Chapter Fourteen Puppets on a String
Fourteen
Puppets on a String
My second encounter with Prince Andrew took place about a month later, at Epstein’s townhouse in New York.
By this point, I knew the place well. Its garish decor seemed intended to intimidate, with black-lacquered cabinetry, bloodred carpets, a huge taxidermied tiger, and a custom-made chess set whose pieces were scantily clad women.
To me, though, the house’s most unsettling design detail was a hidden back staircase whose banister was adorned with a series of carved eyeballs that stared at you as you gripped them, climbing up or down.
The message was clear: “We’re always watching you. ”
It could have been after this party that a friend of Epstein’s—I’ll call him Billionaire Number Two—caught a ride with us back to La Bastide de Saint-Tropez, the five-star mansion-turned-hotel surrounded by four Provencal farmhouses where we were all staying.
On the way, Epstein made it clear that he wanted me to give this fifty-year-old stranger with thinning brown hair a “massage,” so when we arrived, I accompanied the man to his cottage.
Hoping that I could get away with merely a rubdown, I used my most professional-sounding therapeutic voice and instructed him to undress and lie under a towel.
But Epstein must have briefed him about what he could expect, because Billionaire Number Two ignored my instructions and began to undress me.
“You really can’t give a massage wearing this outfit, sweetie,” he said.
After we had intercourse, the man offered to pay me triple what Epstein paid me if I’d come “work” for him. I politely said no and said my goodbyes, returning to Epstein’s room, as he’d instructed me to. When I told him about Billionaire Number Two’s offer, Epstein was fascinated.
“That’s good money. How could you decline?” Epstein asked, amused.
I responded with my own question: “Who would look after you, if I were gone?”
I’ll never forget how he gazed at me that night. I wanted to believe he adored me. But what he adored was my loyalty to him. And I was so invested in my role as his caretaker that I told myself he was loyal to me too.
I see now that this was a fantasy, but it was one that Epstein encouraged.
For example, he never hesitated to give me advice about my tumultuous relationship with Tony, whom he insisted wasn’t good enough for me.
One day, after I’d had a fight with Tony, I was giving Epstein a massage when he raised his head off the table and told me: “You know it’s not good to massage people when you’re angry.
Too much negative energy.” I hesitated as I tried to evaluate what he meant.
Was he just admonishing me, or was he curious why I was upset?
Unsure, I tearfully told him Tony had cheated on me again.
Epstein paused, and for a second I thought he was going to console me.
But instead he laughed. “You can’t hold that against him,” he said matter-of-factly.
“He’s only doing what every guy in the world does.
” I must have looked crestfallen, because he kept talking, taking on the professorial tone that he often used with me.
“I’m on your side, which is why I’m going to save you a lot of grief with this one tip,” he said.
“Never expect a man to be faithful, and you’ll never be let down.
It’s just the way men are genetically imprinted.
” Then he lowered his head back into the face cradle, and I spent the remainder of the massage even sadder than before.
That was classic Epstein: he liked to assert that he was “enlightening” me, making me better by teaching me the ways of the world.
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I don’t know exactly when I had sex with Prince Andrew for the third time, but I do know the location: Little Saint Jeff’s.
I also know that it was not just the two of us this time; it was an orgy.
“I was around eighteen,” I said in a sworn declaration in 2015.
“Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together. The other girls all seemed and appeared to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English.
Epstein laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with. ”
Since I gave that account, the pilot David Rodgers has said in a deposition that a coded notation (“AP”) that he made on his flight log for July 4, 2001, referred to Prince Andrew.
He said that Epstein, the prince, another woman, and I flew from Saint Thomas that day back to Palm Beach.
I guess it’s possible that the orgy I remember occurred in the days leading up to that flight, which would mean I was still seventeen.
I’ll probably never know the date for certain.
What I do know, because Epstein told me, is that Brunel, the French modeling agent who was also in attendance, supplied the other girls who took part.
Just four days after Independence Day, on July 8, 2001, Epstein, Maxwell, Tayler, a few others, and I flew from Palm Beach to Teterboro Airport, just outside New York City.
I wasn’t in great shape. For three weeks, I’d had irregular bleeding, but had tried to ignore it.
Now that we were back in New York, I began feeling a tenderness in my abdomen.
I lay down for a nap, and must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I woke up in a pool of blood.
Sharp waves of pain racked my body as I crawled to the intercom, screaming that I needed help.
I remember Jojo, the butler at the Manhattan townhouse, was so kind, helping me down the stairs as Epstein and Maxwell got a car to take me to New York–Presbyterian Hospital.
When we arrived at the emergency room, though, Epstein took charge, lying that my birthdate was in 1982 (I was born in 1983), so I would appear to be eighteen.
I was admitted and given some sort of pain medicine, and things got blurry after that.
I remember a doctor asking me questions, and when I described my stabbing pain, he wondered if I had polycystic ovary syndrome, which can be painful when the cysts burst. I have hazy memories of my feet in the stirrups, of white papery gowns and bright lights.
I also remember Epstein was in the examination room with me, and before the doctor left to write up his notes at one point, Epstein intercepted him.
The two men talked quietly in the doorway, serious looks on both their faces, then Epstein sent the doctor away.
My sense was that a gentlemen’s agreement had been struck between Epstein and the doctor: whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance, the two men seemed to have agreed, it would be kept quiet.
This would be one of many doctors’ visits, the specifics of which I tried to blot out.
After being used by Epstein and his pals, my body was often in agony.
But just as in my childhood, when my frequent urinary tract infections led to countless uncomfortable examinations, in the hospital it was as if my mind protected me by shutting down.
That and the fact that I was heavily sedated have always made it difficult to know precisely what happened.
Besides, the doctors at New York–Presbyterian talked to Epstein more than to me.
It was only after I was discharged a couple of days later and Jojo ferried us back to Seventy-First Street that I began to piece things together.
I had a tiny incision near my belly button, which one of the other girls in the house told me was consistent with a laparoscopic surgery for an ectopic pregnancy.
But Epstein told me I’d suffered a miscarriage, which is something altogether different.
I’ve seen the medical records since, and they don’t contain the word “miscarriage.” They note severe cramping and weight loss (“7 lbs this month”), as well as that I’d reported having sex with the same partner for two years, but they don’t definitively describe all I went through.
The one thing I remember clearly is that, at one point, a doctor told me I might never be able to have children.
I’ve already said that Epstein never wore a condom.
Neither did the men he and Maxwell trafficked me to.
I made Tony wear a condom, at Epstein’s insistence, and I was on the pill.
But I must have missed a day. After my hospital visit, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had gotten pregnant and lost a fetus without even knowing it was happening.
That made me feel even more numb. But there would be no time for grieving.
In Maxwell and Epstein’s world, the party never stopped.
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