Control, threats, disfiguring surgery: My life inside Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘cult’
The week after the death of sex offender financier Jeffrey Epstein, Anya (not her real name) opened the door to her New York apartment. Outside, he says, Epstein’s brother Mark told him he had to leave.
Anya had lived for years in one of several apartments on East 66th Street in Manhattan that Jeffrey Epstein used to house women he abused. He suddenly lost his home but survived a nightmare. (Mark Epstein denies being aware of his brother’s wrongdoing.)
“I still have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I was abused for years,” says Anya. “You weren’t chained to a door or anything, right? You weren’t locked in the basement. The chains were less obvious, but they were there.”
Anya says that Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial for alleged child sex trafficking, said his operation was “like a cult and he was the leader of the cult.”
She told the BBC a rare account of her experience as one of Epstein’s “assistants”, detailing how the financier kept most of his victims for so long.
The assistants were a group of women who stayed with Epstein, worked under him for hours, and were regularly sexually abused by him—about a dozen at a time, Anya estimates.
Anya says they were lured into elaborate deceptions and empty promises of work before they began to forcibly control almost every aspect of their lives and exploit any weaknesses they could uncover.
He says he controls their finances, dictates who they see, and psychologically humiliates them. Anya says he obsessively watched their body and forced her into unnecessary, disfiguring surgery.
Her description of Epstein’s control is echoed by another former assistant, Sarah Kellen. Earlier this year, he told the US House Oversight Committee how Epstein presented himself as the assistants’ savior. “He was very successful in destroying your ability to make your own decisions and have your own autonomy. And it made you more and more dependent on him,” she said.
Dr. D., a clinical psychologist who works with victims of coercive control. There’s a bias that leads people to think that only children are susceptible to such pressures, but “you can be raised like an adult,” says Tara Quinn-Cirillo. “You may be vulnerable to this,” he says.
