Chapter Seven A Ghost Come Back #2
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.