Chapter Thirty-Three Unbroken
Thirty-three
Unbroken
The interview’s ramifications would be sweeping.
[*] While the royal family still denied my allegations, it also effectively banned the queen of England’s third child from appearing at public events and forbade him from using the honorific “His Royal Highness.” So dramatic was the fallout that two streaming services—Netflix and —would soon announce they had projects in the works to dramatize how the interview was arranged and executed, and a third company embarked on a feature-length documentary.
I was glad for the opportunity to reach a British audience, and at one point in the interview, I spoke to them directly.
“I implore the people in the UK to stand up beside me, to help me fight this fight, to not accept this as being OK,” I said, adding, “This is not some sordid sex story. This is a story of being trafficked. This is a story of abuse.” If only we could keep the pressure on, I thought, maybe the prince and others could be held to account.
—
In February 2020, I flew from Cairns to Los Angeles to participate in a podcast called Broken.
In the podcast’s first season, New Yorker writer Ariel Levy and the Miami Herald’s Julie K.
Brown had taken listeners through the litany of Epstein’s crimes.
Now, journalist Tara Palmeri was hosting the second season, Broken: Seeking Justice.
Palmeri wanted to follow several of Epstein’s victims as we sought to reconcile our pasts with our present-day lives.
The project was backed by two terrific guys named Adam—the Hollywood director Adam McKay and the podcaster and former NPR correspondent Adam Davidson.
I was impressed by the team’s firepower, and I liked that Palmeri didn’t give two shakes about Epstein—only about the women he’d hurt.
I would be helping to gather reporting during a ten-day, cross-country journey with Palmeri.
Our goal: to track down some of the people who’d worked for Epstein during the time I knew him.
I was hoping that some who’d stayed silent before his death might now be willing to talk.
The first person I wanted to talk with was also named Adam: Adam Perry Lang.
He’d been Epstein’s personal chef from 1999 to 2003—Lang is the one who fed me pizza on Little Saint James—and he traveled regularly on Epstein’s jets.
Brad and I had reached out to him in 2014, but we’d never heard back.
Now he lived in Southern California—Palmeri had found a couple of home addresses—and Lang had a steak restaurant in Hollywood called APL, for his initials.
First we tried to visit him at home, but Lang didn’t seem to be living at the places we went to.
So we made a reservation at APL. When we arrived, I told the host Lang was an old friend and that I was hoping to say hello to him.
We were seated in a big booth at the back of the dining room, and we ordered dinner.
But Lang wasn’t in the restaurant that night.
We left word explaining I was trying to reach him.
A few days later, I got a text from him: “Hi, Virginia. I know this has been a traumatic and terrible time for you. I hope your fierce advocacy brings you and the other innocent victims peace and justice. I hope you know by now that I’m planning to speak with your attorney.
Best, Adam.” I was thrilled—I thought Lang was finally ready to help.
But when I followed up, he sent a statement that reiterated what he’d said for years: that while he was in Epstein’s employ, he never witnessed any sexual activity or nudity or underage girls or depraved acts or abuse.
You may be wondering what it was that I wanted from Lang.
Of course, I hoped that he might have information that could help me hold Epstein’s coconspirators accountable.
But also, on a purely emotional level, I just wanted to hear Lang confirm my experience.
He could have said something as simple as, “I saw what happened to you because I was there,” and that would have helped me heal.
Would I have been thrilled if he handed over incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing?
Sure. But I wasn’t really expecting that.
Mostly what I wanted was validation. Clearly, though, I wasn’t going to get that from Lang.
We hit another dead end when we tracked down a woman—a former model whom I knew had procured girls for Epstein—who was one of several women I’d been forced to have sex with, when she was an adult and I was a minor.
This woman’s connection to Epstein was well-known by this point—her name is in the flight logs of his private jets.
The woman now had a different last name and lived in a gated community in the Los Angeles area, which a Broken producer deftly entered by following another car through the gate.
We parked on the street outside her house, and I went to the door and rang the bell.
A moment later, the woman stuck her head out of an upstairs window and yelled at me to get off her property.
“It’s Virginia Roberts,” I yelled back, but she slammed the window.
So I buzzed the intercom. Soon, I heard her voice.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” the woman said. “Jeffrey’s dead, and you helped kill him.”
That pissed me off. “I’m not here about what Jeffrey’s done,” I said. “I’m here about what you’ve done.”
“I’m calling security,” she said, and soon, we were being escorted off the property.
Having exhausted our leads on the West Coast, Palmeri, her producer, and I flew to Florida, where we knew two other former Epstein employees lived.
The first one we visited was Larry Visoski, Epstein’s primary pilot.
As I’ve said, Visoski had been close to Epstein, and he had never turned over his flight logs to the authorities, so I knew an interview with him was a longshot.
The pilot lived in a gated community, and when we drove up, the gate attendant got Visoski on the phone and let me talk to him.
“Hello, is—is this Larry?” I stammered, and when I heard him speak, I added: “Oh, my goodness. Like a voice from the past.” I told him I was outside with a reporter.
“Can I just come in and have a cup of coffee with you?” I asked.
When he hesitated, I suggested lunch. That’s when Visoski hung up on me.
Getting doors slammed in one’s face is draining, to say the least. I’d been so fired up, imagining that if I just put myself in front of these people I’d known in 2000, 2001, and 2002, I could persuade them to talk to me.
But once again I’d been naive. I was beginning to feel like a trained monkey, trotting out my story, over and over and over, but getting little in return.
Palmeri had questioned me at length about my history with all these people—once again, I’d had to relive the dark period when I knew them.
But because none were talking to us, I felt as if I’d gotten all spun up for nothing.
Each night, back in our hotel, I’d call Robbie, more and more despondent.
Robbie got so worried about my spiraling mood that he called Adam Davidson, one of the podcast producers, and the next day Davidson flew to Florida to try to shore me up.
“I know this whole process has put a lot of pressure on you,” he told me.
“I can only imagine how hard that is, and I want you to know we’re all standing behind you. ”
I appreciated Davidson’s support. But still, when Palmeri and I set out to visit the second former Epstein associate who lived in Florida—Juan Alessi, Epstein’s onetime house manager—I was nearly out of steam.
It was Alessi who had driven me home from El Brillo Way on the night Epstein and Maxwell first abused me, and over the next two years, I’d gotten to know him and his wife, Maria, a bit.
Alessi had never talked to the media, and there was little reason to think he would talk to us.
When I rang the intercom on his outer gate, I would have bet you a hundred dollars that we’d strike out again.
But Alessi answered right away. “Hi, Juan,” I said quickly.
“It’s Virginia, Virginia Roberts from, like, twenty years ago…
I’ve flown all the way from Australia to try to put together the pieces of my past.” I told him I just wanted to talk, face-to-face.
There was a pause, then a buzzing sound. Alessi was letting us in.
Moments later Alessi opened his front door, his wife, Maria, right beside him, and we all just stared at one another for a second.
As two small dogs jumped around at our feet, Alessi invited Palmeri and me to sit down.
At first he didn’t want to be recorded, but then he changed his mind.
The conversation was disjointed. Alessi, who still spoke in slightly broken English, acknowledged that he’d been driving Maxwell around on that sweltering day when she recruited me at Mar-a-Lago; he said he remembered sweating in the car as he waited for her.
He insisted he had no idea of the sexual abuse going on in the house but admitted he’d told Epstein at one point, “One of these girls is going to get you in trouble, Jeffrey.” He recalled seeing Prince Andrew in Epstein’s homes, though he said he’d never seen him do anything wrong.
I told Alessi I remembered it was often him who paid me after a “massage.” I also recalled him seeing me naked. He said he didn’t remember any of that.
“I swear to God, Virginia, I never saw you naked,” he said. “I saw other girls, adult. But not you.”
I could tell Palmeri was getting frustrated with his denials, and I understood why.
Still, I felt better than I had the entire trip.
Alessi remembered me! In a sense, that was what I’d come all this way for: to be acknowledged as a person, face-to-face.
As we got up to leave, Alessi apologized.
“Virginia, I feel so bad what happened to you, but I feel so good that I see you so great now. So good that you make up your life, that you have a family.” I felt a wave of emotion then.
“This has been a beautiful reunion,” I said, and I meant it.
“Thanks for opening your doors and your heart to me.”
Alessi reiterated that he’d never imagined he’d ever see me again. “I thought you hate me,” he said.
“Why would she hate you?” Palmeri asked pointedly.
“I thought, you know, she would have blamed me for not doing something,” he said. “I thought these girls would go against me. Or they would have said, ‘Oh, John knew it.’ But I didn’t.”
We said our goodbyes, and as we walked to the car, Palmeri was still aggrieved that Alessi hadn’t owned up to what he’d witnessed.
But I was happy. “I don’t expect everybody to come forward and say exactly what they saw, because that would incriminate them,” I said, but I didn’t blame Alessi for protecting himself.
I thought he had a good heart. “He couldn’t do shit about” Epstein’s behavior, I concluded.
“He feels horrible about it…Could he have talked more? Yes. But it’s the beginning of a dialogue.
So I’ll take that as a plus. I’m grateful that he invited me into his home and treated me like a human being. ”
I returned to Australia. My nonstop media tour had worn me out, and it would have probably been wise for me to slow down and rest. But after so long being vilified by the press, I felt I had to take advantage of every opportunity to tell my story, because who knew how much longer I’d be offered the chance.
So in March 2020, when an Italian TV talk show offered to fly my whole family to Rome, I said yes.
Right before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the world, Robbie, the kids, and I visited “The City of the Seven Hills,” as the guidebooks call it, and ticked off every tourist destination.
I still have a photo book I made that shows the fun we had on this special Roman holiday.
All this came at a cost, however. The price of this lovely getaway for me was that I had to excavate my worst memories, one more time, on camera.
I was noticing that with every interview, my storytelling was becoming a bit less emotional; at times my voice sounded almost mechanical, or even robotic, as if I were reciting something I’d memorized.
And yet still, while I increasingly appeared unaffected on the outside, on the inside, every retelling of my stories of abuse hit me hard.
Robbie was watching me, and he could see I was coming apart.
“When someone comes home from fighting a war, they heal, they get therapy, they put distance between what happened to them in combat and their present-day lives,” he said.
“But every time you relive what happened to you, it’s as if you were still on the battlefield.
How are you supposed to get better if you never come home from the war?
” He was right. I had told myself that in order to fight for justice, I had to keep spreading the word about what Epstein and Maxwell had done.
But spreading the word meant reliving my horrors, and that ate away at me.
“This is the only way I know of to keep the pressure on,” I told Robbie tearfully one night.
He knelt down in front of me then—I’ll never forget this—and took my hands in his.
“Remember when I asked you to marry me—how I told you I’d have your back until we die?
” he asked. “Well, this is me having your back. You are running on fumes. Your publicity schedule is affecting your health. It’s affecting your family.
I understand why you have given all these interviews.
I really do. But, honey, it’s killing you.
And it’s killing me to watch.” My husband saw me more clearly than I saw myself: I was burned out.
Skip Notes
* Indeed, documents made public in a court case in 2023 would reveal that Prince Andrew had lied in the interview when he told Maitlis he’d only seen Epstein a single time, in December 2010, after Epstein was arrested and jailed.
According to court papers from a civil case brought by the US Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase, the prince had also had lunch with Epstein in June 2010, while Epstein was on house arrest, and the two had kept in touch via email.