Chapter Nine Tapping a Crooked Vein
Nine
Tapping a Crooked Vein
After dinner in Perth, Australia, I’m biding my time in my favorite local shopping mall, which stays open late on Thursday nights.
Our twelve-year-old daughter, Ellie, who is already taller than me and still growing, needs new clothes.
“Mama, do you think these will fit me?” she asks, holding up a pair of black cargo pants.
Having weathered the fond taunts of two older brothers her entire life, Ellie often presents as a tomboy: athletic, capable, unafraid.
Just a moment ago, she turned our shopping cart into a race car—first sprinting to get momentum, then jumping aboard with both feet on the back axle, grinning as she flew across the mall’s main rotunda.
Now we are in a boutique that caters to tweens.
When we first walked in, I spotted an orange sundress that I knew would look wonderful on her, but when I said so, she shook her head and scowled like I was out of my mind.
I didn’t push it. That never works with Ellie.
So it makes me happy when I see her circle back, checking out the dress again.
She’s already picked out two pairs of pants and an oversized Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, but I can see her considering whether maybe a pretty sundress wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Without looking at me, she adds it to her growing pile and moves to the next rack.
After a few more minutes, our cart is full to overflowing.
“You ready, Ellie?” I ask, and she nods, blazing our trail to the checkout line.
That’s when I see the display of oversized orange-and-yellow-striped beach towels.
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist. I grab six of them and head to the cash register, even though I can predict how exasperated my husband will be when we get home.
Since becoming a mom, I’ve developed a near-addiction to buying crisp new sheets, pillowcases, and towels.
I could say what motivates me is the simple desire to feather my family’s nest, to make my kids feel cozy and loved.
But Robbie believes there’s something else at work, too—something so powerful that I’ll risk him rolling his eyes and bellowing: “Jenna! No! We have enough towels in this house to keep an army dry!” Whenever he protests like this, I always promise to “do a quick closet cleanse,” as Robbie sighs, resigned.
I understand his frustration, but it can’t be helped.
My perpetual need to fill our home with new, fresh things is driven by a feeling I can’t shake: Even after all this time, I remember how dirty I once felt.
I will do anything to make my world feel clean.
—
So many young women, myself included, have been criticized for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us.
How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away?
If you didn’t like feeling dirty, you could simply have never gone back.
But that stance wrongly discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable to him.
Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless.
Before meeting Epstein, one of his victims had watched her father beat an eight-year-old boy to death; another was present when her boyfriend killed himself.
We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care.
At times I think he even believed he cared.
A master manipulator who excelled at divining the desires of others, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.
If they wanted to be dancers, he offered dance lessons.
If they aspired to be actors, he said he’d help them get roles.
If they said the only thing they yearned to do was paint, he bought them canvases and introduced them to key people in the art world. And then, he did his worst to them.
When I met Epstein just before my seventeenth birthday, all I wanted was to learn a skill that would give me the means to live an independent life.
At least that’s what I told myself. With hindsight, though, the grown-up me can see that the teenage me also wanted something else.
What had Epstein said that first night? That I was “a keeper”?
By now you know how long I’d hoped to hear words like those—and to believe I was worth keeping.
Every time I went to Epstein’s mansion in those early days, he or Maxwell would pay me, peeling two or sometimes three hundred-dollar bills off the huge stack in his black duffel bag.
But money wasn’t the only thing that lured me into their twisted world.
For so many years, I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing.
Even as a girl on the precipice of womanhood, I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly.
For ten years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of “love.” Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.
The day after my “job interview,” I did as Maxwell requested and returned to the pink house behind the high wall.
On this, my second visit to El Brillo Way, I again followed Maxwell up the pink stairs, around the king-size bed, and into the room with the green massage table.
Again, Epstein was lying there naked. Again, Maxwell walked me through the steps that a professional masseuse might follow.
And again, after a few minutes, Epstein—who had a thick gray head of hair and a long face that reminded some people of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren and others of actor Richard Gere—rolled over and the “massage” turned into sex.
You may wonder why the two of them kept up the pretense of a massage lesson at all.
Why didn’t they take me straight to the bedroom?
I think the charade was meant to keep me off balance.
Hadn’t I said I wanted to learn this skill?
But also, abusing me in a therapeutic setting jibed with how Epstein thought about sex.
He would soon explain that he needed to climax at least three times a day.
It was a biological imperative, he said, like breathing or eating.
For him sex wasn’t connected to intimacy or love.
It was a purely physical release. Epstein viewed sex almost as a procedure—one that he preferred to be performed by nubile young girls like me.
My second visit to the pink house differed from the first, however, because this time, Maxwell and Epstein formally appointed themselves my sexual tutors.
Much like Ron Eppinger had when I was his captive, they stressed the importance of learning what men liked and said this was the beginning of my “training period.” If I performed oral sex on Epstein, for example, he would tell me to slow down.
“You want to bring a man to an orgasm, not just give him an orgasm,” he corrected.
Maxwell cautioned that no man wanted a woman to talk during foreplay.
“Asking ‘How do you like this?’ is okay,” she said. “But you should mostly be quiet.”
Afterward, Maxwell joined Epstein and me in the steam room.
As Epstein talked about himself—he was a successful financial manager who used his talents to benefit only the most select clients, he said—Maxwell ordered me to massage her feet and legs.
I knelt before her and obeyed. Apparently, Epstein wasn’t my only responsibility. I had to meet Maxwell’s needs too.
A day later, Maxwell called me at Mar-a-Lago.
“We need you to come again tonight,” she said, her voice more curt than before.
Having successfully recruited me, Maxwell had turned off the charm.
I said I’d be there, and a few hours later, Dad dropped me off at the house.
The butler took me into the kitchen and offered me a drink and some fruit that was prettily arranged on a small plate.
I was starving, so I sat down and was about to take a bite when Maxwell appeared, shooting me a cold look.
I jumped up, as if I’d had my hand in the cookie jar.
“I’ve got plans, so you’re on your own tonight,” Maxwell said. “Jeffrey is waiting upstairs. Don’t disappoint him.”
My skin prickled with nervousness as I climbed the spiral stairway by myself for the first time.
Maxwell hadn’t protected me from Epstein—far from it.
But without her there, I’d be alone with him, and that felt scary.
My senses were heightened. I could smell the cleaning fluids the housekeepers used.
The light in the house was turning golden as the sun set, and I allowed myself to look more closely at the photos displayed on the walls.
There were so many of them: topless girls, bottomless girls, girls with shy expressions, girls from the back, their faces obscured.
In the massage room, Epstein was face down, as usual.
He turned and gestured toward a schoolgirl outfit—pleated skirt, white starched button-down, knee socks—and told me to put it on.
“Leave your underwear off,” he said. I did, then had sex with him as he demanded.
On this day, he continued to critique my performance.
“Stop. Stop!” he told me more than once.
“That’s not how we taught you to do it. Start over again.
” He also ordered me to seem more “into it.” Men liked it when women appeared to love sex, he said.
In that area, I needed to do better. “Relax,” he demanded, and I tried to comply.
A half hour later, our “session” complete, I again bathed Epstein with two warm washcloths.