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In the week after sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died, Anya (not her real name) opens the door to her New York apartment. It was Epstein’s brother Mark outside the house, telling her she had to leave, she says.
Anya lived for years in one of the many apartments that Jeffrey Epstein used to house the women he tortured on East 66th Street in Manhattan. She lost her home in a moment but escaped the nightmare. (Mark Epstein says he was unaware of his brother’s abuse.)
“I’m still struggling to come to terms with the fact that I’ve been abused for years,” she says. “You were chained to a door or something, weren’t you? You weren’t locked in a basement. The chains weren’t very obvious, but they were there.”
In the year Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial for child sex trafficking, described the operation as “a cult, and he was a cult leader,” Annie said.
She gave a biography to the BBC as one of Epstein’s “assistants”, detailing how his finances were kept under control for many of his victims for so long.
The assistants were a group of women—roughly a dozen at a time, Anya estimated—who were kept at Epstein’s house, worked all hours on cue and called, and were regularly sexually assaulted by him.
Anya says they were lured in by the scams and empty job prospects before they began to forcefully control every aspect of their lives.
She claims that he controls their money, dictates who they see and degrades them psychologically. He emotionally monitored their bodies, Anya says, and forced her to undergo unnecessary surgeries.
Her account of Epstein’s control was echoed by another former aide, Sarah Kellen. She told the US House Oversight Committee earlier this year how Epstein presented himself as a savior of assistants. “It was very good at reducing your ability to make your own decisions and have your own autonomy. And it made you more and more dependent on him,” she said.
There’s a bias that makes people think that only children are vulnerable to this type of coercion, but “they can be treated like adults,” says Dr. Tara Quinn-Cirillo, a clinical psychologist who has been a victim of coercive control. “You can be vulnerable to this,” she says.
