Chapter Twenty-Five Back in the Sunshine State #2
In July 2014, Brad and I prepared to fly to New York to meet the famed litigator David Boies.
Boies’s firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, was considering joining forces with Brad on his CVRA lawsuit, but before it did so, Boies wanted a face-to-face meeting.
Robbie and the kids stayed in Florida—I booked them into a fancy resort in Fort Lauderdale so they could relax while Mom did her job “fighting bad guys.” More and more, I was talking to Alex, Tyler, and Ellie about the wrongs I was trying to right.
The details, of course, were too much to share, but I wanted them to know that I believed it was important to stand up to bullies but that, at times, that would mean I would have to be away from them.
When Brad and I arrived in Manhattan, we were four hours early for our meeting, so we had lunch and wandered around the Upper East Side.
“You know, we’re pretty close to Epstein’s mansion,” Brad said at one point.
“Do you think there’s anyone still working there who might talk to you?
” I said the only person might be Epstein’s New York butler, Jojo Fontanilla.
I remembered him fondly—he’d helped get me to the hospital that time in 2001, just before I turned eighteen, when I felt as if I were being torn in half.
Brad held up a tape recorder with a remote microphone that he’d brought.
If we pinned the mic to my blouse, he suggested, maybe I could gather a little intel.
“You could just knock and see if Jojo is there,” Brad said. “Want to give it a try?”
I nodded obediently. I so wanted to play a meaningful role in Brad’s campaign to make Epstein pay.
But as we got closer, I started to feel sick.
It was a beautiful mild day, but my palms were sweating.
Standing on the corner of Seventy-First Street and Fifth Avenue, I gathered myself, breathing deeply in and out.
“I can do this,” I told Brad. “I’d do anything to push this case forward.
” But while bringing pedophiles to justice was an honorable goal, I hadn’t fully realized how hard it would be to return to the epicenters of my trauma.
I had been acting tough for Brad because I wanted him to believe I was worth including in his campaign.
But I could feel my panic rising, and I realized, “I can’t keep pretending I can lock these feelings away.
” Burning my nightmare journals was a good start, but clearly I needed to find more ways to process my worst fears.
As we neared the front door, Brad said it was probably best if he waited across the street. He gave me the recording device, and I turned into the entryway where Epstein’s brass initials, JE, were affixed to the wall and headed up the steps toward his massive front door.
Robbie says sometimes my balls are bigger than my brain, and this was an instance that proves, yet again, that he is right.
What was I doing returning to this place where, treated like a piece of meat, I had suffered so much?
I wanted to be brave—to have my mere presence assert: “I’m no longer your victim.
You didn’t break me.” But now I was nauseous; I could hear my heart beating in my ears.
What if they let me in? What if someone inside somehow hurt me again?
I rang the bell, and after a moment, a blond, curly-haired girl who looked nineteen or so answered.
I asked for Jojo and gave my name. “He was my driver for a while,” I said.
“I just wanted to catch up and see how he’s doing.
” The girl closed the door and returned a moment later.
Jojo wasn’t there, she said. I’ll never know whether that was true or whether he was just afraid, as I was.
Epstein’s employees were all required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and they all knew, as I had known, that there were consequences to disobeying the boss.
But while I was relieved to walk back out to the street, at the same time, it stung to get the brush-off.
I’d thought that Jojo’s heart might be big enough to at least say hello.
When I rejoined Brad where he was waiting, he could see I was upset.
But the look on his face said he was proud of me.
“You were willing to go into the lion’s den, Virginia,” he said.
Looking back, I’m not sure this exercise was worth the trauma it caused me.
But I was determined to be helpful, even to my own detriment.
It was time to go see Boies in his seventh-floor office on Lexington Avenue, near Fifty-First Street.
We checked in with the receptionist, and a few minutes later, Boies himself walked through the glass doors behind us.
After we all said hello, Boies led Brad and me and another lawyer, named Stan Pottinger, into a large conference room.
I’d heard Boies was a big deal. He’d taken on Microsoft in a landmark antitrust case, represented Al Gore in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, and stood up for the National Basketball Players Association during the 2011 NBA lockout, among a zillion other high-profile cases.
But for whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous in his presence.
As he took his seat at the head of the table, I started in, thanking him for considering helping us.
As for my own motivations, I told him, “I’ve stayed silent for too long, but not anymore.
I’m here to help stop Epstein once and for all. ”
Boies asked me several questions in his methodical way, and I told him my story.
I said my goal was to undo Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement, and Brad chimed in about how he planned to make that happen.
When we were done with our spiel, Boies said, “It appears obvious Brad has everything well under control. Where do you see me fitting in?”
It was Brad’s turn to talk. “Epstein should be in jail,” he remembers saying.
“My goal is to put him there. He will do anything to stop me. He has a powerful team behind him and unlimited resources to go after me, and Virginia, and anyone who stands up to him…. We’re going to need a heavyweight legal team to counter their attacks.
” We needed Boies’s reputation, his clout, and his firm’s resources and expertise.
“There will be plenty of room for you,” Brad promised.
Boies didn’t hesitate. “Okay,” he said. “Then I’m in.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a transformative moment, not just for Brad, but for me.
Later that night, Brad and I flew back to Fort Lauderdale, and I rejoined Robbie and the kids.
It had been a successful trip, but I was bone tired.
Over the next several days, Robbie would tell me I seemed to have regressed, as if by briefly reentering Epstein and Maxwell’s world, I’d reverted to the mindset I’d had when I was their captive.
Back home in Titusville, I slept a lot, and Robbie said I didn’t seem able to communicate with him or the kids.
I apologized, but in truth, I wasn’t aware of how I was acting.
I wanted to be strong—to be a fighter—but part of me was leveled by the effort that required.
I guess it made sense: I’d been diagnosed with PTSD.
And indeed, I felt shell-shocked, like a soldier who goes back into battle before fully recovering from an earlier ambush.
Other parts of my life, too, were sapping my energy—my attempt to make peace with my dad, for example.
I’ll never forget the day Robbie, me, the kids, and my dad went to the Busch Gardens amusement park in Tampa.
Usually, Robbie wouldn’t allow me to be alone with Dad—it was an agreement we’d made that we both felt was for the best. But Robbie hates roller coasters, and Dad and I love them, so on this day, the two of us headed off to get in line for the biggest one, which famously went through a lion’s pen before it did twelve upside-down curlicues in the air.
It was starting to rain, and the line was moving slowly, when suddenly Dad turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it.
“I’m sorry for what I let Forrest do to you.
It was wrong. You were just a kid. You’re my baby girl.
I always want you in my life. I’m so sad that I put you through everything that you went through.
” I remember we were half-standing under an awning then, and it was raining harder, so when I started crying, I wasn’t sure if Dad could see it.
In the days that followed, I felt almost high: Dad had acknowledged what he’d never been willing to before.
It didn’t make up for the damage he and Forrest had done to me, but it was still validating.
I wanted that to mean a door to reconciliation had opened for the two of us.
But then I began to think seriously about my father.
He now had several grandchildren, three of them little girls—my Ellie, then Sara, the daughter of my older brother, and my younger brother’s newborn daughter.
Even as I had allowed my kids to spend time with Dad, I’d watched over them like a hawk and never left them alone with him—especially Ellie.
I wouldn’t take the risk that Dad might hurt her in the way he’d hurt me.
Now, all at once, I realized: my brothers didn’t know to take those precautions because I’d never told them what Dad had done to me. I needed to break my silence about Dad.
“We need to have a sit-down,” I told my brothers.
I think I met with them separately—that’s what they remember, too.
I told them what Dad had done to me when I was seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven years old.
Neither one of my brothers wanted to believe me at first, but they could see in my eyes that I couldn’t be making it up.
By the end of the night, all of us were in tears.