Chapter Eight The Pink House #2
“Tell me about your first time,” Epstein said then.
I hesitated. Who’d ever heard of an employer asking an applicant about losing her virginity?
But I wanted this job, so I took a deep breath and described my rough childhood.
I’d been abused by a family friend, I said vaguely, and spent time on the street as a runaway.
Epstein didn’t recoil. Instead, he made light of it, teasing me for being “a naughty girl.”
“Not at all,” I said defensively. “I’m a good girl. I’ve just always found myself in the wrong places.”
Epstein lifted his head and smirked at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “I like naughty girls.”
Then he rolled over onto his back, and I was startled to see he had an erection.
I’d seen men’s private parts before, obviously, but I hadn’t expected to see his.
Without thinking, I raised both my hands, holding them up in the air as if to say, “Stop.” But when I looked at Maxwell, she remained unfazed.
Ignoring his aroused penis, she put both hands on his right pectoral muscles and began kneading.
“Like this,” she said, continuing as if nothing were amiss.
“You want to push the blood away from the heart.” Unsure whether I was right to feel alarmed, I again followed her example, putting my hands on the left side of his chest, which was covered in thick gray hair.
Moving my fingers in circles, I could feel Epstein staring at my face, but I refused to meet his gaze, focusing instead on what I thought I was there to do.
“Not in a circle,” Maxwell corrected. “Don’t be afraid to use pressure.”
Epstein winked at her then and moved his right hand down to his crotch. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked as he began stroking himself.
This is the moment that something cracked inside me.
How else to explain why my memories of what came next are splintered into jagged shards?
Maxwell peeling off her clothes, a mischievous look on her face; Maxwell behind me, unzipping my skirt and pulling my Mar-a-Lago polo shirt over my head; Epstein and Maxwell laughing at my underwear, which were dotted with tiny hearts.
“How cute—she still wears little girl’s panties,” Epstein said.
He reached for an electric vibrator, which he forced between my thighs, as Maxwell commanded me to pinch Epstein’s nipples as she rubbed her own breasts, and mine.
A familiar emptiness flooded me. Just minutes before, I had arrived at Epstein’s mansion hoping that I was turning a corner.
Now I knew I was right back where I’d worked so hard not to be.
How many times had I put my faith in someone, only to be hurt and humiliated?
But this time the disappointment was excruciating.
I blamed myself. “Is sex all anyone will ever want from me?” a voice inside me shrieked, as another harsher voice chided: “Yes, you idiot. You knew that already.” I tasted the tang of adrenaline in my mouth, and I could feel my brain begin to shut down.
My body couldn’t escape from this room, but my mind couldn’t bear to stay, so it put me on a kind of autopilot: submissive and determined to survive.
“Pinch him harder,” Maxwell said, as Epstein moaned.
So I did. “Go down on him,” she said. I did that too.
Eventually, Maxwell ordered me to straddle Epstein so he could penetrate me.
Again, I obeyed. Once he finished, I was told to bring two warm washcloths to clean him up.
Then Epstein led the way to the steam room, where he told me to rub his feet.
As I did so, kneeling before him, he lectured me about the history of sweat lodges and how opening the pores allows toxins to leave the body.
It was important to make healthy decisions, he said, adding, “I can teach you so many things.” From that first meeting, Epstein wanted me to regard him as a mentor, not a predator.
Next, we entered the shower, where Maxwell instructed me to wash Epstein with soap and a loofah.
Again, I obeyed. Epstein told me to shampoo his hair and massage his scalp.
I did. “She’s a keeper,” he told Maxwell, appraising me as if I weren’t there.
When Maxwell left the bathroom, Epstein had me take a towel from a heated rack and pat him dry.
I did so, shivering a little in my own nakedness.
Finally, he pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and I put my Mar-a-Lago uniform back on and wiped smudges of mascara from under my eyes.
Epstein then led me down a back stairway to the kitchen, where Maxwell waited.
I remember the gleaming stainless-steel appliances and the black-and-white checkerboard floor.
When she handed Epstein a black leather duffel bag, he pulled out two hundred-dollar bills and pushed them across the counter toward me.
“This is probably what you make in a week at that spa,” he said.
He and Maxwell smiled knowingly at each other, as if this were funny.
“You did great,” Maxwell told me, almost cooing.
She said I had strong hands, good instincts, and such huge potential.
“You’re a natural. Who knows where this could lead?
” She reached for a pen and paper. “Can you come back tomorrow?” She asked for my cell-phone number, but I didn’t have one.
I recited my work number. And then the butler, Juan Alessi—the same man who’d been driving Maxwell when she first spotted me at Mar-a-Lago—led me out to the driveway, where I climbed into the front passenger seat of a shiny black Chevy Suburban.
Only after buckling my seat belt did I begin to return to myself.
Having escaped from an imminent threat, my brain came back online, but all it wanted to do was scream.
During the half-hour drive inland to Loxahatchee, Alessi and I didn’t speak.
If I opened my mouth, I just knew I’d start sobbing, so I clamped my lips shut.
I didn’t know then what a therapist would tell me a decade later: that when children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together.
I didn’t know that abuse victims struggle to see red flags because they’ve become desensitized to inappropriate behavior.
I didn’t know that a common coping mechanism during sexual abuse is to distance oneself from what is happening in the moment—to “split” into parts: the obedient body and the walled-off mind.
All I knew as the black Suburban headed west was that I felt gutted, as if someone had reached down my throat and scraped out my insides with a silver spoon.
When the butler dropped me at Rackley Road, I went into my parents’ house, not the trailer Michael and I shared.
I’d built the job interview up so much that I knew Mom and Dad would expect to hear how it had gone.
Given the state I was in, however, I kept the conversation short.
I get flushed when I’m upset, so as I ticked off what I’d learned—push the blood away from the heart; always be consistent with a firm, warm touch—I sensed Mom noticing my reddened face and neck.
So before she could ask questions, I pleaded exhaustion and excused myself to take a shower.
For what seemed like an hour, I sat on the wet tile floor and let my tears mix with the hot water pounding my skin.
So begins the period of my life that has been dissected and analyzed more than any other.
I don’t enjoy repeating this story; it hurts to relive what I did and what was done to me.
What’s more, as I describe the chronology, transgression by transgression, I worry that the awful details distract from a broader truth.
Yes, I was sexually abused. My body was used in ways that did enormous damage to me.
But the worst things Epstein and Maxwell did to me weren’t physical, but psychological.
From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself.
From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation.
Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.
I was about to spend more than two years in Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit. My job: to do whatever they asked whenever they asked it. There were no bars on the windows or locks on the doors. But I was a prisoner trapped in an invisible cage.