Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 9
Eppinger held me captive for nearly six months before he gave me away to a friend of his. Yes, you read that right: he gave me away, as if I were a used bicycle or an unloved toy. The man Eppinger gifted me to was in his fifties and had connections to Fort Lauderdale’s seedy nightclub scene. Every n...
Eppinger held me captive for nearly six months before he gave me away to a friend of his. Yes, you read that right: he gave me away, as if I were a used bicycle or an unloved toy. The man Eppinger gifted me to was in his fifties and had connections to Fort Lauderdale’s seedy nightclub scene. Every night at a place called Hot Chocolates, which the man said he owned, he introduced me to everyone as his girlfriend. Maybe someone there noticed how young I looked and reported it, because on a bright June morning in 1999, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the local police broke down the door of the man’s apartment, where I was sleeping naked next to him. “This is a raid!” one black-clad officer yelled as they forced their way in. “Hands on your head!” When they dragged my abuser from the room, I could hear him yelling at me: “If you say anything, you-know-who will find you!” He meant Eppinger. The FBI agents wrapped me in a sheet and let me go to the bathroom to get dressed. I wished I’d had jeans and a T-shirt, but the only clothes I owned had been chosen by my captors, so I put on a metallic blue miniskirt and a tiny shirt that barely covered my breasts. The officers took me back to the Wilton Manors Police Station in Broward County, and for the next few hours, they grilled me about who had done what to me. When they were finally finished, they called my dad.
Even today, I remember Dad’s face when he walked into the police station. At that moment, I was holding tight to the arms of a borrowed swivel chair and spinning in circles. By then, I’d seen things no child should ever see, things that made me feel so much older than my fifteen years . From a distance, I may have looked like a kid enjoying the dizzy thrill of a makeshift Tilt-a-Whirl. But there was no joy in me. When Dad walked in, he flinched at the sight of me, his listless, abused little girl. “Goddamned slut,” he spat. “Fucking whore.” Then, though, he did something I’d never seen him do. He started to cry.
Some of this is a blur for me. I know the outline of what happened, and I can summon many of the feelings I felt, but my mind protects me by not bringing the scene into too sharp a focus. I remember Dad with his head in his hands, telling me Mom didn’t want me to come home, so he was sending me back to Growing Together. I pleaded with him, but he said he needed a week to find me somewhere else to stay. “One week,” he promised, “and I’ll come get you out.” A police officer handcuffed me then and put me in the back of a squad car to return me to juvie. Everyone believed I would try to run. But I was too tired to run. I would give Dad the week he asked for. I hoped that maybe, just this once, he’d keep his word.
Walking back into Growing Together, I recognized only a few of the kids. One girl told me I looked like “a ghost come back” from the other side. That felt about right. I bided my time, but with every passing day, I had less faith in my father. Finally, when Growing Together sent me out with a chaperone to get my blood and urine tested, I made a break for it. Finding a pay phone in a mini-mall parking lot, I called my parents’ house. Dad answered, full of excuses. “I’m trying to convince your mother to sign the papers to get you out of there,” he said.
“Well, you can quit that, because I’m already out,” I said. “Now come pick me up so I can come talk to Mom.” Dad wasn’t happy, but he did what I asked.
When we got back to Rackley Road, Mom was nowhere to be found. I looked in the kitchen and stuck my head into my old room, which they’d made into an office. Finally, I went out back, where I found her sitting in an old rusty lawn chair, smoking a cigarette, a beer can in her hand. When she saw me, she stood up and walked toward me. I knew better than to hope for a hug. She greeted me with a hard slap in the face, but then we both were crying. She didn’t want to hear where I’d been, she said. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. But I could stay, at least for the night.
When I think about this day, I can’t linger on my parents. Thinking of them is too awful. Instead, I think of Skydy, running out the back door, the screen slamming shut as he flung himself into my arms. He held me so tight that the rest didn’t matter. Someone loved me, truly. That didn’t fix everything, but it would have to be enough.
I stayed in my parents’ house only a short while. While they didn’t throw me out, exactly, Mom soon made it clear I wasn’t welcome on Rackley Road. I moved in with the family of a girl named Lorna, who I’d met at Growing Together. But that ended just a few months later, after Lorna’s dad announced that I was a bad influence on her. Lorna was back to partying again and had been caught shoplifting. I protested that I hadn’t been with her when she stole anything, but her dad was done with me. I couldn’t totally blame him—it’s not like I was helping Lorna get clean, and I’m sure he was wondering why my own family didn’t want me. But I was resentful and told him so. Are you noticing a pattern? I was unwanted, so I acted like a girl no one would want. A captive for so long, I had no idea how to harness my freedom.
That’s when Lorna’s stepbrother, Michael, said I could live with him in Fort Lauderdale. Michael was a kind but troubled boy who was two years older than me. We’d met when he visited Lorna’s family’s house—where he’d once lived—and I could tell he had a crush on me. So when he suggested being roommates, I had an idea of what he was hoping for. But I still said yes. Once again, desperation—not affection—determined my love life. Michael rented us an apartment, which we shared with a friend of his named Mario. Michael was working full time as a manager at Taco Bell and eventually helped me get a job there too. One thing led to another until we started having sex. But I had no romantic feelings for him. I just didn’t know how to set boundaries with men who wanted things from me. On Valentine’s Day 2000, Michael asked me to marry him, offering me his grandmother’s ring. I couldn’t say yes—I was just sixteen, two years short of Florida’s age requirement without parental consent. But I didn’t clearly say no, either, or tell him the truth: that I wasn’t in love with him. Years later, he’d say he believed that I’d accepted his proposal. I can understand why. For all the changes I wanted to make, it seemed I was paralyzed. Instead of choosing my own path, I was letting life happen to me. When I had opportunities to take control and advocate for myself, I often found it easier to get fucked up on alcohol or drugs instead.
“I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me,” Richard Ashcroft sings in “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” I must’ve listened to that song by the Britpop rock band The Verve a thousand times that year, wanting to believe, as Ashcroft asserts, that “I can change, I can change,” but knowing that, like the song says, I was “a million different people from one day to the next.” When I heard the Goo Goo Dolls song “Slide,” I again felt the sting of recognition. “Your father hit the wall / Your ma disowned you,” they sang. “Do you wanna get married? Or run away?” I knew the answer—run!—but I didn’t act on it.
Michael and I lived in that Fort Lauderdale apartment until we were evicted for failure to pay rent and for living, in all honesty, like wild beasts—or should I say among them? One of the few things Michael and I had in common was our love of animals, and we had a lot of pets: dogs, cats, even a ferret. We sort of tried to keep the place clean, but when we were thrown out of it, it was a pigsty.
Homeless again, I broke down and asked my parents if Michael and I could live in a travel trailer they’d parked in their back horse paddock. The trailer looked out on the pond, where years before I’d taken refuge on our tiny island and where I’d taught Alice to swim. The trailer had a bed, a bath, a kitchenette, and a small sitting area—plenty of room for us, at least for a while. My parents said yes, and days later, I was back on Rackley Road.
Today, I see this as a moment that could have set me on a better path. Through a stroke of luck, I’d landed the perfect job for a girl who’d dreamed of being a veterinarian. I worked the morning shift at a pet store called The Kookaburra’s Nest, where I was learning to run its aviary. The pay was good—more than $8 an hour—and I found I loved breeding, feeding, grooming, and selling exotic birds. I hand-raised Sugar, a yellow-crested cockatoo, from a chick. Sugar used to ride around on my shoulder, and when I gave her a bath, I’d tell her she was my baby, and she’d coo with happiness. Sugar was a beauty—all white but for a yellow comb on her head, and yellow ear patches and flight feathers—and I was determined to make her mine. Every two weeks, I set aside money from my check. But before I’d saved even half of Sugar’s $1,200 price tag, someone came in and bought her out from under me.
“The customer always comes first,” my boss said, when I pitched a fit. And in truth, the last thing I needed was another mouth (animal or human) to feed. Still, I was inconsolable. Losing Sugar felt like losing Alice all over again. So when another aviary recruited me to work for them, I accepted their offer just to spite the boss who’d sold Sugar. That decision proved a mistake, though, when my new employer abruptly shut down. I was unemployed again.
During this period, Mom and Dad and I forged a fragile peace. You may wonder how this could be. I guess I knew them so well that being around even their most hurtful behavior felt weirdly comfortable to me. More than that, though, who am I kidding? I had no place else to go, no one else to turn to. Setting aside all the indignities I’d suffered at the hands of my parents and others, the consequences of my own choices were becoming evident, even to sixteen-year-old me. I was a high school dropout. I had a boyfriend I lived with but didn’t want a future with. I was damaged in more ways than I even knew, and I was a long way from getting the help I needed to repair myself. I had little money and few prospects for making any. “Well, I’ve been down so long / Oh, it can’t be longer still,” Jewel sang into my earphones around this time. “I’ve been down for so long / That the end must be drawing near.” I thought I had nowhere to go but up. What happened next, then, seemed like a gift. In the summer of 2000, my father—then a maintenance man at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach—got me a job there as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant.
I can still remember walking onto the manicured grounds of Mar-a-Lago for the first time. It was early morning—my dad’s shift began at 7:00 a.m., and I’d caught a ride to work with him. Already the air was heavy and moist, and the club’s twenty acres of carefully landscaped greens and lawns seemed to shimmer. To look at the beachfront site that Mar-a-Lago occupies, you’d never suspect that before the original estate was built in the 1920s, it was just a thicket of undergrowth and swampland. I sure couldn’t see that. Instead, as I watched an army of gardeners set out on their daily rounds, the attention being paid to each shrub and palm and blade of grass soothed me. This, I could see, was not a place that rewarded neglect.
My dad was responsible for maintaining the resort’s in-room air-conditioning units, not to mention its five championship red-clay tennis courts, so he knew his way around, both indoors and out. I remember he gave me a brief tour before presenting me to the hiring manager who—after I passed both a drug test and a polygraph—agreed to take me on. That first day, I was given a uniform—a white polo shirt, emblazoned with the Mar-a-Lago crest, and a short white skirt—and a name tag that said JENNA in all capital letters. I was also given a sixty-five-page employee handbook. My uniform would be laundered by Mar-a-Lago, free of charge, said the handbook, which went on to specify everything from basic hygiene (“Body odors are offensive.”) to how many earrings I could wear in my ears (one per lobe, each no larger than a dime); from telephone etiquette (“All calls are to be answered within three rings.”) to general behavior (“Horseplay and practical jokes are prohibited.”). I wasn’t annoyed by the rules and regulations—far from it. Their formality made me feel good—as if working at a place that took itself so seriously might make the world take me seriously too.
It couldn’t have been more than a few days before my dad said he wanted to introduce me to Mr. Trump himself. They weren’t friends, exactly. But Dad worked hard, and Trump liked that—I’d seen photos of them posing together, shaking hands. So one day my father took me to Trump’s office. “This is my daughter,” Dad said, and his voice sounded proud. Trump couldn’t have been friendlier, telling me it was fantastic that I was there. “Do you like kids?” he asked. “Do you babysit at all?” He explained that he owned several houses next to the resort that he lent to friends, many of whom had children who needed tending. I said yes, I’d babysat before, omitting the fact that the last time I’d done so, I’d been reprimanded; in an attempt to entertain the kids in my care, I’d ignited a huge cache of fireworks I’d found hidden in the house. Clearly I was right to leave that out, because soon I was making extra money a few nights a week, minding the children of the elite.
But it was my day job that gave me my first real vision of a better future. The spa, like the resort itself, was gilded, with luxe finishes and an immaculate, sparkling decor. It smelled delicious, like sandalwood and lavender. I remember there were giant gold bathtubs, like something a god would soak in. More than that, I marveled at how peaceful everyone seemed to feel within its walls. My duties—making tea, tidying the bathrooms, restocking towels—kept me just outside the inner sanctum of the massage rooms, but still I could see how relaxed clients looked when they emerged. Whenever possible I questioned the massage therapists about what they did and how they’d learned to do it. I seized on the idea that, with the right training, I could eventually make a living by helping others reduce stress. Maybe, I thought, their healing would fuel my own. For the first time in my life, I allowed a flicker of hope to build inside me. After all I had been through, I believed I might finally leave my abusive past behind.
Then one steaming hot day some weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I was walking toward the Mar-a-Lago spa, on my way to work, when a car slowed behind me. I wish I could say that I sensed that something evil was tracking me, but as I headed into the building, I had no inkling of the danger I was in. In the car I didn’t see were two people I’d not yet met: a British socialite named Ghislaine Maxwell and her driver, Juan Alessi, whom she insisted on calling “John.” Alessi would later testify under oath that on this day, when Maxwell spotted me—my long blond hair, my slim build, and what he called my notably “young” appearance—she commanded him from the back seat, “Stop, John, stop!”
Alessi did as he was told, and Maxwell got out and followed after me. I didn’t know it yet, but once again, a predator was closing in. This one, however, would prove different from any I’d met before. Unlike my father or Forrest or Ron Eppinger or the man Eppinger had given me away to, this was an apex predator—as greedy and demanding on the inside as she appeared to be beautiful, poised, and self-assured on the outside. Again, I wish I could say that I saw through Maxwell’s polished facade—that, like a horse, I intuited the immense threat she posed to me. Instead, my first impression of Maxwell was the same one I formed when I greeted any well-heeled Mar-a-Lago guest. I’d be lucky, I thought, if I could grow up to be anything like her.
Fanny Wiget
Cool blog.