Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 8

When I was eleven, I got my period. For years, as adults had forced me to do things no child should know about, I’d been praised sometimes for acting “grown up.” But no one had bothered to tell me what happened when a girl actually grew up. I had no idea what was coming. I remember being outside at one of my parents’ boozy bonfire parties, running around with some other kids, when I looked down at my jeans and saw a creeping red stain. Was I bleeding to death? I wondered. Pale and terrified, I sought out Mom, who glared at me as she appraised my bloody pants. Then, without putting down her beer, she headed into the house, scrounged around in the cupboard under the bathroom sink, and handed me a sanitary pad. “Figure it out,” she said, turning on her heel and leaving me alone. Locking the door behind her, I sat down on the toilet and cried.

Around this time, Sheila’s mom called my mom, and what she said set off an explosion in our house. My memory is that Mom got the impression that Forrest had impregnated Sheila. (He hadn’t, as it turned out. Sheila has recently told me that after a Florida court emancipated her, she moved to North Carolina with a boyfriend and got pregnant with him. She married that boyfriend when she was eighteen, and they had a daughter. But my mom didn’t know that.) My parents fought for hours that night as Skydy and I huddled together, covering our ears. For a while, Dad moved out—but not before I was exiled to the home of one of my dad’s sisters. Aunt Carol lived in California, three thousand miles west. Maybe my mother was trying to protect me when she sent me into this other galaxy, but it didn’t feel that way to me. In my mind, my mother had once again chosen my father over me.

“Alone, listless / Breakfast table in an otherwise empty room,” Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would sing into my earphones. When he’d belt out the chorus, in which a young girl demands again and again, “Don’t call me daughter,” I’d chime in at the top of my lungs.

When I arrived in Salinas, a dusty farming town just inland from Monterey, I was a skinny wreck, and I couldn’t have been less interested in starting at a new school. I wasn’t a racist like my father, who’d told us that black people were born with tails that doctors cut off when they were young. I knew that was bullshit, and that I was no better than anyone else, no matter their skin color. But it was still hard to be one of only three white kids, and the only white girl, in a school that was ruled by Latino gangs. I may have been seething inside, but on the outside, I wasn’t very scary looking, with my emaciated frame and my sunken blue eyes. When a classmate told me I had two choices—“You can either be beat into a gang, or fucked into a gang”—I had an idea. That afternoon, I convinced Aunt Carol to take me to get a haircut by threatening her with the truth: “If you don’t take me, I’ll call Mom and tell her you’re spending all the money she sends you on things that are not for me.” The minute I got into the salon chair, though, I told the beautician to shave my head. The poor woman was reluctant—my hair was almost to my waist—but I insisted. When I emerged with my buzzcut, my aunt was horrified. But my plan worked. The next day at school, I looked so crazy that even the gangs steered clear.

Though not raised religious, Aunt Carol had become a devout Mormon, and I had no use for her proselytizing. With all that had happened, how could I believe that the Spirit of the Lord was trying to inspire me? I doubted my aunt knew what her brother had been doing to me. If she had known, she wouldn’t have kept pleading with me to use the Book of Mormon to bear my testimony. Still, her faith sounded like mumbo jumbo to me, and it wasn’t long before I’d had enough of her. Remembering how Mom had run away to San Francisco as a teenager, I hatched a plan. If San Fran was good enough for Mom, I figured, maybe it’d be good enough for me.

The night before Easter, I crawled out a window and hitchhiked more than a hundred miles north. Almost instantly, I regretted it. Not knowing how cold San Francisco could be, I hadn’t brought any warm clothes. A few days later, the cops nabbed me for panhandling. Aunt Carol called my father and said she was done with me. That was that: my dad flew out and took me home to Florida.

When we got back to Rackley Road, the first thing I did was run to Alice’s empty stall. “Where is she?” I demanded. My parents said that when they’d shipped me off to California, they’d sold Alice. I cried for weeks, begging them to tell me where she was. Could I at least visit her? But neither Mom nor Dad would tell me Alice’s whereabouts, saying only that she’d been sent to “a good home.”

“Well, that makes one of us,” I thought to myself.

At this point, for reasons I will never know, the sexual abuse stopped. Forrest was gone, and Dad was steering clear of me. I was relieved, of course, but I can’t say that life became entirely easy, either. What was left of my relationship with my parents was a river of anger that flowed in both directions. All this came to a head when Mom, Dad, Skydy, and I drove our camper van cross-country to a reunion of my dad’s family near Sacramento. For the whole trip west, I stayed in the way back of the van, huddled under a blanket, headphones over my ears. At this point I’d discovered Enya, whose New Age, ethereal style felt foreign in a good way. “I walk the maze of moments / But everywhere I turn to / Begins a new beginning / But never finds a finish,” Enya sang in her lilting Irish accent. I knew how she felt and sang along when she told me, “Sail away. Sail away. Sail away. Sail away.”

When we arrived at the campsite where the family reunion was being held, I couldn’t help but cheer up a bit. The massive redwoods were different from Florida’s trees, and as we sat around the campfire each evening, I liked staring up at the stars. Then one night toward the end of the four-day gathering, there was a dance that was open to all campers, not just our family group. I went, grateful to be around kids my own age, but also to be in a place where no one knew a thing about me. For a few hours, I pretended I was a carefree camper from a wonderful, loving home, and after the DJ played the night’s final song, a shy boy whom I’d danced with once or twice offered to walk me back to our campsite. Gratefully, I accepted. My mom always said that my sense of direction was so poor that I could get lost in a circle, and on this night, I knew I needed help finding my way. But minutes later, as the boy and I walked down the middle of a moonlit asphalt road, Dad’s van suddenly appeared and screeched to a halt. “What the fuck are you doing?” my father screamed from the driver’s seat, and I could tell from the high keen of his voice that he was drunk.

My gracious escort looked as if he might swallow his tongue. “I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered. “I didn’t do anything. I’m just walking Jenna home.” But my dad wasn’t listening. “Get the fuck out of here,” Dad ordered, stepping toward the boy. Then he turned on me. “You’re a fucking slut,” he said, as he threw me into the van.

Back at our campsite, Dad kept up with his yelling, calling me a dirty whore, an ungrateful piece of shit, and worse. I’d heard it all before, but that night I snapped. “What, you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to touch me?” I asked, my voice loud. My mom was inside the camper, out of earshot. But if I was going to finally call Dad out, I wanted to make sure at least my uncles and aunts could hear. “This guy has been fucking me for years, since I was a little kid,” I yelled in their direction, “and no one’s done shit about it.” I wish I could say that they all stood up then to form a protective barrier around me. But they didn’t move. So after a startled silence, Dad grabbed me by my neck with one hand and punched me in the face with the other. Then he shoved me into the borrowed camper where we’d all been sleeping and continued beating me until my lips were split open and one of my eyes was swollen shut. Skydy tried to come in to help me, but he was too little to do much. Finally, I got Dad off me by kicking him in the groin, and the beating stopped. He’d worn himself out raging at me.

The next morning, I woke up thinking that since I’d finally revealed my father’s abuse out loud, something would have to change. Maybe, at the very least, someone would acknowledge what I’d been through. Instead, before we left to drive back to Florida, the entire extended family acted as if nothing had happened. “You want some bacon and eggs?” Aunt Peggy (not actually my aunt, but a family friend; we’d been told to call her that) asked me when I emerged, black and blue, from wherever I’d passed out. She offered me some Percocet. Then my family piled in our van, and I sought out my blanket in the back.

I didn’t speak to my father again until we got to Loxahatchee.

Weeks later, I started at Crestwood Middle School. I was thirteen. Maybe this will be hard to understand, but for a while I stopped fighting. It was as if my anger were a balloon, but all the air had leaked out. I’d lived on the streets of San Francisco, surviving pangs of hunger that even I—a girl who’d become expert in denying myself nourishment—found excruciating. I guess part of me was just glad to be living under a familiar roof again.

It was around this time that I came home and found Forrest sitting with Dad on our back porch.

“Uncle Forrest has something he wants to say to you,” Dad said, as a bump of adrenaline hit me. I wanted to run, but my feet wouldn’t move. “He is a man of God now, born again,” Dad continued, “and it’s important that you respect your elders and hear him out.” I don’t know what I expected to hear from Forrest’s ugly mouth. Maybe: “I’m sorry I raped you and fucked up your life”? Besides, my legs weren’t working. So I just stood there, trying to breathe.

What happened next would be funny if it weren’t so appalling. Forrest stood up and grabbed me by my shoulders, then pushed me to my knees, where he’d forced me to be so many times before. This time, though, he was clothed. “You need to ask God for forgiveness,” he said, sort of bellowing, “for what you did with your dad and me.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As horrible as I felt about myself, some part of me knew that what had happened with Dad and his friend wasn’t all my fault. But standing over me now, Forrest just kept on, half-yelling, half-preaching. Suddenly, I knew what hate tasted like. It was bile in my mouth, bitter, and I had an appetite for it. I hated Forrest. I hated my parents. I hated every living being in Loxahatchee.

After that, my rage stayed at a full boil. I ran away so often my parents put alarms on my windows to try to keep me in, but I’d watched MacGyver and I always got out. Though I went to school each day, I skipped more classes than I attended, whiling away the hours under the bleachers, smoking pot. English class was the exception. I never cut English because I loved reading and escaping into other people’s stories. But one compelling class wasn’t enough to tether me to school. Though I was on the basketball team, I stopped going to practice. For years my parents, who attended every one of Skydy’s games and tournaments, had always skipped mine. I was done trying to win them over.

My middle school shared a campus with the high school, so now I sought out older kids—the “bad” kids, the “rats,” who did drugs and got into trouble. There was one boy, Ian, whom I’d meet in the woods to smoke pot and fool around with. I think he was a senior in high school, while I wasn’t yet a freshman, but I told myself this was proof I was just more grown-up than my peers. Up to that point, all sexual encounters had been against my will, so there was something freeing about choosing sex for myself. That said, Ian wasn’t anything close to a boyfriend or a first love. At the time, I thought that I was taking back control of my life by lying down in the woods with him, but I see something else now. Pathetically, I was trading on the only part of me that anyone seemed to care about—my body—while my soul remained on the sidelines, ignored.

I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. Imagine if a trauma reel like this played in your head all the time, as it does in mine, and not just on the pages of a book you can put down if you need to, just for a moment, to steady your nerves. But please don’t stop reading. I know exactly how to help you get through these tough parts, just as I help myself: by focusing on the present.

It’s dinnertime in the Giuffre household, and Robbie has made his famous shepherd’s pie. “AlexTylerEllie!” he yells from the kitchen, making their names into one word. Suddenly the kids are running full steam toward the table. “Shotgun!” Tyler says. Because he’s first to claim it, he gets the coveted chair to the right of Robbie, who sits at the head of the table. The shotgun seat is the only one with a direct line of sight to the living-room TV, catty-corner from our dining area. The TV isn’t usually on when we’re eating, but a family tradition has been cemented nonetheless: the best seat at the dinner table is that one, and every night, the kids compete for it.

For a few minutes, everyone chews. Everyone except Alex, who’s half asleep. “Eat your dinner, Alex,” Robbie commands. “I’m trying,” our eldest protests. “Your hands are in the pockets of your hoodie,” Robbie observes. “That’s not the definition of trying.” Robbie worries that Alex is too skinny. “You look like a stick figure,” he says. But I remember how thin I was as a teenager, and I’ve seen photos of Robbie as a beanstalk at that age too. I reach over and put my hand on Robbie’s knee to signal: let him be.

“Hey, Dad, what is the most intelligent species on this planet?” Ellie asks.

“You’re looking at him!” Robbie boasts, as Ellie rolls her eyes.

But here’s what occurs to me all the time: Robbie may not be highly educated, but he has taught me and the kids so much. Our children are polite. They take out the trash bins when asked. They are kind to one another—when Ellie was cold at the beach the other day, Tyler offered her his sweatshirt without anyone asking. While I’d love to take credit, I know Robbie is a big part of the reason why. Our kids know something I never knew as a child: that their father would do anything to keep them safe. And that allows them to thrive. “How you doing, beastie?” he’ll ask Ellie, when she looks out of sorts. My husband is difficult to ignore. He gets her talking. And when any of us is truly in a funk, it is Robbie who suggests that we “drop anchor.”

“Envision yourself on a boat,” he’ll say. “Now throw that weight overboard. What are you really feeling? Let’s stop, get centered, see what’s going on.” When we lash out or act angry, it is Robbie—no stranger to anger himself—who pushes us to look for what he knows is there: the underlying hurt. (I’ve got plenty of that.)

Full disclosure, though: when dropping anchor doesn’t work, Robbie’s been known to drop his pants and moon us. Anything to get through—to get us out of our own heads. That’s my husband: part guru, part goofball. He helps me more than I can say.

At thirteen, I would walk a mile for a fistfight. I particularly liked confronting bullies, which is probably part of the reason I befriended a boy named José. He didn’t call himself gay, because that wasn’t a word we used then. But he liked boys “that way,” and he refused to hide it, so he was always getting picked on. I was José’s only friend—we used to do each other’s makeup—and the fact that he made no sexual demands on me was a relief. Wearing brightly colored outfits and heavy eyeliner to school, José seemed intent on forcing our school’s bigots to accept him for who he was. I wanted his plan to work. When it didn’t, though, one insulting word aimed in José’s direction was enough for me to throw the first punch. When he took me home and his mom heard how I was defending him, she told me I was welcome there anytime. Soon I was regularly sleeping on their couch. But then my mother called the cops looking for me, and two officers knocked on José’s front door. I hid, but after they left, José’s mom told me I needed to sleep elsewhere. I was on the move again.

Then I met a fellow middle schooler, a boy named Tony Figueroa, who would play a big part in my life off and on for years to come. Tony’s mom was from Honduras and his dad was from Chile, and he had the most beautiful long black hair. A self-proclaimed goth, with combat boots and all-black clothing, Tony could spend hours listening to Led Zeppelin and Metallica. I thought he was rad. Tony had black lights in his bedroom that made his neon-colored posters glow in the dark. He also had a lock on his door, so when his mom would knock, I had time to slip under the bed before he opened it. On nights when I didn’t want to go home—that was most nights—Tony would bring me scraps from his family’s dinner table, like in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , when the little boy sneaks food to the alien hiding in his closet. I was truly fond of Tony, but this relationship—like so many others—was colored by my desperation. At first we were just friends, but I felt I owed Tony for letting me stay with him, and at this point, I saw sex as the primary way to pay my debts. One night we were in his room, and rain was pouring down outside. Tony put The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” on his stereo, and we ended up having sex. I was probably fourteen. I’d find out later that it had been his first time.

I was barely sleeping at my parents’ house, but I guess they wanted me gone for good, because this was when Mom tricked me into entering Growing Together. I’ve already described the terrors I endured at that teen rehab facility. I’ve told of my escape to Miami when I was fifteen, and what the armed stranger in the white van did to me when I accepted a ride from him. I’ve tried to explain how that rape made me easy prey for the old fat man in the black limousine: Ron Eppinger, who was then sixty-three. What I didn’t know when Eppinger picked me up in his limo in December 1998 was that Perfect 10, the “modeling agency” he told me he was running, was in fact a $1,000-a-night escort service. Federal prosecutors would eventually prove that between 1997 and 1999, Eppinger and two Czech accomplices procured young women abroad, then sent them to South Florida to work as call girls. So when Eppinger discovered me sitting on that curb and took me home, he made an exception: I was the only American girl in his stable.

Eppinger wanted me to look as young as possible, so the first night I was there, before he demanded sex from me, he shaved my pubic area and told me to keep it that way. He said I should be grateful, when he forced me to have intercourse with him, because he was teaching me a valuable skill: how to please men. Later, he required that I watch porn so I’d understand “what sex is about.” He had a certain all-American look he wanted me to emulate. He insisted I have my blond hair dyed a lighter platinum, like a teen Barbie doll’s, and sent me to a tanning salon to bronze my skin. He also liked to show me off in public, driving me around in his convertible. During these drives, he usually required that I be topless.

Early on, Eppinger was relatively gentle with me. But as time went by, he revealed a violent streak. He was aggressive with me during sex and seemed to enjoy making me feel afraid. On one particularly awful night, he grabbed me by the back of my neck and forced my face into his crotch. I closed my eyes and began to count—one, two, three—hoping the numbers would keep my brain from focusing on what was happening. I had to count to over a hundred before he ejaculated in my mouth. Raped again and again, I began to take the drugs Eppinger and his girls offered me: Xanax, oxycodone, anything to numb the pain. Determined to change my fate one way or another, I began fantasizing about killing myself. “It would be so much easier if you just died,” said the voice in my head.

In some published accounts about this period in my life, I’ve been inaccurately described as an eager participant in Eppinger’s world. In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story , the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown writes that after I heard from Eppinger’s other girls about the expensive clothes and jewelry that their clients gave them, I “began to think that this lifestyle wasn’t only exciting; it was an acceptable way to earn a living.” That’s bunk. I wasn’t excited. I was a defeated, hopeless child. I knew what was happening wasn’t right. Soon, after Eppinger began trafficking me to his friends, I knew how it felt to be a puppy picked from a litter, just hoping its new owner wasn’t the whipping kind. I was merely trying to survive.

The only bright spot in this dark chapter came when Eppinger, sensing that law enforcement was onto him, sent me away to a horse ranch in Ocala, in northern Florida. While there, I was made to sexually service the owner of the ranch, who was repulsive. But being near horses again helped me stay in touch with myself. While I didn’t get to groom or ride them, I could watch them from afar, standing together, tossing their tails and grazing happily. I imagined these animals were my guardian angels.

Have you ever heard that nursery rhyme, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”? It means that success in life depends not just on how much you desire it but on what actions you take to achieve it. I like that idea: that a person has the power to push her own life forward. But when I was held prisoner by Eppinger, I didn’t have any power. I felt if I took action to save myself, I’d be caught and physically punished—or worse. In the years since, I’ve come to believe that in Ocala, my wishes really were horses. The horses outside my window embodied the freedom I lacked—the freedom I wished for. Watching them lazily munching sweetgrass, even as they trained their ears to perceive any threats, was the only time I dared imagine that my life might someday get better.