my Paris hotel.

We greeted each other with a warm hug, and for the next two hours, we shared what we’d been through, sitting closely together on a velvet couch. Huisman, now a TV producer, gave me a copy of book she’d written: Close-Up: Het schokkende verhaal van een Nederlands fotomodel, which meant: “ the shocking story of a Dutch fashion model.” She had published this memoir in 2020, and despite the fact that I couldn’t read Dutch, getting my own copy meant the world to me. On the cover was a portrait of her stunning face when she was eighteen, right before Brunel abused her. I held her hand, and we both shed tears for what these men had taken from us.

Over the summer, Siggy and the rest of my legal team sent a letter to Prince Andrew’s lawyers as time was running out to file a lawsuit against him under a New York law extending the statute of limitations for underage sex abuse claims. They didn’t receive any response. In early August, the prince’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, told the Financial Times that she and Prince Andrew were the “happiest divorced couple in the world”—a PR move seemingly intended to burnish the prince’s image on the eve of my likely lawsuit.

On August 9, 2021, my thirty-eighth birthday, two key things happened. First, administrators of the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Fund, which had been created after his suicide to establish a process for survivors of his abuse to bring claims against his estate, announced they were winding down the program because its work was done. In all, the fund had given almost $125 million to about 150 victims. When you add that number to the many of us who’d settled with Epstein when he was still alive, there were now probably at least 200 victims (and likely many more) who had come forward to identify themselves and been compensated by Epstein or Epstein’s estate. The sheer scale of that effort was and is remarkable.

The second thing that happened on August 9 was that I sued Prince Andrew in New York State for violating the Child Victims Act. My suit came just four days before the look-back window slammed shut. In my claim, I alleged that Prince Andrew had raped and battered me when I was a minor, causing me severe and lasting damage. I asked for damages to be determined by the court.

As I turned thirty-eight, I realized that I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first. I was nineteen when I met Robbie and set off to make a new life with him. I’d now lived almost precisely nineteen more years, and I was still fighting for justice. I’d come a long way, but I had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.

When the news of my lawsuit broke, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when the British tabloid newspaper The Sun tracked down my father in Florida. “I support my daughter one hundred percent,” Dad said, calling me “persistent” and “brave.” “The royals are not above the law. That’s not the way it works. They can’t just do what they want. People fight back. That’s what Virginia is doing…. If Prince Andrew puts himself in my position, if this was happening to his daughter, how would he feel? He should be ashamed.” Reading these supportive words, my heart softened toward my father, but only for a moment. Above all, I knew him to be manipulative, so I suspected that this interview could be his way of trying to get back into my good graces. And, given his past behavior, I couldn’t help but wonder: had Dad been paid by The Sun ?

Initially, the prince made it difficult for my lawyers to serve him with papers, fleeing to Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral Castle in Scotland and hiding behind its well-guarded gates. This was not a surprise. Back in 2020, prosecutors in the Maxwell case had noted that Prince Andrew had “sought to falsely portray himself to the public as eager and willing to cooperate,” but, in fact, he had given no interview to federal authorities and had repeatedly declined requests to talk with investigators. If the prince had “completely shut the door on voluntary cooperation” with the US DOJ, as prosecutors alleged, it would have been foolhardy to expect that he would make it easy for me.

At the end of September, however, a judge scolded Prince Andrew’s lawyers for engaging in “a game of hide and seek behind palace walls,” and ruled that service could be made through his US-based lawyers. The case then moved forward. Soon we caught a break: a woman named Shukri Walker went public, saying she remembered seeing me dancing with Prince Andrew at the Tramp nightclub in 2001, just as I’d always said. Walker, who had already given a written statement to the FBI, said she would happily testify against the prince if my lawsuit went to trial. Her lawyer would later tell The Guardian that Walker remembered the night “clearly because she never saw a royal before or since. She says Prince Andrew was happy, smiling, and dancing, and Virginia did not look happy.”

I’d been in the hospital again, having laparoscopic surgery to remove cysts from my ovaries and polyps from my uterus. For weeks leading up to that operation, I’d been bleeding nonstop. Doctors wondered whether my string of health problems were somehow related to the staph infection on my thigh, which was still not fully healed. No one was quite sure of anything, it seemed, except that my body seemed to be staging a revolt.

But nothing was going to stop me from helping Ellie prepare for Halloween 2021. For months she’d been talking about going as Nezuko Kamado, the girl demon in her Demon Slayer manga series. At first, I’d been surprised that my daughter wanted to be a character that had crossed over to the dark side. But Ellie corrected me, saying Nezuko was actually a force for good. Even though a demon had mostly erased Nezuko’s memories, Ellie explained, her love of her older brother kept her from harming him. While most demons ate human flesh to get energy, Nezuko restored herself through sleep. “Kind of like you, Mom,” Ellie teased, referring to how much time I was spending in bed.

Now I threw myself into transforming my beautiful daughter into Nezuko. We got Ellie a kimono, and a pair of geta, those traditional Japanese flip-flops with the elevated wooden soles. We even found a way to re-create the bamboo muzzle, secured with a sash, that Nezuko wears to prevent herself from biting anyone. When we got it all together, my little warrior tried everything on, and she couldn’t have been happier. “You know, Mama,” she said, “eventually, Nezuko and her brother vanquish the evil around them and then they live a peaceful life.” She was beaming at me as if she’d stumbled upon a secret code for contentment. I hugged her long and hard that day. I’d been trying to protect my daughter from the world’s ugliness, but she was developing her own ways of protecting herself—and passing strength to me in the process.