Chapter Twenty-Three My Very Own Princess #3
Several days later, the Daily Mail published a second story based on my interviews with Churcher.
The headline: “Teenage Girl Recruited by Paedophile JE Reveals How She Twice Met Bill Clinton.” Right away, the article noted that I had never been “lent out” to the former president.
But I guess the Mail found it newsworthy simply that I’d witnessed Epstein and Clinton together.
“Jeffrey had told me that they were good friends,” I’m quoted as saying.
“I asked, ‘How come?’ and he laughed and said, ‘He owes me some favors.’ ” The story also named other well-known acquaintances of Epstein’s, including Senator George Mitchell, then President Obama’s Middle East peace envoy, and Ehud Barak, then Israel’s defense secretary.
Barak’s spokesman confirmed to Churcher that Barak “did attend several small functions in Mr. Epstein’s home in New York.
” The story also mentioned that I’d met Al and Tipper Gore while in Epstein’s company, as well as Naomi Campbell and Donald Trump.
The article was something of a grab bag of random facts, but it featured some of the portraits Churcher’s photographer had taken of me, next to a stock photo of Clinton.
After the two Daily Mail stories ran, on March 9, 2011, Maxwell issued a statement through her publicist denying “the various allegations about her that have appeared recently in the media.” The statement called the allegations “abhorrent and entirely untrue.” Epstein remained silent.
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The British tabloids are fiercely competitive with one another, so despite the fact that Churcher had omitted my married name from her reports, soon other reporters tracked me down.
Paparazzi too. (In fact, the media frenzy was so crazy that after Churcher’s first story broke, Robbie and I had to get out of town, taking the kids to stay in a rented bungalow farther north.) They still found me, eventually, but I told everyone, No, thanks, I’d had my say for the time being.
Churcher and I were still in touch, though, and she urged me to consider writing a book about my life.
The idea appealed to me, and somehow, while running around after our five-year-old, our four-year-old, and our one-year-old, I managed to start writing a draft.
Eventually, I completed a 139-page typewritten manuscript I titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club,” in which I told some but not all of my story.
I didn’t reveal that my father had abused me, for example.
And I fictionalized parts of the narrative because Churcher told me if I did so, I couldn’t be sued.
That was entirely false, I now know, but this accounts for why some details in the manuscript—which was never published but which later became part of the public court file—do not align with what actually happened.
(I wrote that my third encounter with Prince Andrew, for example, occurred at Zorro Ranch, not where it actually occurred: the Caribbean.) I changed those details on purpose, thinking (wrongly) that I was protecting myself.
Some critics have used my 2011 manuscript—just as they used the fact that I accepted payment from the Mail—to imply that I was telling my story (or exaggerating and making things up) to profit from my misery.
Instead, my goal was and has always been to try to free myself of some of the memories that haunted me, while also focusing attention on the wrongdoing of my abusers.
Just as the teenage me had when I was journaling at Growing Together, the adult me felt better when I grabbed hold of the memories that ricocheted inside my head and got them down on paper.
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Back in 2007, Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter had taken his department’s findings about Epstein to the FBI.
As I’ve said, I soon heard from someone I thought might be posing as an agent, but I heard nothing more after I hung up on him.
Now, four years later, the Daily Mail’s stories about me led the Bureau straight to my door.
On March 17, 2011, the FBI interviewed me for the first time about Epstein at the US consulate in Sydney.
The meeting lasted several hours; I wanted to help the investigators, but it was a stressful experience.
It was difficult for me to talk about all that I’d experienced in one sitting; I got through it, though sometimes tearfully.
Like Churcher, the FBI agents showed me photographs of men’s faces and asked me if I recognized any of them or had been trafficked to any of them.
Again, I identified several men who had abused me.
Robbie insisted on being by my side during the interview, which was both a plus and a minus.
As always, he made me feel safe, but when I described being passed around from man to man to man, my husband got almost as upset as I was.
At one point, as the line of questioning got more and more detailed, Robbie completely lost it, lashing out at the federal agents.
“You sick perverts,” he yelled. “Do you really need to know every fucking thing that happened in each and every room?!”
I tried to calm him down. “Robbie, they have to ask all their questions,” I said.
But when I mentioned even tiny details Robbie hadn’t yet heard, he was gutted.
You may wonder why I’d kept things from him.
But the truth was that at a certain point in our marriage, he’d said he didn’t want to hear more about my time with Epstein.
Now, though, he felt blindsided. “Why didn’t you tell me those things before?
” he asked when we got home from the consulate.
“Because I don’t want you to know every awful fact,” I told him, stroking his head.
“When you close your eyes and go to sleep or when you look at me across the kitchen table or when we are making love, I don’t want you to see some of the things I see.
” Robbie was fuming. “I don’t need you to protect me,” he said.
“I need you to be straight with me.” But I was adamant.
“Robbie, at the end of the day, I’m your wife.
And I’d like to remain your wife.” By which I meant: if you let me leave out some things, we will both be happier.
The day after the interview, two FBI agents came to our house, where I handed over twenty photographs taken during my time with Epstein and Maxwell.
The photo with Prince Andrew was among them.
I also gave them the massage certificates I’d received in Thailand from ITM.
The FBI would later send me a compact disc with digital copies of all these items, but I would never get any of the originals back.
Skip Notes
* Only later would it become clear that Epstein had been shunned by at least one powerful person he’d previously wooed: Donald Trump.
In their 2020 book called The Grifters’ Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency, journalists Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff, and Jay Weaver reported that Trump ended Epstein’s membership at Mar-a-Lago and banned him from visiting in October 2007, after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.
That was a month after Epstein had entered into the secret nonprosecution agreement with the government but eight months before he made a plea deal.