Chapter Six If Wishes Were Horses #2
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.