Chapter Twenty-Five Back in the Sunshine State
Twenty-five
Back in the Sunshine State
Our new house had two stories, with a screened-in porch and a two-car garage.
But my favorite part was the backyard; dominated by a gargantuan oak tree, draped in Spanish moss, it backed up to a canal.
Every day, I’d take the kids down to watch the turtles and feed the ducks.
Robbie and I made friends with our neighbors, a retired minister and her husband.
And our location was ideal: I was a three-hour drive from Brad Edwards’s Fort Lauderdale office and just ten minutes from Danny.
Soon my little brother, Skydy, and his girlfriend moved in with us for a while, which I was thrilled about.
It was amazing how quickly we fell back into our old teasing routines (I’d call him Stupid Head, he’d call me Sissie).
It felt good to have my family around me again.
We enrolled the kids in school, and for a moment, it seemed they couldn’t have been happier.
I began looking for work as a bartender and briefly took a job at a closed-down restaurant that someone was trying to reopen.
That’s about the time we discovered that the local schools were terribly overcrowded.
Our kids kept coming home and talking about how they weren’t allowed to ask questions in class; the teachers were struggling just to maintain control.
I took a leap of faith: we’d try homeschooling.
I threw myself into keeping the kids engaged.
We’d go to the beach or explore the local tidal pools.
We were regulars at the nearby Manatee Observation Deck, where we watched those huge mammals eat seagrass.
Some days I’d play classical music in the kitchen until the kids finished their lessons.
Other days would be all Eminem, all the time.
Alex in particular loved Eminem. Even at seven years old, he’d run around the living room rapping.
“I’m not afraid,” he’d squeal, and I’d echo him, just as in the song.
“To take a stand,” he’d call out, and I’d repeat it.
Moving back to the Sunshine State also put me nearer to my dad, who had come back to Florida from California.
He now lived in a triple-wide mobile home in Summerfield, about a hundred miles to the east. I tried to see this as an opportunity: for all Dad’s faults, I wanted my kids to know their grandpa.
Robbie was down on the idea, but I promised him I could manage my father.
“He has good qualities,” I said. My husband was skeptical, but he went along with my plan at first. For a while, I thought I was making it work—taking the kids to visit Dad and letting them see the playful, fun side of him.
Alex loved being a passenger when my dad fired up his riding lawnmower and took it for a spin around his yard.
Tyler was transfixed by Dad’s PeeWee 500 minimotorcycle.
When we bought Ellie her first horse—a cantankerous animal we called Angel, although she was anything but—we kept her in Dad’s barn.
I was flooded with memories of how Dad and I had bonded over horses, and I wanted Ellie to love horses too.
When we got a second horse, Copper, he also stayed at Dad’s.
At this point, I asked Brad Edwards to be my lawyer, and as I got to know him, I began to feel as if he were my third brother.
Brad had been locking horns with Epstein for years, and man, did he have stories to tell.
Once in a court-ordered mediation session, Epstein had tried to be buddy-buddy with him, suggesting conspiratorially: “We should just start breaking the shit out of all these glasses”—he waved at several drinking glasses laid out on a table—“and make everyone think we’re killing each other.
” Brad believed there was a part of Epstein that enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game of being investigated; he wanted the world to know what he’d done (but only if he still got away with it).
Whenever anyone zeroed in on his culpability, however, Epstein would turn snide.
Brad told me that when he’d deposed Epstein in 2010, he’d specifically asked him if he knew a woman named Virginia Roberts.
Epstein’s response was to ask condescendingly if Brad would spell my name.
Facing more questions about me, Epstein at one point invoked the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees that an individual cannot be forced to provide information that might incriminate him or her.
But when Brad asked Epstein, “Is it true you asked Virginia Roberts to have sex with numerous friends of yours?” Epstein couldn’t resist a smug response.
“Are you kidding?” he asked, his voice full of disdain.
Much of my early work with Brad and his associate, Brittany Henderson, was a bit like piecing together a puzzle.
Like Sharon Churcher and the FBI before them, they assembled an even larger rogues’ gallery of faces to help me identify the men I’d been trafficked to.
Again I didn’t recognize many of the men.
But others, it was as if I’d preserved their faces in an airtight vault in my head—one that had been waiting to be unlocked.
The former governor of a Western state. A respected US senator.
And so many scientists. As I’ve said, usually when I was trafficked to these men, Epstein didn’t introduce us or tell me their names or their titles.
Some critics have insinuated that there’s no way I could remember these men, given the Xanax and the alcohol that I sometimes relied upon to survive in those years.
But to them, I say simply this: When a man has been on top of you, his face just inches from your own, you remember him.
You may not remember the exact day, date, or time that the man abused you, but his face stays in your mind, even when you wish it wouldn’t.
For example, I told Brad and Brittany that I recognized Marvin Minsky, the prominent MIT cognitive and computer scientist. It hadn’t been hard for my lawyers to find Minsky’s connections to Epstein.
In mid-April 2002, five months before I escaped Epstein’s clutches, the two men had hosted a gathering of twenty scholars in the field of artificial intelligence on Little Saint James.
The goal of the three-day conference, called “The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium: Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence,” was to contemplate building a computer resourceful enough to have what the group called “common sense.” Minsky had published a paper about it.
This could have been when I was trafficked to him for the first time.
I’m not sure of the date. What I do know is that Minsky was in his seventies then, precisely fifty-six years older than me (we shared a birthday).
And I remember what happened: Epstein sent me to a cabana on the beach and told me to service the man inside.
I will never forget Minsky’s bald head, and the way his face seemed to have shriveled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples.
Throughout my time having sex with Minsky, I could hear the waves lapping outside the little room. I tried to focus only on that sound.
Another prominent man I recognized from his photo was a heralded statesman.
He was the oldest person Epstein ever trafficked me to, and I have memories of servicing him in both New York and Palm Beach.
I remember this man didn’t talk to me much.
He also had trouble getting a full erection, so we did not have intercourse.
I performed oral sex on him instead. I had no inkling of this man’s stature (I assumed he was just another scientist).
But I knew the man was important to Epstein, because Epstein made a memorable fuss about how gently I was to attend to him.
When I was with this man, I never succeeded in getting him to ejaculate, but he enjoyed being touched.
Afterward, I massaged his chest, working my way up to his head, and gave him a scalp massage.
For months now, I’d been continuing my sessions with Judith Lightfoot over the phone, and the psychologist had encouraged me to start journaling again.
When I told her I was still having recurring nightmares—in one, Epstein sat in a chair, watching me, as I endured something painful—she had an idea.
I was to transcribe my worst dreams, ideally right after I woke up from them.
Then, when I’d filled up the green spiral notebook she knew I was already scribbling in, I should burn it.
Lightfoot believed that recording my worst memories and then destroying what I’d written might help keep my predators’ faces from breaking through my subconscious mind each night.
Robbie agreed. He’d always believed in the power of ritual.
Soon my notebook was full, and Robbie was building me a bonfire in our backyard.
“Honey, let’s put an end to all that evil,” he said, on the evening we’d chosen to light my worst torments on fire.
The kids were in bed, and it was dark in the yard.
The orange light of the blaze reflected off both our faces.
I was ready. Holding the notebook in my left hand, I used my right to rip out each page.
First, I read what I’d written aloud; then, I threw that page into the flames.
Eighty-five pages later, I was done. “These men are only in my nightmares,” I said over and over.
“They no longer own me.” I could only hope that was true.
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