Chapter Twenty-Five Back in the Sunshine State #3
My revelations caused things to change. First, my older brother confronted Dad.
“You’ve got some pretty heavy charges on you in this family,” Danny said.
My dad just looked at him with a mousy expression that Danny would later describe as “really weird, embarrassed, but perverted.” Dad neither confirmed nor denied what he’d done—to Danny or to Skydy, who raised the topic soon afterward, when our dad disappeared with Skydy’s daughter while at a Tampa Buccaneers game.
Skydy was furious. “Don’t ever walk away with my kids again,” he told Dad, adding, “and you know why, right?” Dad’s response: a blank stare.
Danny told me later that he felt he’d seen a monster inside Dad for the first time—that’s the word he used: monster.
After Danny told our dad he would never see his granddaughter Sara again, Dad showed up at the workplace of Danny’s wife, Lanette, and cornered her, blocking her exit.
He told her he knew where Sara went to school.
“You can’t take her away from me!” he threatened.
My older brother was so worried that Dad might try to snatch Sara that he called his daughter’s school and told them that Dad should never be allowed to pick her up ever again.
And that was the end of Dad and Danny’s relationship. To this day, they do not speak.
Of course, Dad was mad at me too. Why was it taking me so long, you are probably wondering, to expel him from my life once and for all?
That was definitely what Robbie wanted, but I was having trouble setting a firm boundary.
I’d warned my brothers, telling them what Dad was capable of.
Wasn’t that enough? Then came a telephone call so disturbing that I will never get over it.
I remember I was standing on our back porch in Titusville, looking out at the Spanish moss hanging off our big old tree, when the phone rang.
When I stepped outside to answer, the caller (who I knew and trusted) told me they had heard that evidence existed indicating that Epstein had paid my father a sum of money way back in 2000, when I was first being trained by Epstein and Maxwell on El Brillo Way.
As that was sinking in—had Dad profited from my pain?
—the caller asked if I remembered my father getting a financial windfall around that time, but my mind was blank. I did not want to believe this.
After I hung up, I went to tell Robbie what I’d heard.
The thought of a father knowingly accepting hush money from the middle-aged predator who was abusing his teenage daughter was horrifying.
I felt like I’d gone into shock. But for my husband, this moment was the last straw.
If he saw my dad on our property again, he said, he wasn’t sure he could restrain himself.
“I want to kill that man,” he said. While I’d fantasized for years about a happy family reunion in Florida, the state was proving too small for the Roberts-Giuffre clan.
I’d always told Robbie I wanted him to understand where I came from.
Well, now he did, in ways we’d never anticipated. It was time to leave.
When Robbie and I put our minds to something, we get it done.
I called a moving company. We rented a minivan and packed our bags.
I remember the furniture was already on a truck, heading to Colorado, when I called my father and confronted him.
“Dad, I know Epstein paid you off,” I said.
There was a brief silence, and then he started yelling at me about being an ungrateful daughter.
“Here’s the thing, Dad,” I said. “If one of my kids, God forbid, ever accused me of something as disgusting as this, I would tell them the truth. If I hadn’t done it, I’d say I hadn’t done it.
But I’m not hearing you say that. You’re not saying a thing. ”
I don’t know if he hung up or I did. I was seething.
How many times could this one person fail me?
A little more than an hour later, Robbie headed to the backyard to mow our lawn one last time.
We were putting our Titusville house on the market, and he wanted it to show well.
That meant I was standing inside our empty house alone, looking out at the street, when I saw Dad pull up and get out of his sports car.
I opened the front door, and I could see from the way he was swaggering toward me that he was ready to fight.
But I put my hand on his chest and told him he wasn’t coming in.
“Dad, I need you to stop,” I said. “Think for a second. Do you want your grandchildren to see you and Robbie down on the floor, trying to kill each other, with blood everywhere? Because that’s what is about to happen.
If you don’t turn around right now, I’m calling the police. ”
I must have scared him, because he stopped pushing me. I could see Dad looking over my shoulder, registering the lack of furniture in the living room. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“We’re moving,” I said. “You’re never going to see us again. This is the last time.”
The look on his face then—I would like to erase it from my memory, but I can’t. It was like his features were collapsing inward, like he was being flattened by an invisible force.
“Can I see my grandchildren?” he stammered.
“No,” I said. “No, you can’t.”
That’s when he started sobbing. My dad has always been good at making me feel bad for him.
“You’re my baby girl!” he wailed. “You’ll always be my only baby girl.
” That’s Dad: even in the worst situation, he can manipulate things to seem as if they should go in his favor.
“If you leave, I’m gonna have no one to look after me,” he said. “Who’s going to take care of me?”
“Dad,” I said, and now I was crying too.
“Robbie doesn’t know you’re here. You need to get in your car, and you need to go before he finishes cutting the grass.
Because if he comes in and finds you here, I won’t be able to hold him back.
” Dad’s eyes darted around, as if he was listening for the sound of the lawnmower.
Then he turned, walked to his car, and drove off.
And that was the last time I ever saw my father.
A few minutes later, Robbie put the lawnmower in the garage (we were leaving it for the realtor, in case the house took a while to sell).
And within an hour, our family was crowded into the minivan, and we were heading west. Our destination: Penrose, Colorado, just south of Colorado Springs.
My dad had broken my heart. I was done with him. Now I would try reuniting with Mom.