Nobody's Girl — Chapter no 20

TWENTY

Welcome to the World

loved it when Robbie called me his “missus.” There was so muchI fondness in the way he said it. I liked how proud he was when he told people I was his. But the truth is that the first few years of our marriage were tough on both Robbie and me. He chalks that up mostly to a single fact: I didn’t trust anyone. I hate it when he says that, because it makes me sound harsh, but he isn’t wrong. In my core, I knew that men were selfish, women were duplicitous, and anyone could be cruel. I knew these things like I knew that dogs have fleas; it was a fact that I’d had proven to me again and again and again. People couldn’t be relied upon.

At my worst moments, even Robbie wasn’t safe from my near-nihilistic belief system. I was suspicious and sometimes outright accused him of not having my back. A voice inside me still warned: “Don’t let your guard down, or you’ll get hurt.” So I told him I thought that he didn’t understand me, that he never could, and that I didn’t believe I could truly count on him.

Those words hurt him because they weren’t true, so he’d blow his stack.

Robbie had a temper. While he tried to keep himself in check when I provoked him, either by accident or on purpose, there was no denying his anger was there. And yet somehow after we fought, we always came back together. What bound us to one another was stronger than all the forces and flaws that threatened to divide us.

In 2005, we escaped the bustle and noise of Sydney and moved to Blue Bay on the central coast. I loved how peaceful it was there. We could walk from our house to the beach, which Robbie and I made a point of doing every day. Robbie was apprenticing to become a bricklayer. I was working as a receptionist for a company called Employment Training and Recruitment Australia, which coached unemployed people on how to find

jobs, helping them polish their résumés and ace their interviews. I’d actually been hired there after I went to them for help. My office was walking distance from our apartment, so we only needed one car. We still had little money—at times I waitressed at night to help pay our bills. But Robbie and I were getting along, and once in a while, I’d wonder what it might be like if we could have kids. I had never forgotten the doctors who’d told me becoming a mother was highly unlikely. At different points in my life, I’d been told that one of my fallopian tubes was blocked, and I had polycystic ovaries, among other problems. When I’d told Robbie that, however, he’d joked that my eggs had never seen sperm like his before.

“They have hatchets on ’em!” he’d boasted, before giving me one of his big bear hugs. “Don’t worry, Jenna. Why don’t we leave it up to fate?”

In July 2005, we went out and had what Robbie calls “a big slosh” night at our local RSL club, which is a peculiarly Australian institution. The Returned and Services League was founded in 1916 after World War I, and its clubs were created as gathering points for returned military and their family members. We loved the RSL near us because the food was great, the cocktails were strong, and the prices were relatively cheap. We ordered lamb shanks and played a little keno in the casino, and both of us were drinking like camels. By the time we got home, we were so tipsy that it seemed too difficult to climb the stairs to our apartment. So we lay down in the grass in front of our building and took turns pointing out stars and constellations we thought we knew the names of. My head was spinning, and we were laughing and rolling around on the lawn when suddenly I said, “You know, I haven’t had my period in two months or so. That’s a little weird.”

Robbie lifted his head up. “Hatchets!” he said, then flopped back down.

The next day, I bought an at-home pregnancy test, which came back positive. I didn’t believe it. After two more said the same thing, however, I went to the doctor, who took some blood and pronounced me seven weeks pregnant. Still doubtful, I wasn’t convinced until the doctor performed an ultrasound and I saw the baby’s tiny heart beating. Robbie was thrilled— we’d beaten the odds! Maybe one of those seven strings we’d tied to our

wrists on our wedding day (and left there until they disintegrated) had worked its magic on our fertility. Or maybe the doctors who’d evaluated me five years before had made a mistake. Either way, we were going to be parents, and we couldn’t have been more elated. We went out for breakfast to celebrate—I have a photo of me sitting on Robbie’s lap afterward, grinning my face off. Then, when we got home, we called our families and announced: “We’re having a baby!”

I loved being pregnant. I was empowered by the idea that I had something—someone—bigger than myself to live for. Right away I started assembling a baby book. On the “Parents to Be” page, I affixed photos of me in a bikini, my belly protruding, and of Robbie and me laughing, our arms around one another. Right away I began singing the “Alphabet Song” to my tummy, along with “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” because I’d heard music was good for a baby’s brain.

One afternoon right around my due date, Robbie was still at work when I felt a sudden dampness in my underwear. I was scared—was something wrong? In a panic, I called a friend, who immediately came over and ferried me to the hospital. It turned out I’d just lost my mucus plug—a gross- sounding thing that I’d never heard of before. But my water hadn’t broken yet. Robbie’s bricklaying job was an hour and a half away, but he would have plenty of time to get to the hospital: I had about twenty hours of grueling labor ahead of me.

One Thursday in February 2006, at 7:34 p.m., Robbie and I welcomed our first child, an eight-and-a-half-pound boy we named Alexander Anthony Giuffre. I was over the moon about him and felt great physically, so we brought him home the next day. In his baby book, I would soon record his top-percentile Apgar-test scores, his eye color (blue-green), and his hair color (light brown). On the page marked “Welcome to the World,” I wrote, “Alex came out just perfect.”

About a week after I gave birth, we moved closer to Robbie’s parents, to a little house in Bass Hill, just west of Sydney. Now we began calling them simply Nonna and Nonno, which is Italian for grandma and grandpa.

Meanwhile, it turned out that one of my grandmas, Shelley, had left me not

just furniture but also a little money when she passed. I used it to fix up a baby-blue nursery with a Winnie the Pooh motif—a Pooh bear carpet and stickers of Piglet and Eeyore on the walls. Robbie refurbished a white crib —a hand-me-down from his sister, Angie—and I hung a frilly white curtain around it. I wanted Alex to feel loved.

We were nervous parents at first. Alex was hungry all the time, but he fussed a lot, and I worried he wasn’t getting enough nutrients from breastfeeding. It turned out Alex had colic, and he woke half a dozen times a night for the first two months. Only Robbie could get him to stop crying, by turning him face down and pressing his palm into poor Alex’s distended belly. Exhausted and worried about not meeting Alex’s needs, I was constantly asking Robbie’s mom and sister for advice.

But wow, how happy Alex made me. “You are truly a special boy,” I wrote in his baby book when he was one month old. “You have no idea what you mean to your Father and I, and what you have done to bring such closeness to the family.” At nine weeks old, he smiled. “I love being your Mummy!” I wrote.

Watching Alex grow was like medicine for me. I adored every inch of him, but there was something else, too: Alex made me feel essential. He depended on me. And the simple fact that I mattered so fundamentally to him gave my life purpose in a way nothing else had before. Every parent knows how healing it can be to give your child something you didn’t receive as a child. Sometimes it felt that by tending to him, I was tending to the child I’d been, giving myself the love I’d needed. By keeping Alex safe and warm and fed and happy, I also got to experience all those feelings—as the grown-up mom that I now was, but also as the affection-starved little girl that I used to be.

In August 2006, when Alex was five months old, I was surprised to discover I was pregnant again. I’d thought that while I was breastfeeding, that couldn’t happen. My doctor just shook his head when I told him that old wives’ tale. Having been born five years apart from each of my brothers, I liked the idea of my kids coming so close together. Still, a second pregnancy was a lot to handle. Becoming a parent had put me on a

steep learning curve, and I was just barely keeping up. I also worried about money, which we never had enough of. Robbie was overjoyed, though.

We’d figure it all out somehow, he said.

In addition to changing our lives in a thousand other ways, Alex’s arrival made me think a lot about the importance of family. I wanted my son to feel connected to his relatives in a way that I didn’t. Robbie’s extended family was there for us, for sure, but I found myself missing my parents— or at least the parents I wished I’d had. In Alex’s baby book, I’d written: “Remember, Alex: Friends come and go but your family is forever! We must always look out for each other and create memories together. Most important thing in life: Family.” And then I’d drawn a heart. But I felt like a hypocrite: while Robbie’s parents were around all the time, mine had never come to visit, and I talked to them infrequently. Now I began to wonder how I could make things okay between me and my mom and dad.

“I’ve had too much hate towards them,” I told Robbie. “The past is the past. We have a happy family now. I want to let go of my hate.” An idea had been percolating in my head: I knew Mom, who is afraid of flying, probably couldn’t handle a sixteen-hour trip, but I was thinking of inviting Dad to come meet Alex. “I want to give him another chance—a do-over,” I told Robbie. My husband was reluctant. “I mean, what kind of man does to his daughter what he did to you?” he asked. But seeing how much reconciliation mattered to me, he gritted his teeth and said okay.

In September 2006, Dad arrived, and my mother-in-law insisted on making a huge breakfast feast to welcome him. As we headed over to their place, just a few blocks away, I was fretting, worried that Dad would embarrass me. And he did, the moment we walked in Nina’s door, by announcing that he wasn’t hungry. “I already had McDonald’s this morning,” he said, which basically guaranteed Nina wouldn’t like him. You don’t tell the Giuffre clan that you won’t eat their food. We stayed an hour, then headed back home.

After that, we didn’t take Dad out much, but the rest of the weeklong visit went okay. My dad, however, was still my dad. There’s a photo of him in Alex’s baby book, holding a beer bottle to my infant son’s lips. “You and

Grandpa Sky sharing your first brewsky together,” reads the caption I wrote, making the best of it. Today, though, I see the inappropriateness of my dad’s behavior, as well as how triggering it was for me. Forcing an adult beverage on a baby, even in jest, isn’t the same as forcing adult sexuality on a child—but it’s rooted in a similar logic. Adults have the power to manipulate small children, who don’t yet have the capacity to make their own choices. Sometimes it seemed as if my dad enjoyed doing things that were taboo, if only to watch others react in horror or chagrin as he pushed past boundaries. But I so wanted for us to be a tight-knit family that I let it slide.

Maybe that’s why it meant so much to me that, in contrast to my dad, the man I’d married was proving to be a devoted father. For example, when Alex was seven months old, he was suddenly determined to learn how to walk. He would use a coffee table or a chair to hoist himself to a standing position, then look around for help. That’s when Robbie figured out how to loop a rolled-up bath towel under Alex’s arms like a harness, to show our son what walking felt like. Together, we often took Alex to Homebush Bay Aquatic Centre, where we could soak in the whirlpool, and to Featherdale Wildlife Park, which is home to the world’s largest collection of Australian wildlife. Alex loved to go to Featherdale to pet the kangaroos and wallabies.

In early 2007, we had a scare about baby number two. During a routine ultrasound, doctors observed that our unborn baby might have a tiny hole in his heart. I remember the doctor counseling Robbie and me about what that would mean for our family—perhaps several surgeries, with no guarantee of success—and he suggested we consider aborting. “You’re young and healthy,” he said. “You can just try again.” But we were several months along—I felt as big as a house—and our baby in utero had already won a place in our hearts. “Think about it,” the doctor urged us, but Robbie and I told him no. This child was ours, and we would love him or her no matter what. Having been told (wrongly) that I wouldn’t ever have kids, I felt that any child that I carried inside me was a gift.

—

ALEX WAS TAKING a nap one afternoon in 2007 when the phone rang. When I picked up, I would have known the British accent on the other end of the line anywhere. “Hi, how’s life?” Maxwell cooed, and my heart lodged in my throat. For five years, not a day had gone by that I didn’t think about the possibility of Epstein and Maxwell somehow tracking me down. Now all my old fears came racing to the surface. Maxwell was exactly as I remembered her—breezy, charming, pushing an agenda. After a little chitchat, she zeroed in on the purpose of her call. “I can’t believe this but, after everything he’s done for all those girls, Jeffrey’s being investigated,” she told me. “Have you been contacted?” I told her no. I knew nothing about any inquiry and had no intention of trying to find out. Maxwell said that I’d be “taken care of” if I refused to cooperate with investigators. “So long as you don’t say anything, everything is fine,” she said, even implying I might be investigated, too—as if we were all in this together. “If you need legal help, we’re here to help you.” All I wanted to do was slam the phone down and rip its cord out of the wall. But I was afraid that if I expressed hostility, Maxwell would see me as her enemy and punish me. I was eight months pregnant, with a one-year-old and a husband who was at work from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. As my grandma Shelley used to say, there are times to kick the hornet’s nest and times not to. This was not a time for kicking. I promised I wouldn’t speak to anyone. “I’ve started a new life, Ghislaine,” I said. “I just want to be left alone.”

I hoped that was the end of it. But a few days later, Epstein called. He said hello and tried to make nice at first, as if we were dear friends who’d somehow fallen out of touch. Never good at pleasantries, though, he added abruptly, “I’m having my lawyer tape this conversation.” (I would later learn that Epstein had assembled a veritable army of high-profile lawyers to defend him from the allegations: Gerald Lefcourt, Roy Black, former US solicitor Ken Starr, and other well-known men.) I don’t remember which lawyer this was, but after he introduced himself, he explained that an investigation into Epstein was ongoing and that it was based on allegations made by women who’d worked as strippers and prostitutes or who were drug addicts. I didn’t need a translator to grasp his not-so-subtle point: the

accusers had no credibility, and anyone who turned against Epstein was a skank who would be discredited. Just as in my call with Maxwell, threatening energy zinged through the phone line and hung in the air. I suddenly needed to sit down, so I did, resting the bulky landline telephone on my protruding stomach. When Epstein pressed me—“Have you talked to anybody? Are you going to?”—I was determined to reassure him. I knew in my bones that if I didn’t give him the answers he wanted, he would hurt me and my family. “Look,” I said, “like I told Ghislaine, I’m not saying anything to anyone.”

Epstein repeated some of Maxwell’s crap about wanting to “take care” of me if I needed legal advice or anything else. “I don’t need your help, Jeffrey,” I told him nonchalantly, trying to mask the terror overtaking me.

“I’m a mom now. I’m happy. I don’t want anything to do with this.” I remembered how he used to boast about having law enforcement in his pocket. Now that he and Maxwell had found my phone number, I was sure they also knew Robbie’s and my street address.

“Jeffrey, I have to ask: where is all this coming from?” I said before we hung up. I guess I was trying to sound as if I were on his team. But I was also curious. After so many years of surrounding himself with young girls in public, at parties, in airports, and all over the world—after so many years flaunting his predilections and boasting of his superiority—Epstein had made some sort of misstep. Even as he deflected, ignoring my question, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was.

Only a few days passed before the phone rang again. The man on the line told me he was with the FBI and that I’d been identified as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s. I braced myself for an interrogation, but nothing could have prepared me for how immediately explicit his questions were. “Have you ever had sex with Epstein?” he asked. “Has Epstein ever ejaculated in front of you?” The man kept going in this vein, saying photos of me had been found in Epstein’s Palm Beach house. But was the caller really an FBI agent, I wondered, or was this one of Epstein and Maxwell’s minions, testing my loyalty? How had this “agent” located me? “This isn’t a good time,” I managed to say. “I have nothing to tell you. Goodbye.”

It would be a long time before I found out what, specifically, had led law enforcement to begin looking into Epstein. But while I had little sense of what was happening on the other side of the world, I knew this: Epstein had barged back into my life, and I had a feeling he wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.