Chapter Twenty-Six Rocky Mountain High
Twenty-six
Rocky Mountain High
There’s a Kelly Clarkson song that she recorded around this time, and whenever I hear it, I think of how I felt leaving Florida.
In “Piece by Piece,” Clarkson describes recovering from wounds her dad inflicted in childhood by finding a sustaining love, as an adult, with a kind, protective husband.
“Piece by piece, he filled the holes / that you burned in me at six years old,” she sings fiercely to her father, and I think of Robbie, who restored my faith in family by building a new one with me.
And, of course, I think of the man who burned me: my dad.
At thirty-one years old, I’d been fighting most of my life to feel like a worthwhile person.
I’d made strides, no doubt, but sometimes all that healing seemed to disappear.
At those moments, I felt like a house in a pounding hurricane whose breakaway walls float away when the storm surge gets too deep.
Sure, by design, such destruction may help the house survive.
But there’s still damage, and until it’s repaired, the house is a mess.
That was me for a while after we got on the road to Colorado: an unhappy mess.
It didn’t help that the minivan we were driving was full to bursting with both people and animals.
In addition to Robbie, Alex, Tyler, Ellie, and me, we also were transporting several Chinese fighting fish, three ferrets, a cat, three dogs (Bear, Champ, and Odie, an utterly insane Jack Russell terrier we’d adopted in Florida), a snake named Athena, and I don’t even know how many hamsters.
What I do know is that our first night on the road, once we’d found a cheap motel to sleep in, we left the fish and the hamsters out in the minivan.
The fish froze to death, and the hamsters got loose, never to be seen again.
Now we were heading into unknown territory, both geographically and psychically.
Mom and I had been in more frequent touch, but I hadn’t seen her in person for years.
I knew she wanted me to flourish, and of course I wanted the same for her.
When she’d married again, I hadn’t attended, but I told her I was happy for her, and I meant it.
Whenever I’d brought up anything about abuse I’d experienced, she would tell me she just couldn’t bear to talk about the past. For months now, I’d been trying to accept that if I wanted a loving relationship with my mother, I’d just have to take her as she was.
My mom and her husband, Stan, lived in a mobile home in Penrose, a farming and ranching community in Fremont County so rural that it’s categorized not as a town but as a “census-designated place and post office.” With our house sitting unsold in Florida, we were in no position to buy a home.
Besides, we weren’t feeling like making any long-term commitments.
Instead we found a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house to rent, just two miles away from my mom.
I was determined to make a go of getting to know her again.
Robbie and I found a great school for the kids, which, looking back, was perfectly timed.
While I’d loved playing “teacher,” the kids were missing the camaraderie of having other kids around.
And I was getting too busy for homeschooling, spending more time with Brad Edwards and Brittany Henderson, whom I’d asked to help me create a nonprofit organization to help survivors of sexual trafficking and abuse surmount the shame, silence, and intimidation that victims typically experience.
I wasn’t sure exactly what my organization could accomplish, but in December 2014, Brad and Brittany helped me file the paperwork to formally get Victims Refuse Silence, as I then called it, registered as a 501(c)(3).
That same month, Brad and a colleague, former federal judge Paul Cassell, put the finishing touches on the motion that sought for me and another victim to join the lawsuit that Courtney Wild had filed against the US attorney’s office back in 2008.
As I’ve said, that suit alleged that the government had failed to protect the rights of Epstein’s victims guaranteed by the CVRA: the right to confer, to have reasonable notice, and to be treated with fairness.
In response, the government had argued that those rights did not apply to Wild because no federal charges had ever been filed against Epstein.
But the judge in the case rejected that position, which cleared the way for Brad to try to get me and the other victim attached to the case.
Brad knew he had to be careful. He didn’t want the judge to think he was unnecessarily expanding the lawsuit’s scope.
But he felt it was important to show there were different kinds of victims who’d been impacted.
The other woman he was seeking to add, Jane Doe 4, was one of a dozen or so women whom Brad had identified as victims of Epstein’s underage sex abuse but whose existence the government had never formally acknowledged.
That was because the government had stopped investigating when it entered into the broad immunity agreement for Epstein that we found so abhorrent.
In the wake of that, Brad had pushed the US attorney’s office to consider these unnamed women as opportunities to go after Epstein again.
As Brad wrote in his book, “Because the government, having stopped its investigation, did not know their identities at the time the non-prosecution agreement was signed…there could not possibly be any restriction against filing a new indictment against Epstein for those newly discovered crimes committed against these newly discovered victims. Right?” Wrong.
Despite Brad’s urging, no new charges had been brought.
That was why he wanted Jane Doe 4 attached to his suit.
He wanted me attached, meanwhile, because unlike the case’s original petitioners, who were abused only in Palm Beach, I’d traveled the world with Epstein and been lent out to several prominent men, some of whom Brad was planning to name.
I would be kept anonymous, he said, and referred to as Jane Doe 3.
Brad decided we would file our motion for joinder, as it’s called, the day before New Year’s Eve 2014.
He hoped the filing would go unnoticed, given the holiday.
And perhaps it would have, but for Josh Gerstein of Politico.
On December 31, Gerstein blogged about the filing in general, but mostly about me.
“A woman allegedly kept as a sex slave by politically connected billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein, who went to jail for having sex with underage girls, is accusing several prominent friends of the financier of having taken part in the debauchery, according to a new court filing,” Gerstein wrote.
“The woman—referred to in court papers as Jane Doe #3—leveled the allegations Tuesday.”
Gerstein’s story went on to quote this part of our filing: “Epstein…trafficked Jane Doe #3 for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to describe the events that she had with these men so that he could potentially blackmail them.”
When the Politico story hit, it unleashed a firestorm of press, and for Maxwell, who we’d referenced by name in the complaint, that was particularly unwelcome.
Maxwell had been attempting a reputational makeover by founding the TerraMar Project, a self-described environmental nonprofit organization that was vaguely focused on creating a “global ocean community” (whatever that means) based on the idea of shared ownership of the high seas.
She was in the midst of fundraising. So it was no surprise when, on January 2, 2015, Maxwell issued a statement through her publicist identifying me by name and calling me a liar.
“Jane Doe 3 [sic] is Virginia Roberts,” the statement began.
“The original allegations are not new and have been fully responded to and shown to be untrue,” it went on.
“Each time the story is retold it changes with new salacious details about public figures and world leaders…Ms. Roberts’ claims are obvious lies and should be treated as such and not publicized as news, as they are defamatory. ”
On January 13, 2015, Sharon Churcher—determined to capitalize on my being back in the news—wrote a misleading news story about the handwritten pages about my time with Prince Andrew that I’d handed her the day we first met in 2011.
Photos of those pages—my loopy handwriting on lined paper—accompanied a story by Churcher on the gossip site Radar Online, and its headline couldn’t have been more breathless or error-ridden: “Diary Entries of ‘Teen Sex Slave’ Detail Sordid Hook-Up with Prince Andrew—in Her Own Handwriting.” Billed as a “bombshell world exclusive,” the story was inaccurate in that it described the twenty-four pages I’d given her as a “secret diary” and implied I’d written them as a teenager, when I was with Epstein, not a decade later, when she asked me to.
Reading those pages again, I was embarrassed by the girlish tone.
But more than that, I was disgusted by Churcher.
Once I’d believed she was my friend; now I saw she was nothing but a bottom-feeder.
How long, I wondered, would she try to dine out on her years-old interviews with me?
It’s no fun being called a liar. It sucks to be the subject of erroneous muckraking. Dr. Lightfoot, my psychologist, had taught me breathing exercises to help with my anxiety attacks, but in these weeks right after the joinder motion, it was all I could do to not hyperventilate.