Chapter Thirty-Two Survivor Sisters Unite
Thirty-two
Survivor Sisters Unite
This was the kind of legislative change that victims’ rights advocates had long been pushing for.
Increasingly, research was bolstering their arguments.
For example, CHILD USA, a nonprofit focused on child-abuse prevention, conducted a study of thousands of abuse victims who had been Boy Scouts; only half of those came forward before they were fifty.
More and more, the public was coming to understand that being sexually abused as a child could take decades to process.
And it could take even longer than that for a victim to imagine speaking publicly about that experience and naming his or her abuser.
If you ask me, statutes of limitations should be abolished entirely for cases involving the sexual abuse of children.
But this look-back window in New York State was a step in the right direction, and it was particularly a boon for Epstein’s victims, so many of whom had been abused in Manhattan.
Over the next two years, several of us would take advantage of the window to file claims that would otherwise have been impossible.
But first we had a hearing to attend. On August 19, 2019, the US attorney’s office had filed a document to withdraw the charges against Epstein, since he was deceased.
Usually this results in a dismissal of the case as soon as the judge signs it.
In an unusual move, however, Judge Berman said that he was aware that Epstein’s death had robbed his victims of something vital to their healing.
To remedy that, Berman—who is a licensed social worker as well as a judge—scheduled a hearing for a week later.
On August 27, he said, he would give any of us who wished to speak the opportunity to address the court.
The government would pay for our airfare and hotels.
It was short notice, but I was determined to be there, as were scores of others.
Because of the enormous media attention and expected attendance, Berman moved the hearing from his usual courtroom to a larger one.
Half of the seating was reserved for survivors and their attorneys, and on the day of the hearing, that side of the room was almost full.
Siggy and Brad were there, as well as several other lawyers I knew.
Berman heard from the lawyers first, and then, one by one, twenty-three of us rose to say what we were there to say.
Woman after woman—now in their twenties, thirties, and forties—told a similar tale of being hurt by Epstein, and then struggling for decades afterward as memories of that trauma threatened to derail them.
But for all the pain being described, it seemed each woman who spoke took strength from the woman who’d gone before her.
Courtney Wild went first, and she set the perfect tone for the proceedings.
At fourteen, she had been a straight-A student, the first-chair trumpet in her school band, and the captain of the cheerleading squad.
Then Epstein began abusing her, “robbing me of my innocence and my mental health,” she said, and all her ambitions and achievements went up in smoke.
“I feel very angry and sad that justice has never been served in this case.”
Another survivor said she had lost her mother to cancer when she was eleven.
Afterward, she recalled being approached by “a lady” when she was playing her violin at a mall in Texas, not far from the New Mexico border.
The lady told the girl she knew a wealthy man who lived nearby who’d pay to see her play.
“This was the beginning of the end of my childhood,” the survivor told the court.
Chauntae Davies, who’d been recruited to be a masseuse for Epstein, recalled how at first she’d tried to reject his sexual advances, but that seemed to excite him. He ended up abusing her for years, she said. “We have all suffered, and he is still winning in death,” she said.
Jennifer Araoz said that she was first abused by Epstein when she was fourteen and that he forcibly raped her at fifteen. “He stole my chance at really feeling love because I was so scared to trust anyone for so many years,” she said, speaking through tears.
Annie Farmer, Anouska De Georgiou, Teala Davies, Teresa Helm, Sarah Ransome, and Marijke Chartouni—these might be names you’ve heard, as all of them have been quoted in media accounts speaking out about what they’d been through.
But they are only a few of my Survivor Sisters (as we’d soon come to call ourselves) who spoke that day.
We all shared the belief that by raising our voices, we might comfort and inspire others who weren’t yet ready to reveal their own suffering.
Several of us thanked the prosecutors who were there for finally assembling a case against Epstein, but I was not the only one to remind them that there were others walking free who should still be held to account.
“The reckoning must not end,” I told the court in my remarks.
“It must continue. He did not act alone, and we, the victims, know that. We trust the government is listening and that the others will be brought to justice.”
After the public hearing ended, the prosecutors invited all Epstein’s victims to meet with them in a private room.
It was an emotional session. Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney, had tears in his eyes as he told us how sorry he was for all we had endured.
William Sweeney, the head of the FBI’s New York office, thanked us for our presence.
And both pleaded with us to help them in their ongoing investigations into Epstein’s coconspirators.
Siggy and I would soon meet with them, as I know many Survivor Sisters did.
In addition to whatever leads we provided the prosecutors, the hearing and its aftermath resulted in something else that I’d never known to hope for.
Being with all those resilient women in one place gave me back a piece of myself that had gone missing.
When David Boies and Siggy offered to take several Survivor Sisters to the US Open, Farmer, Helm, Ransome, Chartouni, and I were among those who gathered in Queens to watch a match.
As we had dinner together later and drank champagne, I felt as if, despite our differences, I could tell these women anything.
There was a palpable feeling that each of us understood and supported the others.
And it was more than symbolic. Some of us were still looking for answers.
For example, Marijke Chartouni told me she thought she’d been abused by Epstein around the same time I was.
She was trying to identify the woman who’d recruited her, and when she described what the woman looked like, I recognized her instantly as a woman I’d known who was in Epstein’s circle for a time.
I remembered her first name but not her last. Marijke is like a detective—she would soon use pattern matching and public records to find what she thought must be the woman’s last name, and quickly after that she found the woman’s website and social-media accounts.
When we looked at the photographs the woman had posted of herself, there was no denying it was her.
Because this woman witnessed Marijke’s assault and participated in it, Marijke felt that finding her again—seeing that she still existed—helped defang a trauma that had gnawed at her for years.
For weeks after that hearing, I mostly felt jubilant.
The way all these strangers had come together, like pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle, to comfort one another and help fill in each other’s gaps was electrifying.
When united—we formed a WhatsApp group chat to keep in touch—we felt as if we had power.
“Now I know I’m on the right road,” I said to Robbie, “because look what is happening!”
In addition to this new form of kinship, the Survivor Sisters were dealing with a full-on media frenzy.
All the women who’d spoken in the courtroom in August were being asked by various news outlets to tell their stories.
For me it started right after Judge Berman’s hearing, when I stood in front of the courthouse with a dozen microphones in my face and tried to keep people focused on the wrongs that still needed to be righted.
“It’s not how Jeffrey died, but it’s how he lived,” I said.
“And we need to get to the bottom of everybody who was involved with that, starting with Ghislaine Maxwell…I will never be silenced until these people are brought to justice.” Before I stepped away from the mic, a reporter asked me whether that included Prince Andrew.
“He knows exactly what he’s done,” I said, “and I hope he comes clean about it.”
Soon I did a series of interviews for NBC’s Dateline.
Several other survivors were also featured.
That report would air on September 30, 2019.
Interviewer Savannah Guthrie was tough, but fair, and I appreciated how she let me address some people’s skepticism.
When she said, for example, that during my time with Epstein I’d been “coping [by using] Xanax, taking drugs, drinking. There are going to be people who say: maybe it didn’t happen the way you say it happened,” I responded like this: “I say when you’re abused, you know your abuser.
I might not have the dates or times right, and the places might not even be right, but I know their faces, and I know what they’ve done to me.
” Next, Glamour magazine invited Chartouni, Helm, Ransome, another Epstein survivor, named Rachel Benavidez, and me to have a roundtable discussion about what we had been through and our hopes for the future.
That feature appeared in the magazine’s October 2019 issue.
In rapid succession, I’d be interviewed on camera by the BBC and by the producers of Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a multipart documentary about Epstein and Maxwell that would eventually air on Netflix.
But perhaps my most important interview was conducted by Tara Brown of 60 Minutes Australia.
She was preparing an extensive report in which she interviewed not only me, David Boies, and Siggy but also Courtney Wild and a lawyer named Spencer Kuvin who represented many other victims of Epstein and Maxwell.
As its air date approached in early November, I told Robbie (who would also make a cameo in the report) that I wanted Alex and Tyler—then thirteen and twelve—to watch it.
(I felt that at nine, Ellie was still too young.) I told Robbie chances were good that some of the boys’ friends and their parents might see the report and recognize me.
Even though I was known as Jenna, not Virginia, in Australia, they knew my face, and this was going to be on TV in their living rooms. Our sons might get asked about it, I told Robbie. I didn’t want them to be blindsided.
But there was another, more pressing reason I wanted my sons to watch it.
“I want them to know what I’m fighting for—to make sure other children don’t have to endure what I did,” I told Robbie.
“They’ve known for a long time that something bad happened.
I think they are old enough now to understand.
” Of course, I knew it would be difficult for the boys to hear the details of my abuse.
But those details were the truth, and if the world was going to hear them, I wanted my sons to know them too.
I also thought it might be easier for them to understand because 60 Minutes would provide the context for my experience.
They would be able to see that their mother wasn’t alone—not in her victimhood, certainly, but also not in her willingness to stand up to those who’d hurt so many.
The night the report aired, the four of us gathered on the couch to watch.
The boys sat silently as Brown walked her audience through Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes.
They saw footage of the inside of El Brillo Way and photos of me as a young girl, and they heard me and Courtney Wild talk tearfully about what we’d experienced.
Importantly, they heard my answer when Brown asked me why, after I was abused the first time by Epstein and Maxwell, I went back a second time to El Brillo Way.
“As an adult, I know it’s right to run,” I told Brown.
“But as a kid who had been through what I’d been through in my life already, I guess the last thought that I had was, ‘Well, this is what life’s about.
’ ” When the report was over, I could tell by the way he was clenching his jaw that Alex was angry.
“Why did they let that guy get away with hurting so many people?” he demanded.
It just wasn’t fair, he said. Tyler had a different reaction.
He’d cried a few times while watching the report, and afterward he wouldn’t stop hugging me.
“I’m proud of you, Mom,” he said. That felt good, of course, but watching alongside my sons stirred up a lot of emotion.
On the one hand, I’d never wanted them to be touched by my terrible past. Now they were old enough to know the truth, but it still made me sad.
On the other hand, though, I was happy for the boys to see that I was, indeed, fighting bad guys—something I was determined to keep doing.
As much as this role could sometimes disrupt our family life, I wanted them to know that sometimes even one person can make a difference.
And given that possibility, you have to try.