Chapter Thirty-One A Taste of Justice
Thirty-one
A Taste of Justice
Epstein’s bail hearing was a week later.
I wished I could attend, if only to see Epstein in shackles.
But Brad Edwards assured me that other survivors would be there to represent us all.
Courtney Wild, Michelle Licata, and Annie Farmer did indeed attend, and the judge let them speak.
First Farmer and then Wild stood up and briefly described how much harm Epstein had done.
If nothing else, Wild said, the judge should keep him behind bars “for the safety of any other girls.”[*]
I’ll tell you one thing, though: while I’ve read that Epstein was buried in an unmarked grave not far from his parents, in Palm Beach, Florida, I don’t believe that at all.
Epstein had repeatedly told me exactly what would happen when he died: his body would be placed in some sort of cryogenic chamber to be preserved until technology advanced far enough to bring him back to life.
That’s what he’d always bragged to me, with that satisfied smirk on his face.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but I wouldn’t bet against the notion that he somehow got his way on this.
Investigators would soon discover that on August 8, two days before his death, Epstein had placed his entire fortune into a trust—“The 1953 Trust,” apparently named for his birth year—in the Virgin Islands.
This legal maneuver would be widely interpreted as Epstein’s final thumbing of his nose at those who’d survived his predation, because it made it much more difficult for his victims to get restitution.
Even after death, Epstein seemed to be asserting control.
It was oddly heartening, therefore, when another photo emerged in the public realm that refocused the narrative not on Epstein’s maneuvering but on his perversity.
Taken by a party photographer in 2001, the image is ostensibly of Naomi Campbell—the lens zeroes in on her, in a black leather bikini and a mesh black wrap, arriving at her thirty-first birthday bash on that yacht I’ve told you about in Saint-Tropez.
But despite her undeniable beauty, the supermodel wasn’t the reason this photo ran in the New York Post on August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein’s death. I was.
“Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Sex Slave’ Seen at Naomi Campbell’s Birthday Party in 2001” blared the headline atop the photo (which had also appeared a day earlier in England’s Daily Mail).
And with that, a single image reminded the world just how childlike the girls in Epstein’s world were required to look.
I’m caught in the foreground—clearly by accident—an awkward smile on my face, my long blond hair falling down my back.
I am looking away, and my pink sleeveless top reveals a slender arm and a bare shoulder.
I am seventeen years old. And right next to me, partially obscured, with only her dark hair and a sliver of her cheek visible, is Maxwell.
Later, I would meet a fellow Epstein survivor who would tell me this photograph was the reason she had broken her silence and come forward with her own story. The photo said something a thousand words couldn’t, she said: “Everyone knew: that was a child.” By “that,” she meant me.
Skip Notes
* Later it would become clear, in case anyone doubted it, that when he was arrested, Epstein had likely still been keeping company with minor girls.
Two weeks before Epstein’s arrest, the US Marshals Service had interviewed an air-traffic control employee who reported seeing Epstein as recently as November 2018 disembarking from his jet with girls who appeared to be as young as eleven or twelve.