Chapter Thirty A Reckoning Begins
Thirty
A Reckoning Begins
Whether talking to journalists, working with law enforcement, or filing lawsuits, so many brave women have stood up to Epstein and Maxwell.
But when each of them first decided to do so, I can guarantee every single one felt terrified and alone.
While I’d been in Epstein and Maxwell’s world, they’d safeguarded their evil enterprise by stoking rivalries, strategically keeping girls from forging alliances.
In their presence, then, we’d been kept at odds with each other, and even after I’d escaped, I still felt isolated, for a long, long time.
Now, however, as I learned of other women who had come forward, that solitary feeling was starting to lift.
I knew about Courtney Wild from the CVRA case.
And it turned out there were two sisters, Annie and Maria Farmer, who’d been trying for nearly two decades to expose what Epstein and Maxwell had done to them.
As word spread that there were a handful of lawyers representing a growing number of Epstein’s victims and getting results, more women were choosing to break their silence.
In October 2016, for example, a South African woman named Sarah Ransome called Paul Cassell.
She told him that she, too, had been a victim of Epstein and Maxwell in 2006 and 2007.
She said she’d been following my story in the media and had found the Facebook page of my nonprofit, Victims Refuse Silence—the one Brad had helped me found in 2014.
Ransome said she wanted to assist my case in any way she could.
Paul gathered my legal team in a room at Boies Schiller Flexner, and they called Sarah back in Barcelona, Spain, where she was living.
She said she’d been abused by Epstein and Maxwell in various locations beginning when she was twenty-two.
Specifically, she said that Epstein had raped her repeatedly while on his island and that Maxwell facilitated it, while also starving, berating, and swindling her.
Like me, she had photographs of herself with them.
She hadn’t been a minor during this period, but what had happened to her was still wrong.
In early 2017, right before a ten-year statute of limitations was about to expire, Boies Schiller Flexner filed a lawsuit on Sarah Ransome’s behalf against Epstein and Maxwell.
The charge: violation of the federal sex-trafficking statute, which prohibits the recruiting, enticing, transporting, or soliciting of someone for sex by means of fraud, force, or coercion.
Before I settled with Maxwell, Ransome had flown to New York to serve as a witness in my defamation case.
While the mounting number of cases against Epstein and Maxwell was heartening, however, there were indications that public awareness of their crimes was either fading or had never been very high in the first place.
Donald Trump was now president, and in early 2017 he nominated Alexander Acosta—the former federal prosecutor based in Miami who had approved Epstein’s shameful, secretive nonprosecution agreement—to be secretary of labor. Acosta was confirmed in April 2017.
At the same time, accounts describing the mistreatment of women in America were multiplying: Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual-harassment suit against her boss, Roger Ailes; Uber employee Susan Fowler went public about toxic masculinity at the ride-sharing company, causing its CEO to resign.
It was as if all this bad behavior were a surging river and a dam was about to break.
Then it did. On October 5, 2017, The New York Times ran the first of several articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s serial harassment and assault of women, and their sources’ allegations were backed up by on-the-record quotes.
Five days later, The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote of several more women who Weinstein had victimized, and Farrow, too, was just getting started.
He would soon shine light on several of Weinstein’s associates who sought to silence Weinstein’s victims—among them, one of my own attorneys, David Boies, who had represented Weinstein and had personally signed a contract directing a private investigative firm to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a New York Times story about Weinstein’s abuses.
(Boies later said this had been a mistake.
While his firm didn’t select or direct the investigative firm, he said, and he characterized the arrangement as “an accommodation for a client,” he took personal responsibility for the error, which he said was not “thought through.”)
Back in 2006, when an activist named Tarana Burke had founded a nonprofit to serve survivors of sexual harassment and abuse, Burke had called her movement “Me Too.” Now, eleven years later, the actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter and encouraged survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #MeToo as a status update.
The response from women around the world was enormous.
Two days later, the first of more than 150 gymnasts who’d been abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar went public.
It was hard not to hope that real change was coming.
—
On the home front, things were good. Robbie and I used part of my Maxwell settlement to buy a four-bedroom house in a gated community just north of Cairns.
After more than two years as renters, we were homeowners once again.
We lived on a street named Iridescent Drive, which was fitting because at times the place, which had a lovely swimming pool in the backyard, seemed to shimmer.
We had an outdoor kitchen, and during hot, muggy weather (which there is a lot of in Cairns) we pushed open our accordion doors and let the breeze cool the house.
In mid-2017, my kids were no longer babies.
Alex was eleven, Tyler was ten, and Ellie was seven, and more and more I was noticing that each was special in his or her own way.
Alex was beginning to write rhymes that he would eventually turn into rap music.
Tyler was an artist who could draw anything.
And Ellie loved to regale us with fanciful stories.
While she aspired to be a firefighter more than a writer then, she was becoming a great raconteur.
I admired my kids and was grateful for what they taught me every day.
Which is why I got it into my head that we should make our family bigger.
In Cairns at that time, there was a campaign to streamline the process of finding homes for children in Queensland’s foster-care system.
I’d seen brochures about the program, called “foster to adopt,” at the kids’ school, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to be part of it.
Our family was so fortunate and had so much to give.
Having slept in foster homes during my time at Growing Together, I knew how bad it felt to lack a safe, permanent home.
I proposed the idea of adopting to Robbie, who I suspected would be open to it, since his own father had been adopted as a child.
When my husband said yes, we submitted an application, and before we knew it, we’d passed the home evaluation.
Robbie and I took a required class to get educated about the challenges some foster kids might have.
And right away, we were matched with a three-year-old girl.
Her father was absent, we were told, and her mother was in prison and had decided to give her up for adoption.
I knew with all my heart that we should give this little girl a home.
But then Siggy called. She needed me to travel to the United States again.
I can’t remember what the reason was—it’s possible that it was for a deposition in one of my Survivor Sisters’ cases—but I do remember it was urgent: I had three days to get there.
As I began packing, Robbie said we needed to talk.
“Jenna, you know I love kids, but you’ve been the one pushing us to adopt,” he said.
“I’m on board, but it’s you who really wants to give back like this.
But if you’re not going to be here…” He hesitated, which is rare for him.
Finally, he said: “It’s just not fair. You need to commit to one thing or the other.
” I understood the choice he was laying out for me: keep on fighting to expose Epstein’s cabal or step back, adopt a new daughter, and stay home with my expanding family. “It’s either this or that,” he said.
I knew Robbie was right, even though I didn’t want him to be.
The tension between my desire to be an activist and my desire to put my family first was always there for me, but in this instance, it required that I make a stark choice.
I wanted to do both. Especially now that I knew of a particular child whom we could help, I yearned to do so.
But at the same time, what I’d started with Siggy was nowhere near done.
And seeing it through, wherever it took us, would potentially help other young women and girls.
So I made my choice, and a few days later got on the plane to the States.
To this day, I think about that little girl I never met and wonder how all our lives would be different if she had joined our family.