According to British media reports on April 3, a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's case described her experience at the pedophile's infamous "Zorro Ranch" in New Mexico, saying it was "cold", "dark" and gave people an "eerie feeling".
"That's where most of the assaults happened," Shauntee Davis said of the property, where she appeared with five other survivors on Wednesday. "My darkest memories are from Zorro Ranch." She added that she felt "trapped" there. "There was a cold, dark, eerie feeling there."
Davis said her traumatic experience with Epstein continued to affect her throughout her adult life, destroying her marriage and making her paranoid about her daughter's interactions with men.
She described how she triple-locked her garage door to ward off intruders, checked for car bombs, and experienced other "weird, weird fears." “I think every aspect of my life has been affected by it,” she said.
Another woman, who appears anonymously on the show as a silhouette and uses the pseudonym "Nikki," told host Victoria Derbyshire that she was drugged and raped by Epstein when she was 19 at the late financier's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. Nikki said she preferred to remain anonymous rather than have her family suffer "collateral damage" or face "undue harm." Like other survivors, Nikki said she was initially introduced to Epstein by a friend and agreed to give him massages for income, which is exactly what happened when they first met.
Nikki also spoke about an experience when the billionaire was not wearing any underwear and was only covered with a towel. Nikki said Epstein asked her to take off her top as he rolled over on the massage table. "So I took off my top like last time and started massaging his feet and worked my way up, and when I got to my upper thighs and chest, he pulled on my jeans and almost unbuttoned them," she recalled.
She lied to Epstein that she was menstruating in order to stop him from doing anything further. But he still tried to seduce her into a relationship and boasted about his abilities. When she continued to refuse, the massage continued until Epstein pulled off the towel and started in front of her, leaving her feeling "extremely sick" and telling herself she "had to get out of here right now." Epstein then urged her to drink a bottle of Fiji water, saying it was important to stay hydrated. "I drank some water and I don't remember anything about it for at least 12 hours," she said.
Nikki said she woke up feeling nauseous, "groggy" and immediately realized she had been violated while unconscious. During a subsequent third massage, Epstein made advances to her again and she again told him she was menstruating. "You don't have to lie to me," he responded. Nikki said that comment later made her realize that the assault had indeed occurred, otherwise he would not have known the truth.
That time he violated her again. Nikki told the outlet that her memory of the incident did not return until the summer of 2019, when she suffered a panic attack after reporting her allegations to the FBI following Epstein's second arrest. "I tried all kinds of therapy, I tried to remember, I tried to catch glimpses, but it was dark and I didn't know anything," she told the outlet. "But I can logically make a number of inferences that I think are pretty accurate."
"It led me down a very dark path for several years, and from that point on I learned how to use my body to make money," another survivor, Jenna-Lisa Jones, told Derbyshire. "I find it hard to keep revisiting these things and not seeing any consequences. I think it was more retraumatizing than the actual abuse, and I think a lot of us say that."
"You can't get away from it. It's hard to heal when you see the news every day. I had a first date and someone mentioned it to me and didn't know I was involved," said Joanna Harrison, a victim who has not previously been seen publicly. "There are things you can't predict and when you're stuck and seeing that person's name every day and hearing that person's name every day, it becomes really hard to heal."
At the end of the program, all the participants became emotional when asked to hold up photos of their youth taken during the period of abuse. “I was much more naive then,” Harrison remarked poignantly, “and I’ll never smile like that again.”
(Original title: Epstein survivors recall the 'cold, dark, eerie feeling' of being at the infamous Zorro Ranch)
