Nobody's Girl — Chapter no 22

TWENTY-TWO

“He’s a Tyler!”

uring the first few months of Alex’s life, I found my footing as aD mother. I saw my job as keeping Alex healthy and safe in our well- protected den, and with every passing day, I got more confident that I was up to that task. But after Maxwell and Epstein’s back-to-back intrusions, that confidence crumbled. The thought of the two of them tracking my family’s location kept me up at night. Just like that, my former abusers had stolen my peace of mind. With Robbie away at work each day, I stopped leaving Alex alone, even for a minute—when he napped, I sat in the rocking chair in his room, keeping watch. Robbie was worried, too—not only about the danger Epstein and Maxwell posed but also about my fragile psyche. He made the decision that we would stay with his parents in Sydney until our second child was born. We all had to cram into one of Nina and Frank’s guest bedrooms, but we made it work.

The next few months were a blur. Robbie organized a surprise baby shower. I got started on a second baby book, pasting in ultrasound photos and the obligatory bikini pic of me, the beaming, rotund mother-to-be.

Then, in April 2007, fourteen months after Alex’s birth, I went to the hospital in Sydney and had another baby boy. He had strawberry-blond hair, just as I’d had as an infant. And for all the doctor’s warnings, the pediatric heart surgeon wasn’t needed after all—our new son appeared completely healthy. Relieved, as well as overcome with gratitude, Robbie and I could finally focus on choosing a name. We’d been considering several, but now, Robbie looked into our second son’s dark blue eyes and exclaimed, “He’s a Tyler!” And that was that.

Tyler Shane Giuffre, who smiled for the first time when he was just a few days old, brought happiness into our hearts again. I had my hands full

with two kids, and we were on a tight budget, since Robbie was the only one working. But we more than made the best of it. After we moved back home, when Tyler was three months old, we got a kitten, whom we named Sophie, who joined Champ in our ever-growing menagerie. We kept up our weekly outings to Featherdale National Park, where, at four months old, Tyler pet his first koala bear. At night I held my boys close as I read them Curious George and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. When I needed a break, I let them watch Sesame Street and The Wiggles on TV, and Tyler developed a fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine. At eight months old, Tyler started crawling, and soon I was finding train tracks everywhere I went. I’d be cleaning the house when I’d stumble over a vast toy transportation hub. “Boys?” I’d call out to my sons. “How am I supposed to vacuum around this?!”

In April 2008, when Tyler turned one, I answered a prompt in his baby book—“Describe a typical day”—like this: “Not much changes around here. We eat, sleep, poop, play and do it all over again.” But there was something else I didn’t write down: I was beginning to worry about my youngest boy. Something wasn’t right. I just sensed it. Tyler was crying all the time. As he learned to walk, we’d jokingly called him the Drunken Master, because he wobbled and fell a lot. But it wasn’t funny anymore. At times, it seemed he had trouble focusing. At other times, like when he wanted to run straight into a swimming pool or attempt some other dangerous activity, I couldn’t distract him from his goal, no matter what I did. More than once, I’d had to jump fully clothed into bodies of water to save Tyler, even though I had been watching him like a hawk. (How many cell phones had I ruined that way?) One friend recommended I put Tyler on a leash. I balked at the thought, but eventually I gave in. A leash was the only way to keep him safe.

At this point, Tyler was almost completely nonverbal. He’d indicate something he wanted with his eyes, or by yelling when you touched it.

Someone told me it wasn’t uncommon for second children to talk later than firstborns did—something about the younger one letting the older one speak for them. But when Tyler began banging his head on the floor, I went in

search of help. “It feels like he just wants to be heard, but he can’t get the words out,” I said, guessing at what I thought my second son was feeling.

More than one doctor brushed off my concerns, treating me like a helicopter parent. But I didn’t give up. “Please,” I said again and again. “I just know there’s something wrong.”

I enrolled Alex in a preschool near our home in Chester Hill, so I would have more time to focus on our youngest. Soon I was ferrying Tyler from speech therapy to occupational therapy, and Tyler and I became regulars at a sort of “Mommy & Me” for nonverbal kids—he’d play with other children, I’d sit with the other parents (mostly moms) and trade stories about what was and wasn’t working for us. Some moms swore by special gluten-free diets for their kids, which I dutifully tried. Cooking a whole separate meal for Tyler was a hassle, but I was willing to do anything to make his life better. In Tyler’s case, at least, special diets seemed to make no difference at all, so I eventually abandoned that. But there was nothing I wouldn’t try. I took him to an alternative healer who practiced iridology, which looks for clues about a person’s health by studying the irises of their eyes. We’d gotten him a helmet to protect his head. But he still got blood blisters from all the headbanging. Often he awoke in the middle of the night screaming, and he was utterly dependent on pacifiers to calm him down.

On one particularly hard day, another mother handed me an essay that she said had helped her. It’s called “Welcome to Holland,” by Emily Perl Kingsley, and as I read it—sitting in a parking lot, with Tyler screaming in his car seat behind me—it made me laugh and cry at the same time.

“When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy,” it begins. “You buy a bunch of guidebooks, and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.

You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, ‘Welcome to Holland.’ ”

Holland is not what you signed up for, the essay—which Kingsley, a writer for Sesame Street, composed after her son was born with Down

syndrome—explains. “I’m supposed to be in Italy,” you protest. “All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change of plans, and Holland is where you must stay. So you do. “The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place,” the essay says. “It’s just a different place.” Holland is slower paced and less flashy than Italy, but it has windmills and tulips and Rembrandts. Sure, everyone you know is “coming and going from Italy. They’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.’ The pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

“But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things…about Holland.”

This made a lot of sense to me. I had initially felt sad that Tyler’s behavior as a toddler wasn’t like Alex’s. But that was just me torturing myself with thoughts of Italy. I loved Tyler, and he’d taken us to Holland. I resolved to embrace where my second-born child actually was, not my fantasies of where another child might have been.

Certainly, life didn’t get easier right away. It was around this time that a cop car rear-ended Robbie, leaving him with three bulging disks. Suddenly my husband was almost completely unable to help me with the boys—he couldn’t bend over and pick either of them up without feeling excruciating pain. At times I was so tired at the end of the day that I’d fall asleep midway through a Dr. Seuss book. One day at Robbie’s parents’ house, Alex was in the backyard, picking figs from the tree and putting them in a bucket. I went in the house to wash my hands, but I must’ve dozed off on the couch for a minute, because when I woke up, he’d eaten the entire bucket of figs. I won’t spell out for you exactly what that many figs can do to a three-year-old’s digestive tract. You can imagine that for yourself. But the point is that I was tired. Many days, Robbie would come home from work to find one boy breastfeeding, the other in an automatic swing set that we called the Nap-o-Matic because it put babies right to sleep, and me in

the middle, at my wit’s end. I’d shoot my husband a death stare that said, “You’re going to die a horrible death for doing this to me.”

Robbie kept urging me to talk to a therapist, as I was still having nightmares. I had consultations with more than one doctor but didn’t feel I clicked with them. Then a terrific counselor who was helping me with Tyler pulled me aside one day. “How are you doing?” she asked, and the warm way she looked at me made tears pop into my eyes. This woman—her name was Elizabeth—would prove pivotal, not just for Tyler’s well-being but for mine. She and I became close, and for the first time I started to examine, in detail, the events of my childhood. Elizabeth helped me understand how extremely damaging sexual abuse is for children. It wasn’t just about sex, though that part of one’s life was obviously impacted. It was about how being so fundamentally betrayed often made a person feel deserving of betrayal. Through that lens, I began to make space for the girl whose worst experiences I’d sought to erase—all those bad things that had happened that my rational brain knew weren’t my fault but that my emotional brain still felt shame about. Elizabeth also helped me examine another part of my past that filled me with guilt. When I recruited other girls to suffer as I was suffering under Epstein, she reminded me, I was caught in a system I couldn’t control. I still blamed myself—I probably always will. But Elizabeth was the first to tell me about the importance of self-forgiveness.

Around this time, Robbie made us an appointment with Petra, the woman who’d foretold our lifelong bond. He’d reconnected with her somehow and asked if we could both come see her. Driving to meet her for the first time in October 2008, I didn’t know what to expect. A woman with feathers in her hair and a scarf wrapped around her head? A mystic with cloudy eyes and a whispery voice? As it turned out, when we knocked and she opened the door, I saw that Petra was just a normal-looking woman in a floral skirt. She appraised me knowingly, then waved us into her modest home, indicating we should sit around her circular dining table. “So how are you?” she asked, and I could hear she had some sort of Eastern European accent. We told her we were well—our two growing sons filled our lives with happiness. She nodded and reached for a pack of cigarettes.

Fishing one out, she put it in her mouth, lit it, and said in her thick accent, “So, how is your little girl?” Robbie and I looked at each other, then back at her. “What little girl?” Robbie asked. Petra turned her gaze away, concentrating as if she were fine-tuning her mental reception, then said, “You will soon be pregnant with a girl.” I couldn’t help but smile. I’d hoped we’d someday have a daughter. And Petra had been right before.

Just after Tyler’s second birthday, I discovered I was pregnant. I would get bigger this time, which I know many women do as they have more children. But looking back, I see that I was growing in lots of ways— stepping into my own power, both physically and mentally. I’ve read that carrying a baby to term takes about the same endurance as climbing Mount Everest. Well, I’d climbed that mountain twice now and was in the midst of doing it a third time. Despite Epstein and Maxwell’s unwelcome intrusion, building my own family with Robbie and handling all the joys and struggles that came with parenthood was helping me regain my self-confidence.

Which is partly why I now began thinking that we should move to the United States. We’d spent so much time with Robbie’s extended family, which I loved, but it only made me miss my brothers more. I nurtured fantasies of an extended reunion where all our kids could get to know each other. I began to lobby Robbie, and while he was skeptical at first, eventually he agreed that we could apply for tourist visas. I was so excited that I began selling what little furniture we owned to prepare for the trip.

But I had to change course when our visa applications were denied.

Apparently, we had to prove that we had enough money in the bank to support our two children during the period we were in the United States, and our net worth was too low. We were staying put, at least for now.

—

AS EXPECTED, MEANWHILE, Epstein’s shadow still loomed over our lives. In 2008, I’d received a letter from the US Department of Justice that said I was being contacted because I was “an identified victim of a federal offense.”

There was an ongoing investigation into Epstein, the letter said, and

apparently scores of women were receiving these letters. The letter included the name of a lawyer I was encouraged to contact. I thought this meant that Epstein was finally going to be prosecuted. But that was wrong.

Unbeknownst to any of his victims, a year earlier, in September 2007, Epstein had entered into a secret nonprosecution agreement with the government, which canceled a trial that had been tentatively set for January 2008. And in June 2008—more than two months before I would hear from the DOJ—Epstein had made an unprecedented plea deal. As part of that deal, the government had agreed not to punish his associates and conspirators, both unnamed and named—a list that included Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, and two assistants named Lesley Groff and Adriana Ross. Finally, in return for his pleading guilty to two state charges— procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute—Epstein was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

I only learned of the nonprosecution agreement after I contacted the lawyer—his name was Robert Josefsberg—the DOJ had recommended to me. He and his daughter, Amy, who was also a lawyer, interviewed me for months, and during that time, I foolishly thought they were preparing me to testify against Epstein. “Oh, there’s no trial,” they finally explained. “The government made a deal. But there will be restitution. What you need to decide now is: what’s your number?”

I didn’t want money. I wanted justice. I told that to the Josefsbergs, but they said it was too late. I was outraged—an emotion I’d soon discover I shared with so many of the countless women and girls Epstein had harmed.

While I’d initially been afraid to testify in public, I’d soon realized I had to if I wanted to hold Epstein accountable. It was time for me to stand up, I now knew, and once I’d made that choice, I had warmed to the idea. But the Josefsbergs now said filing a civil lawsuit against Epstein was the only avenue left open to me. So I stepped back from revealing my name to the world. In May 2009, I filed suit under a pseudonym: “Jane Doe 102.” My suit alleged that Epstein had “a sexual preference for underage minor girls” and made clear that I was one of them. The filing described my first encounter with Epstein and Maxwell and accused them of “sexually

assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” me. It said I believed I’d been recruited by Maxwell from Mar-a-Lago in 1998, when I was fifteen years old (I was mistaken about my age; later, employment records obtained by other attorneys of mine would show I’d begun working at the spa one year later, in 1999). My suit said I’d been forced to satisfy Epstein’s “every sexual whim” and that I was also “required to be sexually exploited by Defendant’s adult male peers, including royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen,” and others. As a result of all this, the suit said, I had “suffered, and will in the future continue to suffer, physical injury, mental anguish, humiliation, confusion, embarrassment, loss of educational opportunities, loss of self-esteem, loss of dignity, invasion of her privacy, separation from her family, and other damages.” As I reread my lawsuit now, two lines stand out: “Plaintiff has suffered a loss of income, a loss of the capacity to earn income in the future, and a loss of the capacity to enjoy life. These injuries are permanent in nature.”

—

IN JULY 2009, Epstein was released from jail after serving only thirteen months; he was placed on house arrest for a period of another year. It would later be revealed that for most of his jail sentence, he’d been allowed to go “on work release” to the office of a nonprofit he’d newly created called the Florida Science Foundation. As delineated in a handwritten addendum to the nonprosecution agreement, he was permitted to visit this office up to twelve hours a day, six days a week. He continued to molest girls there, and after he got out of jail, he dissolved the foundation. After that, his period of house arrest was equally lax: he was allowed frequent trips to New York and getaways to his private island. No wonder he showed no signs of being chastened by his time behind bars. In late 2009, Epstein kept up his self- justifying narrative in a twenty-two-minute conversation with George Rush, the gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. Rush taped it and, much later, described Epstein’s spiel to Vanity Fair. “It was just kind of this self- serving rationale for how he had been tormented by the lawyers for these

girls, whom he characterized as these preexisting prostitutes and strippers who’d already been indoctrinated into the sex world,” Rush said. “You got the sense that he could adopt many masks. He played up his working-class roots on Coney Island, and how he understood that this was a good story that sold newspapers, and how everybody hates a rich guy. He basically said, I get why this is a good story for you, but I think a better story would be how these con artist lawyers are abusing the legal system…He showed little remorse and no pity for his victims.”

Had anyone asked me, I could’ve predicted that Epstein would remain free of remorse. I’d sure never seen him have any. But at least I didn’t have to witness his self-satisfaction firsthand. My only contact with Epstein at this point was through lawyers. In November 2009, I agreed to a confidential settlement. The terms: my lawsuit against him would be dismissed; we would both keep the settlement secret, and Epstein would not contact me again; and while he was not admitting that he’d violated any federal statutes, he would pay me $500,000. That was the number I’d named, and I’ve since been told it was far too low. I’d chosen the amount after looking at the average home prices in our neighborhood. Later I would learn that at least one victim was paid ten times what I was, but back then, I simply didn’t know to ask for more.

There are those who’ve criticized Epstein’s victims for entering into confidential settlements with Epstein because, they assert, that allowed him to sweep his problems under the rug. People are particularly judgmental about our receiving money from him. My response to that is anger. The DOJ—not Epstein’s victims—made the secret deal that ultimately let Epstein off the hook in 2008: Alexander Acosta, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, approved the nonprosecution agreement behind closed doors without consulting with (and while actively misleading) Epstein’s victims. Afterward, those of us whom Epstein had abused were told that was the end of it—Epstein wouldn’t be prosecuted, no matter how much we wanted him to be. We were also told that extracting money from him was the only way to punish him. (Remember that it was the DOJ that connected me with a lawyer so I could sue.) But here’s the real

reason I’m angry at those who judge victims who settle: all that legalese in our lawsuits about pain and suffering and mental anguish—those things are real. And getting treatment for them costs money.

When I settled with Epstein, I had a little money for the first time in my life. After years of scrimping—of buying secondhand furniture, driving used cars, and xeroxing baby photos instead of ordering extra prints— Robbie and I could now buy our first house. We found a brick three- bedroom in the suburb of Glenning Valley, about two hours north of Sydney. Epstein had taken what was left of my childhood. But now a tiny fraction of his immense fortune was going to ensure that my children grew up in their own home.