Chapter Twenty-Three My Very Own Princess #2
Churcher called right away, and from the start, she has said, my voice sounded “shaky but determined.” We were speaking off the record, and I warned her I might never switch from off to on.
She said she understood, even as she kept pressing me.
She asked about how I’d been recruited into Epstein’s world and probed for other details about my experience with Epstein and Maxwell, but it was clear she was particularly interested in which of their friends I’d been forced to have sex with.
In my lawsuit, I’d referred to Epstein’s “adult male peers, including royalty.” Because Churcher worked for a British tabloid, anything royal was catnip to her.
Who, she asked, was that a reference to? Prince Andrew, I said.
“Do you have anything to back this up?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I think I still have a photo of him and me together.”
That was all Churcher needed to hear. She booked flights from her home in New York to Sydney.
From there, she rented a car and drove ninety minutes to our front door.
She’s said she didn’t sleep during the entire twenty-four-hour journey because she worried I wouldn’t be able to find the photograph I’d mentioned.
But her jet lag evaporated when I greeted her at my front door with an envelope that I’d stashed in one of our bookcases.
Inside were several snapshots from my time with Epstein and Maxwell.
The photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around me was among them.
Churcher had asked me over the phone to write down what I could remember of my time with Prince Andrew, and I gave those handwritten pages to her when she arrived.
Then she and I sat outside in the backyard and began talking.
I was still on the fence about whether I would give her permission to use the material I was sharing, but I figured I’d tell her what I knew, and she could tell me what interested her most. While much of the chronology was disturbing to talk about, it felt good to lift the veil on so much that had been hidden.
Churcher had brought about forty photos of various men in Epstein’s circle, and she asked me which ones had abused me.
I have always been a visual person, by which I mean that my mind attaches to images more than it does to words.
Being presented with these photos, then, felt surreal.
Some of the men were utter strangers to me, but my abusers’ faces I recognized instantly, as if I’d seen them yesterday, and I pointed out several.
Churcher acted like a friend who cared about me.
I felt as if I could trust her. On one of our days together, I remember we went to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Terrigal, where Churcher was staying, and met up with a photographer, Michael Thomas.
He took about thirty frames of the Prince Andrew photo, front and back.
He also took several portraits of me posing at a nearby park.
Still, however, I wasn’t sure I would give my permission for the Mail to publish either my story or my likeness.
Robbie and I saw both the pros and cons of letting the Mail run my story.
It galled us how Epstein had gotten off nearly scot-free.
But we both knew our lives would change forever if I revealed that I was Jane Doe 102.
I told Churcher that I had already seen shady characters hanging around our house and that I believed Epstein had sent them to intimidate me into staying silent.
The stalkers had had the desired effect: I was scared.
I didn’t want to let Epstein win, but I couldn’t decide what to do.
Then I stumbled upon a photo of Epstein walking in New York’s Central Park with Prince Andrew.
Another British tabloid, News of the World, had taken the photo after a days-long stakeout, and on February 20, 2011, they published it for the first time under the headline “Prince Andy and the Paedo.” Soon the photo was being reprinted around the world—including in the former British colony where I lived: Australia.
I was of course revolted to see two of my abusers together, out for a stroll.
But mostly I was amazed that a member of the royal family would be stupid enough to appear in public with Epstein.
When Maxwell had first arranged for me to have sex with Prince Andrew in London in 2001, Epstein was still largely concealing his predilection for young girls behind closed doors or on his private island.
But by 2011, everyone knew that Epstein—though he’d gotten off with a light sentence—was a convicted sex offender.
Seeing this new photo of Prince Andrew at Epstein’s side made “Randy Andy” seem even more arrogant to me.
The Central Park photo had been taken during a four-day visit Prince Andrew had paid Epstein at the end of 2010.
The prince stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, where Epstein had even thrown the prince a party, which I also read a squib about.
A powerful publicist named Peggy Siegal had helped wrangle the guest list, which included CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric, the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the talk-show host Charlie Rose, the Good Morning America coanchor George Stephanopoulos, the director Woody Allen, and Allen’s wife (the daughter of his former partner, Mia Farrow), Soon-Yi Previn.
It seemed that being a sex offender had not eroded Epstein’s social cachet one bit. [*]
The one-two punch of the photo in Central Park and the details of that A-list party knocked me off the fence I’d been straddling.
I told Churcher I’d go on the record. Her first article based on our interviews ran in the Mail on Sunday on February 27, 2011, under the headline “Prince Andrew and the 17-Year-Old Girl His Sex Offender Friend Flew to Britain to Meet Him.” That article made clear that I was Jane Doe 102 and accused Epstein of trafficking me to several unnamed men—“a well-known businessman (whose pregnant wife was asleep in the next room), a world-renowned scientist, a respected liberal politician and a foreign head of state”—but stopped short of explicitly including Prince Andrew in that list. I’d told Churcher all the details of my time with Prince Andrew, but the Mail’s lawyers worried they’d be sued if she included them.
Instead, Churcher repeated my lawsuit’s claim of my having been trafficked to “royalty,” then described everything about my first meeting Andrew in London except the sex.
I guess she figured the Mail’s subscribers could read between the lines.
Churcher also noted I’d met the prince a second time in Manhattan and a third time in the Caribbean.
Alongside the article, the Daily Mail published the photo Epstein had taken of the prince and me.
I accepted $160,000 for the use of that photo and agreed that I wouldn’t talk to anyone else for three months.
Later, after the Daily Mail syndicated the photo, I received about $4,000 more.
Today I understand what I didn’t then: that taking money from a tabloid publication for an interview or for use of a photo discredits the story even if it’s entirely accurate.
The fact that I received that Daily Mail payment has been used against me repeatedly to undermine the truth of my story.
I’ve been cast as a person who made things up for profit, when in fact I naively thought that being paid for telling your story was typical.
I’ve never been paid for an interview again.
Reading that first story Churcher wrote was hard for me.
On the one hand, the tone of the piece sometimes made me sound as if I loved being in Maxwell and Epstein’s rarefied world.
I was quoted talking about the jewelry Epstein bought me—“Diamonds were his favorite”—and I was described as “delighted” (a word I’d never used) to be asked to travel with him.
At one point, Churcher quoted me as having said, “I was a pedophile’s dream”—which is a spicy soundbite, I guess, but something I would never say.
On the other hand, though, it felt good to be standing up for myself.
I’d told the story of how Maxwell recruited me at Mar-a-Lago, and I’d made it clear that she was a key player in Epstein’s sexual pyramid scheme.
Calling out Epstein and Maxwell after so many years felt a little like flinging open the windows to air out a musty, foul-smelling room.
I hoped it might do some good. Speaking about the recent photograph of Epstein and the prince in Central Park, I’d told Churcher: “I am appalled. To me, it’s saying, ‘We are above the law.’ ” Talking to Churcher was my first attempt to try to bring these people back down to earth with the rest of us.