Marina Lacerda knew the friend who brought her to Jeffrey Epstein from the neighborhood. It was 2001, Marina was 13, and the friend was a couple of years older. They both lived near Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, where people got dressed up just to walk around, stopping at the tanning salon, the shish kebab place and the barbershop, waving at friends riding up and down in their cars, pumping music. Marina’s block was “super Italian,” she told me. “Real Italians with plastic over their couches who were cooking pasta.” Around the corner were Egyptian and Romanian families, lots of Brazilian families like Marina’s.
Some of the girls around the corner formed a Spice Girls group and made up dances. Marina wore bell bottom jeans, a T-shirt with flowers and white platform sneakers printed with the Union Jack. It’s what she thought Sporty Spice would wear. It was also one of the only outfits she really had. Her mom, who worked as a cleaning lady, would take her to a thrift store and Payless, and that was it.
Marina told her older friend, who was also Brazilian, everything about her life, including how badly she needed money. The friend wanted to help. “I have this really rich and powerful guy,” she said. “He’s really cool.” Marina could make $300 giving him a massage. The friend had met Epstein the same way — another girl from the neighborhood introduced her. “The only thing is you have to take off your top,” she said. “It’s like being in a bikini.”
Marina remembers taking a cab to Manhattan with her friend, because Epstein paid for it. She knew there were skyscrapers in the city, but she didn’t know there were mansions. She had never been in a rich person’s home before. She walked into the townhouse on East 71st Street wearing the same clothes she wore almost every day, looking like Sporty Spice.
Marina and her friend took an elevator to the third floor and waited in the massage room, where the ceiling was painted to look like the sky. She loved the sky! It was her favorite thing. When she was a little girl, still living in Brazil, Marina would sometimes get carsick on drives with her grandparents, and they would tell her to lie down in the back seat and look up at the sky. It always made her feel better. Her mom had already left for America, but she felt safe looking up at the sky, thinking about how they were under the same roof of stars.
Epstein walked into the massage room wearing a robe. He introduced himself as Jeffrey and told Marina he’d heard wonderful things about her. She blushed. She figured her friend must have told him that she was working three jobs to help support her mother and little sister, who was 5. He must already know she’d been going through a really tough time.
Epstein lay on the table with a little towel over him and talked to her, asking dozens of questions about her life. Where are you from? Where do you go to school? Where do you live? Do you have any siblings?
Marina was beaming. She couldn’t believe this rich man was taking the time to get to know her. She massaged his calves because he said he loved getting his calves massaged. Her friend was massaging his arms and shoulders. She already felt comfortable with Epstein, chatting as if with a friend. Then he turned onto his back and his towel slipped off. He didn’t put it back on. “Can you take off your bra?” he asked Marina. When he reached for her breasts, she told him she wasn’t comfortable, and her friend yelled at her in Portuguese, saying she was being a stupid prude. Then she said in English: “I don’t know why you’re being annoying!”
“It’s OK,” Epstein said. “She’ll get comfortable with time.” Then he spit in his hand and masturbated while Marina waited for it to end. When he finished, the friend grabbed the little towel and cleaned him off. He handed the girls cash in hundreds. He told them everything was great and he hoped to see them again.
Marina visited Epstein almost every week for the next four years. She couldn’t quite understand how she got so comfortable with him, even as he wanted more from her. How did she go from having her clothes on, to taking her shirt off, to taking her pants off, to taking off her underwear? He manipulated her so slowly that she didn’t even notice. She brought her friends to see him too. After she walked away, when she was 17 or 18, she spent the next two decades doing everything possible to avoid thinking about him. Even after the F.B.I. questioned her, even after she cooperated with investigators, even after Epstein died, she kept hoping she could forget. And she did, in a way. The abuse left her with memory lapses. She knew she had brought him a lot of girls but couldn’t remember how many. She couldn’t remember names or faces. She couldn’t even remember that Epstein raped her, until a friend who witnessed it told her. How could she forget a thing like that?
Now Marina is trying to remember, not only for herself but on behalf of the girls she brought. Only a few survivors have talked publicly about bringing girls, but she knew she wasn’t alone. Every girl was brought by somebody. That was how Epstein grew his sex trafficking operation. It’s why more than a dozen girls came from a single high school in Palm Beach, Fla., because friends were bringing friends. Some victims who brought girls, Marina knew, had been labeled traffickers and conspirators, and that seemed wrong. That was one reason she was determined to talk openly about her experience, a story that she told me over many hours of interviews this summer and that I corroborated by speaking to several other survivors and searching through thousands of pages from the Epstein files.
Last year, when the Epstein survivors gathered in public for the first time, Marina found herself lingering longer than she should on the faces of the other women. She thought some of them looked familiar. She kept thinking: Wait, I know these girls. I know you. I know you. I know you. She tried to discern the child’s face in the adult’s. She had the feeling that she was wandering among ghosts. Every time she talked to someone she wanted to ask — “Did I bring you to Jeffrey’s?”
Marina never planned to go back to Epstein after her first trip to the townhouse, but a couple of weeks later her Brazilian friend called. “Jeffrey’s in town,” she said. “He loves you. He wants to see you.” Marina thought, How else am I going to make enough money to support a family? They were eating Wonder Bread with peanut butter for breakfast, and Cup Noodles at night. Marina convinced herself that if she could get Epstein to respect her, then maybe one day he would help her get a job. So she went back to the mansion.
Epstein changed his approach. He slowed down. He didn’t ask her to take off her clothes, and he didn’t touch her. She gave him a massage while they chatted about her family and then he paid her $300. Marina was so happy, because she thought it meant he respected her.
The next few times she went, it was the same thing. Marina rubbed lotion on Epstein’s hairy legs, starting with his ankles. He was facedown. They talked a lot about her mom, how she was drifting away, always blaming Marina for their problems.
Marina had come to New York when she was 8 to reunite with her mother, who was living with a boyfriend in an apartment on Steinway Street. Not long after, around the time her mother got pregnant with her little sister, the boyfriend started sexually abusing Marina. He got away with it for a couple of years before her mother found out. She promised Marina he wouldn’t do it again, and he stopped for a few months. The next time was worse. He hit Marina and kicked her down the stairs. When she was 12, another teenager in the building shared with Marina that the boyfriend was sexually abusing her too, and together they felt brave enough to report him.
Marina will never forget the sight of her mother crying, picking up clothes off the floor after the police raided the house. “Why did you go to the police?” she remembers her saying. “What are we going to do with your sister? How am I going to work?”
Marina could finally sleep well at night, but she felt as if her mother never forgave her. She expected Marina to support the family while her boyfriend served time. Now Marina was an eighth grader working multiple jobs, including weekends, making $6.75 an hour at a catering hall for Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.
“I just want everything to be perfect again,” she told Epstein. He hugged her and told her everything was going to be OK. She decided to keep seeing him, at first with her friend, and later alone.
She remembers how wonderful it was to have Epstein hold her. But when he hugged her, that’s also when he took off her clothes. He began with her bra, unhooking it with one hand. She didn’t say anything, because she was being hugged and she didn’t want him to let go. She didn’t want to ruin the feeling of being special and loved just because he took off her bra. The next time he took off her pants. Then her underwear. She told herself it was worth it for the good parts. Sometimes when she couldn’t make sense of what was happening, she looked up at the ceiling, and lost herself to the sky.
Epstein gave Marina money whenever she needed it. He was like a bank account. She started cutting school to see him. He told her school was less important than the people you knew. So she dropped out of high school partway through ninth grade. That’s around the time Epstein asked Marina to bring her little sister. She hadn’t told him how old her sister was, but she knew she would never bring her sister anyway. Then Epstein asked about her friends. “Listen,” he said. “I get bored very easily. I like new things in my life. In order for you to stay in my life and be in my orbit this is what you’re going to have to do.” He offered her $300 for every new girl. He never used the word “recruit” but always said, “Bring your friends.”
A couple of months later, in the summer of 2002, Marina was walking her dog, Freedom, a chow chow mix, on Steinway Street when he sniffed at a teenager rolling a joint. The girl turned around. “Wow, your dog knows his stuff,” she said. Her name was Lisa, and she was also 14, the daughter of Balkan immigrants. She lived nearby with her brother, but he was always drunk or high, because he had been the one driving the car when it crashed and killed their mom. Lisa was bouncing around, sleeping on friends’ couches, not waking up for school.
By then, Marina was living across the street from her mom’s place. She had moved out when she learned that her mom’s boyfriend was getting out of jail. Marina and Lisa became fast friends. After a couple of weeks, Marina let Lisa stay at her place.
Marina was seeing Epstein almost every day, bringing home hundreds of dollars in cash. Lisa was having such a hard time, it felt wrong to keep it from her. Lisa couldn’t believe Epstein was willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a massage. She loved to give massages — to her mom, her aunt, her friends.
“Let’s go,” Lisa said. “I don’t have a dollar.”
Marina felt good about helping a friend, and Lisa couldn’t have been happier. With $300, she had hope again. Lisa introduced Marina to her best friend, Lindsay, who was 15. All three girls had the same kinds of problems. Lindsay’s father robbed banks, and her mom couldn’t care less about what her kids were doing. They all just wanted money and a place to live, and an adult who cared about them. (Lisa and Lindsay asked to be referred to by nicknames they’ve used in the past, in order to protect their privacy.)
The three of them started going to visit Epstein together. They were a trio. They’d call a cab and take it from Queens to the Upper East Side. Then they’d leave the cab waiting in front of Epstein’s mansion, run inside to get money and dash back out to pay the driver. They thought they were lucky. They were in a rich man’s house making a dollar. Epstein told them he was a brain surgeon and the co-owner of Victoria’s Secret. He gave them bags of Victoria’s Secret lingerie, extra cash, Broadway tickets. He paid for their dentist and doctor’s appointments. They had money for egg and cheese sandwiches from King’s Deli on Steinway after a night out. They had money for rent.
Epstein chatted with them the whole time, asking the girls about their weekends, about their lives. They loved talking to him. They were excited to tell him about other girls because they were young and loved their friends. “I met this new girl and she was so cool!” Lisa would say, and Epstein would smile and soak up all the details. The girls were thinking: Jeffrey’s our friend. He’s so cool!
They all said no to his advances at first, and he would leave them alone, and then slowly he’d build up to it again. He sensed if they were ready to give in or not. Eventually they felt that they couldn’t keep saying no to sex. They thought, OK, I have to just do this already.
Marina remembers watching Epstein unhook Lisa’s bra, and how Lisa giggled because she didn’t know how to act. Lisa recalls that he was gentle with her when he took her virginity. She thought she really cared for him. Sometimes when he was touching her he’d say, “God bless America,” and she’d say, “Land of the free,” and he’d say, “Home of the brave.”
Epstein talked so much about Marina’s status as an immigrant that it felt as if she actually needed him to be able to stay in the country. Lindsay was always scheduled to go to the mansion after school, so she’d show up wearing her uniform. That first year, the girls worked for Epstein a lot around Christmas so they could have money to buy presents.
They wanted to numb themselves through the bad parts with alcohol or drugs, but Epstein threatened to send their hair to a lab for testing if he suspected anything. Lisa was too scared to drink, but Marina and Lindsay took shots of Patrón. Because Lisa’s breath didn’t reek, she worked Epstein’s shoulders while Marina and Lindsay got the feet. He made the girls hold their breath so they could have longer orgasms, even though they were faking them. He used a huge vibrator toy that looked like a neck massager. It was torture, they said, but they pretended to like it because then it would be over faster. The most important thing was to make him happy.
After a while the alcohol wasn’t working to numb them. Lisa figured out that if she brought another girl, Epstein would want to touch the new girl instead. It took the heat off her, so she worked hard to find people. They all started bringing girls, lots of girls. They would bring the girl to the mansion and usually stay with her in the massage room. Sometimes, if Epstein wanted to be alone with the new girl, Lindsay would sit on a bench in the hallway in her bra and spend the whole time worrying about her. Once Epstein got the new girl’s number, he would reach out to her directly and cut them out of the loop.
They realized they made more money if they kept the girl from giving Epstein her number. If they brought her again, they’d get paid multiple times for the same girl. While he was with the new girl, they would wander through the mansion, discovering the stuffed tiger and the security room with the video feeds. They walked around the library with the staircase that looked like the one in “Beauty and the Beast” and went down to the kitchen, where the chef would cook for them. They still got paid.
Soon it was as if all of Astoria knew these girls were going to see a rich man in Manhattan and getting paid for it. Marina’s apartment became known as “the whorehouse,” and she had to explain to people that it wasn’t a whorehouse because nobody was coming over. They were just going to this rich guy’s house to “give massages and a little whatever” for good money. Marina’s apartment had an open door for anyone who needed a place to stay, mostly immigrants trying to get their footing. Lots of girls started coming by, asking about the rich guy.
After a while, Epstein resented that three girls were bringing only one girl each time. He tried to pit the girls against one another by comparing them, inciting jealousy. He made comments about their bodies. He would call one on the phone, ignoring the others. He didn’t like the girls getting too close — he had more control when they were fighting for his attention. Sometimes the girls they brought weren’t good enough. He said they looked too tired, too old, too dark or too heavy. Sometimes he’d say they wore too much makeup.
Lisa treated finding girls like a job. She was always thinking, I need to go talk to this girl. Sometimes Lisa brought two or three girls a day. She’s pretty sure she brought the most girls of anyone in Queens, maybe in all of New York and Florida. She felt like it was all day, every day, constantly for at least seven years. She met them everywhere: the nail salon, shopping centers, clubs like Marquee. She knew how to find girls like herself: No parents, no job, drug addiction? Perfect. She figured that was the kind of girl she could help. Lisa would say: “Oh, my god, I love your shoes. Where are you from? What do you do?” And once she heard their story, she would tell them she knew Epstein. She felt like a savior. She was giving young immigrants the chance at the American dream.
Danielle Bensky had run away from home in suburban New Jersey when she met the trio. She was rebelling against her mother, a stage mom who decided when Danielle was young that her daughter would become a ballerina. She danced competitively by the time she was 10, taking laxatives before “The Nutcracker” at 13, eating five croutons for lunch to stay under 100 pounds. In middle school, Danielle recalls, her mom would finish her homework for her because she was “only meant to dance.”
In 2004, Danielle was a high school student at New York’s Professional Performing Arts School. She had come to love the rigor of ballet — the crunch of rosin under pointe shoes, waking up early to train when the street smelled like last night’s party, practicing in the hot studio with no air-conditioning and getting sweaty enough to slip through her partner’s arms. But she also felt deprived of a normal childhood. She had never eaten hot wings. Never been skiing or gone bowling. Was never allowed dessert. She was angry. So when a friend suggested she ditch her mom and crash with him at his apartment on the Upper East Side, she agreed.
That was around the time that a friend from school, who knew Marina, introduced the two girls. Marina, Lisa and Lindsay were spending more time in Manhattan, doing promo work for clubs, which meant they were going to parties all the time, getting in free. They spotted Paris Hilton, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez. “We felt like boss bitches,” Marina told me. “We had limo drivers taking us for free to clubs. We had learned how to finagle things.” Marina was around 15 but remembers thinking of herself as a full-grown adult — she was paying bills, taking care of the house, making money. “I thought I could make good decisions,” Marina said, “but obviously I couldn’t.”
Danielle couldn’t believe Marina was more than two years younger than she was; she seemed more mature, more “street smart.” Marina and her Astoria friends used to get ready to go clubbing with Danielle at her friend’s place, putting on fake tans, looking orange because that was the thing. They choreographed dances in the living room. If one of them had $20, it was enough for a night out, because all they needed was a cab home. They were going out together all the time, having fun, rebelling, drinking and dancing.
One night at a club in Chelsea, Danielle was talking to a friend about how to get some money. She was thinking of being a bottle waitress. Danielle remembers either Lisa or Lindsay overhearing her and mentioning “a rich guy who would give her $300 for a massage.” She thought it didn’t sound too different from being a bottle waitress. She checked with Marina, because Marina was someone she trusted. Danielle says Marina told her she should definitely go. She said she’d been seeing Epstein for a while, and it was a lot of money. Marina offered to arrange a session through Epstein’s assistant. Danielle could even bring a friend.
Epstein approached Danielle more carefully than he had Marina. The first time, when she came with a friend, he didn’t masturbate or try to touch her. Instead, he asked them about their families. He learned Danielle was a middle-class girl from the suburbs attending an affluent high school. Like so many girls, she didn’t have her father in her life. Her parents were going through a divorce. While they talked, Epstein gave instructions: Push a little deeper into the right. Now up a little bit higher. Make sure your fingers are moving counterclockwise, he’d say. You want to really push in deep to the tissue in the left calf.
Over time, Epstein got to know Danielle’s dreams. She felt as if they spoke the same language. They talked about concertos, about the difference between Balanchine and Vaganova. Epstein asked questions no one else asked: how she was doing, how she was taking care of herself. He listened to her, supported her, promised to help her with introductions at the New York City Ballet.
He would sometimes sit up and tell Danielle to turn around and hold out her arms out like a ballerina. He said, Why don’t you get naked and let me see your body? He explained that famous ballerinas didn’t mind getting naked — in fact, they loved it. Danielle took off her clothes and held second position. He pinched her waist, smacked her butt, grabbed her and pulled her close. She was accustomed to this kind of treatment from ballet. She had already been weighed and pinched and had her butt slapped by instructors for a decade. The violations didn’t even register.
When Epstein masturbated during the sessions, Danielle told herself it wasn’t actually wrong because it wasn’t directed at her. She decided seeing him masturbate in front her was just the price she was going to pay for having all these amazing conversations. She told herself that as long as he wasn’t touching her in a sexual way, then she was OK.
Danielle continued visiting Epstein even as he pushed her boundaries. Some weeks she would see him more, some weeks less. Epstein gave her hope that she could still become a ballerina. But she knew something was off. She couldn’t take enough showers to get herself clean. Epstein told her that if she ever went to the police, not only would no one believe her, but she also would be charged with prostitution. “I really convinced myself that I was a prostitute,” Danielle told me.
Not long after, Danielle got a call from her mother. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and needed her daughter’s help. Danielle was terrified of losing her and felt guilty for running away — after all her mother had done, driving her to and from dance class six days a week, for years. At one of mother’s appointments at Mount Sinai she saw the name Epstein on the donor wall. She wasn’t sure if this meant he had any power, but she didn’t want to risk it. The next time she saw Epstein, told him about her mother, and he offered to look at the scans. He dangled a promise of the best care at Mount Sinai, and also made clear he could take it away.
Now that Epstein had the scans, his behavior changed. He no longer bothered to pretend to care about her. He stopped talking about ballet, stopped feigning tenderness and love. He was more aggressive than he had ever been. “It was painful,” Danielle told me. The next time she saw him, she ended up crying. He threw money at her and she ran out.
She thought she would never go back, and that he wouldn’t want to see her again anyway. But she was so worried her mother would die that she called Lesley Groff, Epstein’s assistant. “Please,” she said. “Can I come back to work for Jeffrey?” (In a statement, Groff’s lawyer said that “at no time during Lesley’s employment did she have any knowledge of his wrongdoing.” She has never been charged with a crime.)
Epstein gave Danielle the sense she could stop the abuse by bringing him another girl. “Who are your friends?” he would ask. “Tell me about them.”
“Oh, yeah, I have friends,” she told him. But that year she didn’t have that many friends, and she didn’t want to bring anyone anyway. She hated Epstein, but she was accustomed to pushing through pain. As long as her mother was sick, she would endure. Then, one day at the studio, wearing her leotard and tights, Danielle found she could not move her body. Her joy for ballet was gone. All she could do was cry.
Her mother had a successful surgery to remove the tumor in May 2005, and once she recovered, Danielle finally stopped answering Groff’s calls. She got a job as a door girl at a nightclub, sleeping on couches, gluing extensions into her hair, running around in Victoria’s Secret lingerie, drinking excessively to escape thinking about Epstein and what he had done to her.
Marina was 17 when Epstein told her she was “boring” and “too old” for him. He said it in a joking way, but she got the hint. She didn’t need him so much anymore, anyway. She had just married and begun working as a dancer at a strip club in New Jersey, an hour and a half commute from Astoria. She was one of their top girls. Her name was Sky. She got a better gig in Manhattan at New York Dolls, then FlashDancers, then Private Eyes, then at Rick’s Cabaret. She liked Rick’s Cabaret. She thought it was classy. You had to wear a gown.
In 2008, when Marina was 19, the F.B.I. showed up at her door asking about Jeffrey Epstein. Marina didn’t know that Epstein had been under investigation in Florida since 2005. More than 30 girls had already been interviewed by the Palm Beach police, who sought charges for unlawful sexual activity with minors, but a grand jury indicted Epstein on just a single count of soliciting a prostitute. Investigators in Palm Beach who suspected Epstein was getting special treatment referred the case to the F.B.I., setting off another wave of interviews with victims.
Marina was in the process of getting her green card and was worried about being deported. “I was petrified,” she told me. She asked the agents to leave and immediately got on the phone with Epstein. He told her not to call him. He would have a lawyer call her. He hung up.
Marina talked to a lawyer Epstein hired for the case, Brendan White. “What about the girl that brought me?” she remembers asking. “What about the girls I brought, and the girls they brought? How am I the only one getting in trouble for this?”
“They found you,” she recalls him saying. “That’s it.”
Marina agreed to be interviewed by Florida investigators and spent months preparing with White. Then one day, she says, he told her she had nothing to worry about. Go home and forget about this, he said. (White said that he never interacted directly with Epstein and acted in Marina’s best interest as his client. He acknowledged these conversations took place but does not recall what was said.)
Like most victims, Marina wasn’t getting the full story. Federal prosecutors had drawn up a 53-page indictment against Epstein, but in a deal that was later ruled to have violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, the U.S. attorney’s office agreed to give him immunity from federal crimes if he pleaded guilty to lesser state charges. The investigation was called off, the indictment shelved. Epstein was sentenced to 13 months at the county jail in Palm Beach.
The F.B.I. found Marina for the second time in 2019. She was still working at Rick’s Cabaret, having divorced, remarried and given birth to a daughter. They told her that Epstein had been arrested again. Ghislaine Maxwell, a former romantic partner of Epstein’s who helped him traffic and abuse underage girls, had also been arrested. The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York was building a new case, and the F.B.I. was searching for witnesses.
Marina reluctantly told the F.B.I. about Lisa, Lindsay and some of the other girls. Then she had to call her friends to let them know the F.B.I. was coming. They were furious, cursing at her, all asking, Why would you do that? They weren’t thinking about justice for themselves. They were thinking, Am I going to get in trouble?
Some of the women remembered what happened to a woman in Florida named Haley Robson. Robson was 16 when another girl brought her to Epstein. When she resisted his advances, he threatened and harassed her. Robson felt she had to choose between bringing girls and being sexually abused by Epstein. She introduced him to around 20 girls, some as young as 14. In 2005, during the Palm Beach investigation, the police sought charges against her, even after she agreed to cooperate. In May 2006, the police requested an arrest warrant for Robson for “lewd and lascivious acts on a victim under 16 years of age.” Her name was distributed to the press as a co-conspirator, leading to death threats that are still coming in today. In 2008, one of the girls she brought to Epstein filed a lawsuit against her for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Robson’s experience showed the other victims how easy it would be for them to be treated as a perpetrator. Politicians kept calling them “recruiters” and “co-conspirators” without talking about how they themselves had been trafficked or recognizing that asking girls to bring their friends was a typical way sex traffickers built their networks and stayed in control — by sowing guilt, shame and conflict among their victims. They worried: Am I on the list of co-conspirators that’s going to come out?
When the F.B.I. called, Lindsay had just moved into a new house and was a stay-at-home mom taking care of a newborn. She went straight to a lawyer and offered everything in her family’s bank account: $10,000. She thought she might go to prison for life because she would be condemned as the next Maxwell.
Even so, Lindsay agreed to testify at Epstein’s trial. Marina also agreed to testify, appearing in the U.S. attorney’s indictment as Minor Victim-1. But Lisa wanted to be left out of it. She dodged the F.B.I. She dodged her lawyer. She dodged all her friends. She stopped listening to the news. I will never face him, Lisa remembers thinking. I’ll never go to trial. She was mad that her friends had turned on Epstein. She had seen him for close to a decade and had really cared for him. Lindsay and Marina kept asking her, “Why are you still protecting him?”
When Epstein died in his jail cell a month after his arrest, Lisa was so sad that she cried. For months, she barely slept, trying to make sense of it all. She began remembering things in the middle of the night, and when she did, she called Lindsay. They talked for hours. The memories seemed contradictory: He loved them, he trapped them, he saved them, he hurt them. Lisa’s lawyer tried to help her talk through it. She’d say, “Tell me about a time he upset you,” but Lisa couldn’t handle it. “He never upset me,” she’d say. “He didn’t do anything to me! Jeffrey was my friend!”
Marina was taking a lot of Xanax, numbing all thoughts of Epstein. She moved to Florida with her husband and daughter, but her pill supply ran dry during the pandemic. Every day felt like a heart attack. She had diarrhea, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t function. Then she had a seizure and woke up in a gurney on her way to the hospital. It took her 18 months to recover. The last thing on her mind was the news.
Lindsay worried that she had ruined other women’s lives by bringing them to Epstein. She felt her whole moral self collapse. During her first meeting with her therapist, Lindsay said: “I brought the girls. I am not a victim.” The therapist had to remind her that she had been a child. “I felt terrible,” Lindsay told me. That’s when Epstein came to her in her dreams. He was giving her money, trying to bring her back. These were “horror dreams,” she said. “You feel him coming for you.”
Lindsay wrote to apologize to girls she introduced to Epstein. She got in touch with a childhood friend who had lived in the same building as her family in Queens. The two of them used to sneak cigarettes outside. The friend was so overwhelmed by the news after Epstein’s death that she fled the country with her family. Lindsay offered to help her apply for settlement money through Epstein’s estate. It was a new program, set up by Bank of America, which had held some of Epstein’s accounts. “Not that the money’s going to compensate,” Lindsay told her, “but we are already in it. And I know you have kids. All I can do is try to help with my kind of intel and what I know, but I just want to let you know I never meant to bring any of this on you.”
Lisa was also hearing from some of the women she brought. They wanted compensation from the estate, and hoped Lisa would help their chances by signing declarations saying that she had introduced them to Epstein. They promised her she wouldn’t get in trouble, but she was too scared to sign. One of them had been abused by Epstein for years and years because he really liked her. “Without your signature,” Lisa recalls her saying, “I don’t have anything. And I think that’s fucked up. You’re the one that brought me there, and because of you I didn’t have a childhood.”
Danielle and Marina hadn’t seen each other for nearly 20 years when they unexpectedly met again in September 2025. They had both come to Washington for a rally outside the U.S. Capitol, organized by the anti-trafficking coalition World Without Exploitation, to demand the release of the Epstein files. It was the first public gathering of Epstein survivors, and many of the women were meeting for the first time.
Danielle was working as a dance instructor and choreographer after having a son and moving back to New Jersey. Until Epstein’s arrest in 2019, she hadn’t known that she was a victim of sex trafficking. She thought being trafficked meant you were kidnapped off the street and held captive. The realization that she was a victim came as some relief. Danielle went public with her story in 2021, speaking to reporters outside Ghislaine Maxwell’s arraignment, and she knew that more women planned to go public with their stories at the rally.
That day, Danielle had her blonde hair cut above her shoulders, and she wore a royal blue blazer with a brooch shaped like a butterfly. She walked up over the hill toward the Capitol and recognized Marina. Her hair was pulled back into a low bun and she was wearing a light pink silk blouse and large black sunglasses. Danielle decided she wanted to talk to Marina. “We had been friends,” she told me. “This was someone, dare I say, back in the day, I really loved.”
Danielle went to shake her hand. “Hi, I’m Dani,” she said, looking up at Marina, no longer a child of 15 but a woman of 37.
“Dani, oh, my god! I can’t believe you’re standing in front of me.” Then she asked, “Did I bring you to Jeffrey’s?”
Caught off-guard, Danielle’s first thought was to protect Marina. She blurted out: “No, no, no. It was somebody else.”
She walked away from Marina thinking: Why couldn’t I have just been honest? Why couldn’t I have told her that she’s all over my paperwork, in the F.B.I. reports. Why couldn’t I have just said, Yes, it was you.
A news conference had been planned for that morning where victims would give statements. At 10:30 a.m., Marina and Danielle joined a crowd of survivors and politicians huddled around a lectern, fanning themselves with their speeches in the heat. A lawyer for the survivors said that her team had identified hundreds of other victims, but only about 30 were public. Marina was one of eight survivors who spoke. She stepped up to the mic and shared her story with reporters for the first time.
One reason she wanted the files released, she told the crowd, was so that she could better understand what happened to her. “There are many pieces of my story I can’t remember no matter how hard I try,” she said. She lived in a constant state of wonder, fear and confusion. Her voice cracked trying to read the speech she held with shaking hands. “There are people out there who know more about my abuse than I do,” she said. “The least that they can do is give me my documents.”
Marina started to realize how much she had erased from her mind only after she reconnected with Lisa and Lindsay and they began comparing their memories. “He raped you in front of us, plenty of times,” she remembers Lindsay telling her. “He used you as an example, as a doll.”
Marina couldn’t understand how she had blocked it out. Her therapist said it was how her body protected her. That seemed true. If her therapist asked about Epstein, most of the time Marina said: “I’m not upset about what happened. I don’t remember.” She kept telling her therapist, “When Jeffrey and I had sex,” and her therapist, Randee Kogan, kept saying: “You didn’t have sex. You were a child. He sexually abused you.”
When a batch of files was released this January, Marina learned that she had brought Danielle — it was all there in the F.B.I. report. The next month, they saw each other at a congressional hearing where Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, was testifying about the Epstein files. When it was over, Marina walked up to Danielle and shared that she had read the F.B.I. report. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Danielle explained that she had been embarrassed. She didn’t know how to talk about it. None of them did. “I was worried how you’d react,” Danielle said. But she left wondering whether Marina really didn’t remember bringing her to Epstein. Was she lying? And if she really didn’t remember, that hurt, too. How could Marina — her friend — have forgotten a moment that had derailed her entire future?
Danielle wished a victim who had brought girls would come forward and talk honestly about it. “There’s the 15-year-old recruiter who was just trying to help her family and make it,” Danielle told me. That’s different from someone like Maxwell, who was holding passports and preventing girls from leaving. But she also wondered: Where does the victimization stop and the choice begin? She knew it was distressing and triggering for so many survivors to suddenly be in the company of the women who had ensnared them, and the taboo around recruitment was making it harder to heal. “If what we are doing is working to bring secrets out of the dark,” Danielle said later, “then recruitment is the biggest secret out there.”
But it was hard for women to come forward when politicians were continuing to refer to victims who recruited as co-conspirators or traffickers. In February, outside the House Oversight Committee’s deposition of Bill Clinton, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, told reporters that it was “very apparent” that Epstein groomed some victims to traffic other girls, but insisted that once a victim turned 18 they were no longer victims but co-conspirators. “In my opinion, they are not to be given victim status, because they did partake in harming young girls.” In May, Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, put it even more harshly: “If you’re an adult female and you’re recruiting underage girls, you’re not a victim. You’re a prostitute, a child predator, and a sex trafficker.” News outlets continued to raise the question of the possibility of criminal accomplice status in connection to a survivor.
The women were starting to blame one another, and question one another’s stories. Some wanted to create different categories for victims who brought girls their age, and victims who were young adults and brought minors. Randee Kogan, Marina’s therapist who has been working with Epstein victims since the Palm Beach investigation, told me it didn’t make sense to draw that line. “That’s not the way psychology works,” she said. Kogan emphasized that turning 18 didn’t mean you were suddenly a different person — young adults were just as vulnerable to Epstein’s manipulation. Earlier this year, one of the other Epstein victims killed herself. “And you know why?” Kogan said. “I’ll tell you this: She couldn’t handle the fact that she brought other girls and ruined other girls’ lives.”
This spring, Danielle and Marina were among a group of survivors invited to visit a public art installation in New York created by a nonprofit focused on government transparency, which displayed 3.5 million pages of partially redacted Department of Justice records from the Epstein files. As part of a publicity campaign, the exhibit’s curator asked survivors to post note cards about their experience on an enormous timeline on the wall.
Danielle wrote, “Trafficked to Epstein in 2004, 17 years old.”
Later, Marina read the note and took offense. Trafficked? Was Danielle calling her a perpetrator? “I understood that it’s never a good feeling to have the person who brought you to Jeffrey standing in the room,” Marina told me. “But I thought I was helping people, and I still do today. I didn’t forcefully bring anybody there.” She felt she had no choice but to obey Epstein because she was a child who didn’t know where food was coming from or how she was going to live. “That’s pressure,” she said. “And when you’re under pressure, you don’t realize that you’re making mistakes along the way that might hurt other people.” But she decided not to say anything to Danielle. She didn’t want to cause any trouble.
As the months passed, Danielle learned more about Marina’s story, seeing how different it was from her own. Danielle could always go back home to her mom. Marina really didn’t have anything. If she went to her mom’s she would be going back to live with a man who sexually abused her for years. Danielle told me it was hard to navigate these feelings of empathy and anger on her own. There was no playbook for dealing with this kind of betrayal. “They were victims, too,” Danielle told me. “That’s what makes it so complex.”
Danielle was not the only victim searching for answers. When Marina went public, another woman reached out to talk about how angry she was. She said Marina brought her to Epstein in 2004. She went only once, but Epstein assaulted her.
“You never told me what was going to happen,” she said.
Marina couldn’t remember this woman. She told Marina that they met at a cafe in Astoria and went to clubs together.
“I can’t remember you,” Marina said. “I don’t remember!”
They talked for hours, until slowly some of the details returned. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Marina told her. “I was so young.”
Even years after Epstein’s death, the women felt his presence everywhere. Danielle had recurring dreams in which a bomb explodes or she’s driving off a cliff and can’t get the seatbelt off her son, and she just accepts what’s going to happen. She always had the feeling of having to accept what was happening and just submit to the violence. Last year, she tried to read Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” but after she got to the part about Ghislaine Maxwell, she couldn’t fall asleep. She entered a half-sleep state where she was walking the halls of the mansion over and over, not knowing what she was trying to find. She thought she was awake, because she remembered waking up, but then she was still in the massage room. “Am I awake? Am I not awake? Oh, my god.”
Epstein was so present in Lisa’s dreams that it was hard for her to believe he was dead. She and Lindsay lived with daily reminders of his power. Ever since their identities were released in unredacted files, they’ve been harassed by strangers. This summer a rock crashed through Lisa’s window. Lindsay saw men taking photos of her house and decided she had to move. She and her husband would go out for a nice dinner and somehow it always seemed as if the topic at the bar was Epstein.
Lisa told me she couldn’t have sex without massaging her partner first. “I don’t know how to get into it,” she said. She paused for a moment. “I don’t even like sex,” she said. “Honestly. I hate it.”
Marina hated sex, too. She told me her anxiety is so high that she can’t sleep through the night and obsessively cleans to avoid difficult thoughts. She found it hard to connect with other people, to be intimate with them. Sometimes she had trouble telling her boyfriend that she loves him, too afraid he’ll think she’s weak and exploit her. She didn’t want her daughter go to the movie theater or the park without her waiting nearby in case of danger.
Marina had a lot of hope that going public with her story would help people understand how Epstein manipulated victims to harm other girls. She thought her voice would be everything, speaking and getting into people’s hearts. But she was still seeing people online calling victims who brought girls co-conspirators.
“It’s OK,” Marina told me. “I think it’s going to take everybody a long time to accept that we all brought each other.”
“I don’t know how to feel about it,” Lisa told me. “I thought it was helping people, because he was helping me. Now when I look back, I’m like, That’s fucked up.” She continued: “I was grooming them, too.”
“But we had no choice,” she added. “There was no ‘I don’t want to do this.’ You know what I mean? If you don’t want to do this, then we’re going to literally be in the street living with bums and crackheads.”
“And he made us feel loved,” Lindsay said. “He did. We were cared for.”
“He would ask us about everything,” Lisa said. “He always acted like he cared to hear all the stories in our head. And so for the first time we had a voice. We didn’t have a voice at home.”
“We felt heard,” Lindsay said. “I know I did.”
“Me, too,” Lisa said. “That’s what it was. We felt heard.”
They could call him anytime and ask for help. They could say, Hey Jeffrey, we are locked out. Anytime. For any reason. “That’s what it was,” Lindsay said. “That was a nice feeling to have.”
For Marina, it helped to try to imagine what it was like to be 13 again. “I think I’m starting to understand more seeing my daughter being 13, really seeing that age and how she thinks.” When she can, Marina spends time looking at the sky, the way she did as a child, trying to remember. She lies in the hammock in her yard, beneath big oak trees, naming the shapes of clouds, asking the questions she asked as a girl: Why is the cloud following us? How are we upside-down on earth and still not falling?
She has been in therapy for a year, working on breaking down her defenses. She was still suppressing memories, trying to protect herself from the pain that would come along with them. “Do I feel bad for bringing girls to Jeffrey? Maybe after more therapy,” she told me. Every time she brought up the past, Marina admitted, she ran away from it. “I keep saying, ‘I’m not upset about what happened.’” Only in September did she find herself crying for the first time remembering Epstein. She couldn’t believe it. Why am I crying? She was starting to understand how afraid she’d been at 13. It was hard. She didn’t want to stay there for long.
Marina and Danielle still found it challenging to be in the same room, but they got along. Sometimes they didn’t talk, just felt each other’s presence, and that was all they could take for now.
Jen Percy is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Girls Play Dead: Acts of Preservation,” a nonfiction book on passivity and women’s survival strategies, out in paperback on Nov. 10.
The post She Was a Victim of Jeffrey Epstein. She Also Helped Him Find Other Girls. appeared first on New York Times.
