Chapter Ten A Very Important Man
Ten
A Very Important Man
From the start, Epstein and Maxwell held me to my promise to be available at all times.
Some days, the call would come in the morning.
I’d show up, perform whatever sex acts Epstein wanted, then hang out beside his vast swimming pool while he got some work done.
After a few hours, I’d usually be summoned to have sex with him again.
If Maxwell was there, I was often told to attend to her sexually as well.
She kept a bin of vibrators and sex toys handy for these sessions.
But she never demanded sex from me one-on-one—only when we were with Epstein.
Sometimes there were other girls there, too, and I’d end up staying at El Brillo Way all day.
Other times, my phone wouldn’t ring until Epstein was preparing to go to bed. “Come over,” Maxwell would command when I answered. “He’s requesting you.” When that happened, I’d tell Michael I had a work emergency and head out the door. Michael didn’t bat an eye.
My relationship with my family, meanwhile, was both better and worse.
My mother had confronted me early on, asking what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials.
I’d laid it on thick, crowing about the doors Epstein had said he’d open for me.
I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that?
I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.
But also I wanted to believe I didn’t need saving.
I’d survived my early childhood, hadn’t I?
In those initial weeks with Epstein and Maxwell, I told myself I could weather this, too, and maybe even come out ahead.
I remember my first break from servicing the two of them came in what was probably late August, when they went on a trip to two of Epstein’s far-flung properties.
Zorro Ranch was an eight-thousand-acre spread near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Epstein said he’d custom built a three-level thirty-three-thousand-square-foot “castle” decorated with rococo flourishes: ten-foot-tall marble fireplaces, sculpted moldings, trompe l’oeil frescoes, and iron chandeliers.
In addition to manicured grounds and gurgling fountains, a tennis court, and a grass airstrip and hangar, the property had its own miniature town that housed his servants and groundskeepers.
The town also had an eight-stall stable and tack room, a firehouse, a large glassed-in kitchen garden, and even a general store.
It sounded like Disneyland to me, and I told Epstein so.
“Wait until you see my Manhattan townhouse,” he replied, and then proceeded to brag about his Upper East Side mansion.
Formerly a K–12 academy for well-to-do children, the seven-story, thirty-room manse at 9 East Seventy-First Street was one of the city’s largest private homes.
I’d never been to New York and knew very little about fine art, so when he told me his house sat right across from the Frick Collection, it meant nothing to me.
But I could still read the message Epstein seemed determined to deliver: he was a Very Important Man.
As for Maxwell, who told us girls to call her G-Max, I was figuring out she was important too.
In October 2000, she jetted off to New York to meet up with her old friend Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II’s second-born son, who was then fourth in line to ascend the British throne.
On Halloween, along with other guests that included Donald and Melania Trump, Maxwell and Prince Andrew attended a party hosted by German supermodel Heidi Klum at The Hudson, a swank hotel.
Maxwell boasted that she knew the man who’d just renovated it—hotel impresario Ian Schrager.
Maxwell was proud of her friendships with famous people, especially men.
She loved to talk about how easily she could get former president Bill Clinton on the phone; she and Epstein had visited the White House together when Clinton was in office.
Maxwell also enjoyed repeating that once, at some random event, she’d taken the actor George Clooney into a bathroom and given him a blow job.
Whether that was true or not, we’d never know.
She was less forthcoming about her upbringing, but I began to piece that together too.
I remember that Epstein once showed me a mural she’d had painted of a happy-looking family sitting on a bench overlooking a pond, as a hunting party chased foxes nearby.
In a hushed voice, Epstein said to me, “This is a portrait of Ghislaine’s childhood—the part she can be proud of.
” The youngest of nine children, she’d been born in France but was raised in a fifty-three-room mansion in the south of England, and she held both French and British passports.
Her late father, Robert Maxwell, had been a media mogul in England before he was accused of embezzlement and then found dead, perhaps by suicide, after falling off his yacht in the Canary Islands.
That was nine years before I met Maxwell, but his death clearly haunted her.
In happier days, she had been his favorite child (he’d named the yacht he was sailing when he died the Lady Ghislaine).
I gathered that she’d met Epstein not long before her father passed, and I suspected that had something to do with their connection.
And what was that connection like? While they usually slept in separate bedrooms, and rarely kissed or held hands, it seemed to me that Maxwell and Epstein lived in complete symbiosis.
Epstein, who described Maxwell as his best friend, valued her knack for connecting him to powerful people.
Maxwell, in turn, appreciated that Epstein had the resources to fund the lavish life she thought she deserved yet had trouble affording after her father’s death.
In social settings, Maxwell often appeared vivacious, entertaining, the life of the party.
But in Epstein’s household, she functioned more as a party planner: scheduling and organizing the endless parade of girls who she and others—particularly Sarah Kellen—recruited to have sex with him.
I remember that at one point I asked her why she wasn’t bothered by Epstein’s desire to have sex with so many others.
She said that it was a relief. Epstein’s sexual appetite was so relentless, she said, that no one person could satisfy him.
Her lack of jealousy seemed odd but genuine.
Over time, I would come to see Epstein and Maxwell less as boyfriend and girlfriend, and more as two halves of a wicked whole.
During my first months working for them, I learned more about Epstein as well.
He’d studied physics at Cooper Union and math at New York University, then dropped out two years shy of graduation.
Still, Epstein saw himself as an intellectual prodigy, and that self-confidence propelled him forward.
The story went that as a young man in the 1970s, he’d talked his way into more than one job he lacked the qualifications for—first as a teacher of high school–level math and physics at the esteemed Dalton School in Manhattan (he told me he gave pretty girls there good grades if they agreed to sleep with him), then as a floor trader at Bear Stearns, the global investment bank where he eventually became a limited partner.
In the 1980s, he’d run a consulting firm that assisted clients recovering stolen money, then formed a firm to manage the assets of people whose net worth, he claimed, was no less than $1 billion.
This was a point of pride for Epstein: that he, raised by a groundskeeper and a homemaker in Coney Island, only did business with the wealthiest people.
For all his cultivation of the upper crust, however, he often appeared unsophisticated and even oblivious.
His enormous brainpower couldn’t hide his working-class Brooklyn accent.
And though he wanted people to know he had money, he usually wore a Harvard sweatshirt and jeans or sweatpants, even when attending fancy events.
The incongruities didn’t end there. Epstein was strictly disciplined about what he ate, subsisting on tofu, salmon, chickpeas, ginger, and other foods he deemed healthy (and insisting that the girls around him do so too).
A germaphobe, he was equally meticulous about what he touched.
He mostly refused to shake hands, and he required his sheets be changed every other day.
And yet he relentlessly sought sexual contact with young girls who were strangers to him—some who lived rough, terrible lives outside his gated compound—and he never wore a condom.
While he required girls like me, who he forced to have intercourse with him regularly, to be tested every three months for sexually transmitted diseases, no one could guarantee the health of all the girls who streamed in and out of El Brillo Way.
I guess this lack of caution can be chalked up to arrogance; Epstein believed he didn’t have to follow the rules everyone else did.