Nobody's Girl — Chapter no 14

FOURTEEN

Puppets on a String

y second encounter with Prince Andrew took place about a monthM later, at Epstein’s townhouse in New York. By this point, I knew the place well. Its garish decor seemed intended to intimidate, with black- lacquered cabinetry, bloodred carpets, a huge taxidermied tiger, and a custom-made chess set whose pieces were scantily clad women. To me, though, the house’s most unsettling design detail was a hidden back staircase whose banister was adorned with a series of carved eyeballs that stared at you as you gripped them, climbing up or down. The message was clear: “We’re always watching you.”

On this night, which was probably around April 2001, Epstein greeted Prince Andrew and brought him to the living room, where Maxwell and I were sitting. Another one of their victims, Johanna Sjoberg, arrived soon afterward. As always when the prince was around, Maxwell was being a saucy flirt. She told Sjoberg to come with her to a closet, where she pulled out a puppet with a little tag on it that said “Prince Andrew.” Maxwell then announced to the prince that she’d purchased him a joke gift, a puppet that looked just like him. She made a big show of giving it to him, then suggested we pose for a photo with it. The prince and I sat down next to each other on the couch, and Maxwell put the puppet in my lap, positioning one of its hands on one of my breasts. Then she put Sjoberg on the prince’s lap, and the prince put his hand on Sjoberg’s breast. The symbolism was impossible to ignore. Johanna and I were Maxwell and Epstein’s puppets, and they were pulling the strings. Later they sent me to a bedroom, where I had sex with the prince for a second time.

As compliant as I was, I have a memory from this period that indicates I was beginning, ever so slightly, to resist. It was nighttime in the

Caribbean, and Epstein and I were on one of his boats, having just picked up Sarah Kellen in Saint Thomas. The air was warm and the darkness complete, pierced only by tiny twinkling lights. It would have been peaceful except that as we motored back to Little Saint James, Kellen insisted on blaring music from the onboard CD player. She cued up the song she was looking for—Santana and Rob Thomas’s “Smooth”—and started dancing suggestively around Epstein. “Come on! Dance with me!” she told me, pulling me up off the captain’s chair where I was sitting. Suddenly, I wanted to shove her overboard. I didn’t want to dance for Epstein. I didn’t want Kellen to give me orders. Since I’d met Epstein in the summer of 2000, my anger had gone missing. Not anymore. Now the lyrics to “Smooth”—a song I’d once liked—filled me with rage: “If you said this life ain’t good enough / I would give my world to lift you up / I could change my life to better suit your mood.” I got up and danced because I could see Epstein wanted me to, and I didn’t want to invite his wrath by disobeying him. But inside, I was seething. Day and night, my every waking moment was circumscribed by his wants and needs. I was caught in the trap of familiar diminishment. But still, something about Epstein’s hold on me kept me docile and acquiescent.

In May 2001, Epstein, Maxwell, and I flew to the French Riviera to attend the model Naomi Campbell’s thirty-first birthday party, which was being held on a yacht. That night I wore the same outfit I’d worn when I first met Prince Andrew—the shiny jeans emblazoned with horses, the tight-fitting pink top. All evening, I felt like a stowaway on that crowded boat in Saint-Tropez. For her part, the birthday girl ignored me, and her white-haired boyfriend Flavio Briatore, an Italian businessman and convicted con man, looked old enough to be my grandpa. Conscious that I was one or two decades younger than everyone else, I lowered my eyes and tried to blend in.

It could have been after this party that a friend of Epstein’s—I’ll call him Billionaire Number Two—caught a ride with us back to La Bastide de Saint-Tropez, the five-star mansion-turned-hotel surrounded by four Provençal farmhouses where we were all staying. On the way, Epstein made it clear that he wanted me to give this fifty-year-old stranger with thinning

brown hair a “massage,” so when we arrived, I accompanied the man to his cottage. Hoping that I could get away with merely a rubdown, I used my most professional-sounding therapeutic voice and instructed him to undress and lie under a towel. But Epstein must have briefed him about what he could expect, because Billionaire Number Two ignored my instructions and began to undress me. “You really can’t give a massage wearing this outfit, sweetie,” he said.

After we had intercourse, the man offered to pay me triple what Epstein paid me if I’d come “work” for him. I politely said no and said my goodbyes, returning to Epstein’s room, as he’d instructed me to. When I told him about Billionaire Number Two’s offer, Epstein was fascinated.

“That’s good money. How could you decline?” Epstein asked, amused.

I responded with my own question: “Who would look after you, if I were gone?”

I’ll never forget how he gazed at me that night. I wanted to believe he adored me. But what he adored was my loyalty to him. And I was so invested in my role as his caretaker that I told myself he was loyal to me too.

I see now that this was a fantasy, but it was one that Epstein encouraged. For example, he never hesitated to give me advice about my tumultuous relationship with Tony, whom he insisted wasn’t good enough for me. One day, after I’d had a fight with Tony, I was giving Epstein a massage when he raised his head off the table and told me: “You know it’s not good to massage people when you’re angry. Too much negative energy.” I hesitated as I tried to evaluate what he meant. Was he just admonishing me, or was he curious why I was upset? Unsure, I tearfully told him Tony had cheated on me again. Epstein paused, and for a second I thought he was going to console me. But instead he laughed. “You can’t hold that against him,” he said matter-of-factly. “He’s only doing what every guy in the world does.” I must have looked crestfallen, because he kept talking, taking on the professorial tone that he often used with me.

“I’m on your side, which is why I’m going to save you a lot of grief with this one tip,” he said. “Never expect a man to be faithful, and you’ll never

be let down. It’s just the way men are genetically imprinted.” Then he lowered his head back into the face cradle, and I spent the remainder of the massage even sadder than before. That was classic Epstein: he liked to assert that he was “enlightening” me, making me better by teaching me the ways of the world.

—

I DON’T KNOW exactly when I had sex with Prince Andrew for the third time, but I do know the location: Little Saint Jeff’s. I also know that it was not just the two of us this time; it was an orgy. “I was around eighteen,” I said in a sworn declaration in 2015. “Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together. The other girls all seemed and appeared to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English.

Epstein laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with.”

Since I gave that account, the pilot David Rodgers has said in a deposition that a coded notation (“AP”) that he made on his flight log for July 4, 2001, referred to Prince Andrew. He said that Epstein, the prince, another woman, and I flew from Saint Thomas that day back to Palm Beach. I guess it’s possible that the orgy I remember occurred in the days leading up to that flight, which would mean I was still seventeen. I’ll probably never know the date for certain. What I do know, because Epstein told me, is that Brunel, the French modeling agent who was also in attendance, supplied the other girls who took part.

Just four days after Independence Day, on July 8, 2001, Epstein, Maxwell, Tayler, a few others, and I flew from Palm Beach to Teterboro Airport, just outside New York City. I wasn’t in great shape. For three weeks, I’d had irregular bleeding, but had tried to ignore it. Now that we were back in New York, I began feeling a tenderness in my abdomen. I lay down for a nap, and must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I woke up in a pool of blood. Sharp waves of pain racked my body as I crawled to the intercom, screaming that I needed help. I remember Jojo, the

butler at the Manhattan townhouse, was so kind, helping me down the stairs as Epstein and Maxwell got a car to take me to New York–Presbyterian Hospital. When we arrived at the emergency room, though, Epstein took charge, lying that my birthdate was in 1982 (I was born in 1983), so I would appear to be eighteen. I was admitted and given some sort of pain medicine, and things got blurry after that. I remember a doctor asking me questions, and when I described my stabbing pain, he wondered if I had polycystic ovary syndrome, which can be painful when the cysts burst. I have hazy memories of my feet in the stirrups, of white papery gowns and bright lights. I also remember Epstein was in the examination room with me, and before the doctor left to write up his notes at one point, Epstein intercepted him. The two men talked quietly in the doorway, serious looks on both their faces, then Epstein sent the doctor away. My sense was that a gentlemen’s agreement had been struck between Epstein and the doctor: whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance, the two men seemed to have agreed, it would be kept quiet.

This would be one of many doctors’ visits, the specifics of which I tried to blot out. After being used by Epstein and his pals, my body was often in agony. But just as in my childhood, when my frequent urinary tract infections led to countless uncomfortable examinations, in the hospital it was as if my mind protected me by shutting down. That and the fact that I was heavily sedated have always made it difficult to know precisely what happened. Besides, the doctors at New York–Presbyterian talked to Epstein more than to me.

It was only after I was discharged a couple of days later and Jojo ferried us back to Seventy-First Street that I began to piece things together. I had a tiny incision near my belly button, which one of the other girls in the house told me was consistent with a laparoscopic surgery for an ectopic pregnancy. But Epstein told me I’d suffered a miscarriage, which is something altogether different. I’ve seen the medical records since, and they don’t contain the word “miscarriage.” They note severe cramping and weight loss (“7 lbs this month”), as well as that I’d reported having sex with the same partner for two years, but they don’t definitively describe all I

went through. The one thing I remember clearly is that, at one point, a doctor told me I might never be able to have children.

I’ve already said that Epstein never wore a condom. Neither did the men he and Maxwell trafficked me to. I made Tony wear a condom, at Epstein’s insistence, and I was on the pill. But I must have missed a day.

After my hospital visit, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had gotten pregnant and lost a fetus without even knowing it was happening. That made me feel even more numb. But there would be no time for grieving. In Maxwell and Epstein’s world, the party never stopped.

—

IN THE YEARS since, doctors and healers who I have consulted have suggested that my body—having withstood so much sexual trauma—was staging a kind of revolt. That idea makes sense to me, especially because around this time Epstein was inventing new ways to abuse me. He’d become interested in sadomasochism, and he didn’t care who knew it.

When a Vanity Fair reporter paid a visit to his Manhattan townhouse, he left a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue out on his desk for her to see. But he wasn’t just reading about it. He’d begun to experiment with whips and restraints and other instruments of torture. At that time, I was the only one of his girls, so far as I knew, whom he subjected to this cruel torment. In session after session, he would play out various fantasies, with me as the victim. I was gagged, and often hog-tied.

Epstein liked to put a black leather, metal-studded collar around my neck that continued down my spine, where it attached to a chain that bound my hands and feet tightly together. The backbreaking contortions this contraption forced upon me caused so much pain that I prayed I would black out. When I did, I’d awaken to more abuse.

In the midst of all this, Epstein bought a ticket for me to see a Broadway play: The Phantom of the Opera. I’d never been to the theater before, and I was stunned not just by the spectacle but by how much the phantom reminded me of Epstein. A brilliant scholar, magician, architect,

inventor, and composer, the Phantom had been born with a deformed face.

I’ll never forget the scene when he forces a young girl he has abducted to put on a wedding dress. The girl explains that she fears not his physical appearance but rather his inner nature. Even today, when I hear Andrew Lloyd Webber’s song “Think of Me,” I think of Epstein, the twisted monster who essentially abducted me. Thinking about an imagined future when his prisoner has broken free, the Phantom sings, “Long ago, it seems so long ago / How young and innocent we were / She may not remember me, but I remember her.”

I had descended into a deeper level of hell.

As we moved into autumn, the world was going crazy. On September 11, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers shook every American to his or her core. But even before that, I had begun to fall apart.

My grandma Shelley had fallen ill, and while I’d managed to see her in Florida right before she died at the end of August, I felt guilty that my obligations to Epstein had long ago turned me into an absentee granddaughter. In October, Maxwell flew up to New York City to host a dinner party for Prince Andrew, who was visiting the United States for the first time since 9/11. Epstein and I stayed behind in Palm Beach, I remember, and that’s when he pulled me aside and said he’d noticed how strung out I seemed. There were dark circles under my eyes, and my ribs were visible beneath my skin. I told him I wasn’t sleeping well. I’d added cocaine to the drugs I was taking, and that wasn’t helping any. Epstein looked disgusted; he said my drug abuse had become unacceptable. He’d always demanded that his regular girls be cheerful and appear to desire him.

Me, I was dead-eyed and listless.

“You’re not the same girl you were,” Epstein said coldly. “You need to clean yourself up.” I didn’t argue. He said he was going on a trip. “I’ll call you next time I’m in town,” he said. Then he sent me home.

All I felt was relief, at least at first. This was my chance for a new life, and I tried to treat it as such. I had invested the money Epstein paid me in a car of my own, a used Dodge Dakota pickup truck with a great stereo

system, so for the first time I could get myself around. That was good because I needed to make money: Epstein had stopped paying my bills.

I worked briefly in an animal hospital, trying to make good on my childhood vow to learn what it took to become a veterinarian. But I was a mess. I got there late and made up excuses. They fired me. Chastened, I got my first waitressing gig, and while that restaurant didn’t keep me on for long, the experience I gained made it easier to find another job. Little by little, the drugs I’d been numbing myself with left my system, and I began to feel more like the old Jenna. At the same time, though, a nagging feeling of worthlessness remained. Amid the awfulness, Epstein’s praise had been my main source of self-esteem for so long. Even though I needed the break he had given me, I felt ashamed that I’d caused him to think ill of me.

Tony and I made a vow: we would go back to school. We enrolled at the aptly named Survivors Charter, a place aimed at older students who wanted to get their high school diplomas. I hoped having a common goal would help Tony and me improve our fraught relationship. But if that had ever been possible, I soon found out that it was no longer. Tony had gotten caught more than once stealing everything from DVDs to his brother’s truck. I suspected drugs were driving his kleptomania, and at one point, I threw him out, only to take him back in a few weeks later. We were both fighting to control our worst impulses, even as we tried to support each other. But we were unraveling.

In November 2001, my old tormentor Ron Eppinger—who’d pleaded guilty to charges of “smuggling aliens” to the United States for purposes of prostitution—finally received his sentence: twenty-one months in prison, a $6,000 fine, and the forfeiture of a boat and the limousine he’d used to promote his call-girl service. To my mind, Eppinger had gotten off easy.

Not that I was surprised. Less than three years had passed since he’d first picked me up in that limo, but it felt like forever. And everything that had happened to me in Epstein’s world had only confirmed that certain privileged men existed in a liminal space outside the law, no matter how dastardly their behavior.

During this period, Epstein was keeping busy. Flight logs would later show that he and Sarah Kellen flew to Ohio to attend the funeral of Leslie Wexner’s mother, Bella. But while I was unaware of that trip at the time, there was one thing I had figured out: I’d been naive to believe Epstein’s claim that I was his special “Number One.” Given how abruptly Epstein had sent me packing, and that he hadn’t reached out since, it was clear that he was doing just fine without me. In a weird, complicated way, that hurt.

Still, as time passed, those feelings of rejection were replaced by a tentative surge of optimism. No, I wasn’t flying on Epstein’s jets anymore. I was too busy waitressing for five dollars an hour (plus tips) at T.G.I.

Friday’s. And that was okay. Even as I faced how disposable I’d been, I was finding ways to establish my own value outside Epstein’s world. My older brother, Danny, was about to get married to a great woman named Lanette, and I was happy that I would be able to attend their ceremony. Had I still been on call 24/7 for Epstein and Maxwell, there’s no way I could have guaranteed that. After T.G.I. Friday’s, I did a few shifts at a restaurant called Mannino’s, then I got a full-time gig at a place called Roadhouse Grill. I liked my colleagues and enjoyed how my ability to read customers’ wants and needs translated into generous tips.

Then one night after my shift in March 2002, Tony—who’d borrowed my Dodge truck—came to the Roadhouse Grill to pick me up. As he sat at the bar waiting for me, he noticed the jar that held the tip money that the waitstaff had pooled throughout the night. When no one was looking, he helped himself. I had no idea. I clocked out and we went home.

The next day, my boss called and accused me of stealing. I said I hadn’t done it, but with a heavy heart I suspected I knew who had. I begged my boss to take what was missing out of my next check, and when he said no, I went over the next day and paid the money back. But still he told me I was fired and that he’d called the police. I was terrified I would be arrested.

That’s when Epstein called me to check in. His timing was uncanny—eerie even—and almost made me believe he was as all-knowing as he liked to brag that he was. “Come for lunch,” he said. “I want to see you.” When I arrived, he looked me over, evaluating whether I was still using drugs. Only

when he was satisfied that I was clean did he ask me how I was doing. I burst into tears. The tip jar at work, I told him, my words pouring out of me —Tony had emptied it and gotten me fired. What if the police came for us both? Epstein had never approved of Tony, but he said he could easily get the police to back off. He had one condition, however: I had to return to El Brillo Way.

I had no job. My boyfriend was a screwup. So when Epstein turned and led me to the massage room, I followed him. That was all it took. I was back under his thumb.