Trigger Warning:
This piece contains detailed accounts of child seggsual abuse, grooming, and exploitation. It discusses seggsual trauma, disassociation, suicidal ideation, and the long-term psychological impacts of abuse. If you have experienced seggsual abuse or trauma, reading this may be triggering. Please consider your emotional capacity before proceeding, and have support available if needed.It took me more than thirty years and a documentary to realise it.
It took me more than thirty years and a documentary to realise I too am one of the Epstein girls. I was scrolling through Netflix one lockdown evening, not really looking for anything specific, just bored and clicking through recommendations when Surviving Jeffrey Epstein appeared. I didn’t know anything about him but seggs crime had always been a pull so I went ahead. As the stories started unfolding, I kept on feeling more and more uncomfortable. I felt tightness in the chest and in the belly, the physical memory came before anything else.
The smell of old flesh and his wrinkly hands on my adolescent skin became alive.
My body had kept score in a way my mind had learned to forget several careers, relationships and seggsual partners under my belt. I was a grown up, three decades had passed, life had happened but by the second episode the realisation had hit and I was in tears.
I was one of the Epstein girls but my story didn’t look like theirs.
I was fourteen years old when my employer sold me to an eighty year old man for the first time. My employer was a thirtyfive year old single mother of two. I’m not sure if she knew how broken my family was, but she must have sensed it. A fourteen year old doesn’t end up working in a bar at night unless something at home is already falling apart.
The seggs was quick and uneventful, unlike the Epstein stories plastered across our newsfeeds. There was no cannibalism, no fancy mansions and toys, no rich and famous men, no island. Just a fourteen year old with an eighty year old in a sedan parked next to a vineyard on the hills. The old man handed me lots of cash and dropped me home before midnight. Not sure how long everything lasted because as soon as I sat in the car I simply disassociated, something I still very skillfully do today too.
My body knew it had to switch off to go through this experience and it functionally did. The only visceral memories of the event, that I still experience, are the smell of his skin and his wrinkly hands on my unformed breasts.
The seggs was quick and uneventful, unlike the Epstein stories plastered across our newsfeeds. There was no cannibalism, no fancy mansions and toys, no rich and famous men, no island. Just a fourteen year old with an eighty year old in a sedan parked next to a vineyard on the hills. The old man handed me lots of cash and dropped me home before midnight. Not sure how long everything lasted because as soon as I sat in the car I simply disassociated, something I still very skillfully do today too. My body knew it had to switch off to go through this experience and it functionally did. The only visceral memories of the event, that I still experience, are the smell of his skin and his wrinkly hands on my unformed breasts.
That man was the first of many in the four years that followed and for thirty years of disassociation I kept asking myself why I didn’t run away. That question became my punishment. I shamed my fourteen year old self for choosing paid seggs. I told her she had options when she didn’t.
That lockdown documentary changed my question from why didn’t I run away to something more complex: Can a fourteen year old even choose?
A few months after watching the documentary, and several therapy sessions I started talking about my experience to the few people I felt safe with. I expected them to ask me questions I had been torturing myself with: why didn’t I call the police, why didn’t I tell someone. But every time I shared what happened people just went silent and our conversation stopped at: I am sorry this happened to you.
Maybe they were too shocked but in true honesty I don’t think they could understand or empathize because unless it’s happened to you, you won’t understand.
I stopped sharing, left most of the processing in the EMDR room and carried on living with the multiple crutches seggsual abuse leaves behind: loss of trust, seggsual dysfunction, low self esteem, damaged relationships. I went back to functioning in daily life and falling apart only during therapy. Over six years scattered articles appeared as I worked through therapy. I thought I’d moved on. The files came back in full force and so did everything.
Because the thing about seggsual trauma is that the moment you think you’ve left it behind something in the world will bring it crashing back again and again. It can be a client, a relationship, a date holding your hand before asking, somebody sharing stories of their abuse. Trauma comes back but nothing hits it harder than reliving the same exact narrative. The Epstein files dropped and suddenly
I was fourteen again in a sedan parked next to a vineyard.
Today, I scroll on my screen and I see dark memes about Epstein and his famous cohort. In this healing journey I have moved from just crying to: crying, thinking and speaking up. I would call it progress.
As a survivor, here are my thoughts: we are condemning pedophilia, we are focusing on the powerful men because they’re rich and famous. It’s easier to rage at a name than to look at what’s happening in our own neighbourhoods and around us. As a survivor, I need people to understand that pedophilia and predators don’t live only in mansions and islands, they live next door or maybe in your own house. They’re your relative, your family member, your neighbour, your colleague.
They are not just men. Often those involved in the abuse and manipulation are women. It’s not just girls either. Boys and non-binary kids get it too.
Most of my male clients have been seggsually manipulated in their teens and that’s why they are hyperseggsual. That’s why they engage in risky seggsual activities, why they cheat on their partners who, in turn, are probably experiencing painful or dissociated sex for the same exact reasons. That’s why some of my clients have become predators themselves, because trauma reproduces itself. The cycle keeps turning and we keep looking away unless it’s glamorous and sensationalized.
I survived but I often wonder if I am ok.
I watch the memes, I cry and I worry a lot about the children right now. My trauma is probably one of the reasons I have decided to not have any but I still worry about those kids who are vulnerable and underage. I worry about young people engaging in seggs work too early in life. Because seggs work has its own occupational hazards. I worry about the ones whose parents or grown ups are absent for whatever reason, the ones who are already learning that their bodies are negotiable.
The ones sitting in cars with family members and the ones sitting at home online with strangers.
As a society we have a responsibility to check on our kids, not just our own but the kids around us. The ones we notice working too young and the ones who seem withdrawn or afraid, the ones who seggsualise themselves, the ones who flinch or freeze when an adult gets too close and the ones who are disappearing into disassociation the way I did. We really need to start asking questions and be patient when listening.
We need to be the grown-ups who don’t look away.
Because if we don’t there will be many generations spending thirty years trying to feel anything at all and another generation convinced it was their fault and another generation sitting alone in EMDR rooms trying to process what should never have happened to them.
The cycle just keeps turning while we scroll past headlines about the rich and famous.
Check on all the kids.Please.
Check on the kids, not the famous grown ups catching your eyeballs with sensationalised headlines.
Did I catch your eyeballs?
