Sarah Ransome - Silenced No More: Surviving My Journey to Hell and Back

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

MAYA ANGELOU

I never planned to tell The Story. On the day in 2007 when I fled hell, I made a pact with myself: no one would hear the details of what happened to me during the most grievous nine months of my life. Not my parents. Not my brother. Not even my close friends. The den of depravity I had endured was too horrendous, too grisly ever to breathe aloud. Sharing The Story would resurrect it, I felt, revive a nightmare I intended to keep buried. And there it lay, entombed for a long while, bathed in darkness, quiet, shame. Until, after nearly a decade underground, it unexpectedly stirred.

The Story, my horror, isnt one you know. What youve witnessed is the landscape, the sweeping panorama of press reports. In July 2019, billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was charged with operating one of historys most vast and seamy sexual assault networks. A month later, he was dead, ostensibly because hed hanged himself in his prison cell. The next summer, Jeffreys chief accomplice, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, was taken into custody by the FBI at the New Hampshire house where shed wrapped her cell phone in tinfoil, seemingly to evade detection. Together, she and Jeffrey are accused of recruiting, grooming, and irrevocably damaging at least a hundred girls, many of them underage. Those are the facts weve all taken in.

My testimony lurks between those headlines, in the spaces surrounding the summaries. Its the close-up lens on a torture no Epstein and Maxwell survivor has ever published. Its the narrative record of what happened in Jeffreys sprawling Fifth Avenue mansion. Onboard his Lolita Express, the 727 he used to transport countless girls into Hades. On his Pedophile Island, the Caribbean hideaway I once risked my life trying to escape. Its the truth about what I experienced at the vile hands of Ghislaine, how she starved and berated and swindled me while demanding I be raped dailyclaims, like all others made against her, she categorically denies. That is the appalling chronicle you dont know, the heartache now demanding to be aired. I share it not for voyeurisms sake but because remedying injustice begins with confronting it.

The Story, once roused, asked questions most disquieting. How does a twenty-one-year-old college dropout like Jeffrey weasel his way into a job at an elite prep school where his female students, way back in the 1970s, noted his lecherous gaze? How could Jeffrey and Ghislaine operate a rape pyramid scheme for twenty-plus years, all as the powerful leaders they hobnobbed with didnt notice, didnt care, or became involved and thus feared retribution? How did an unsuspecting young woman like me, the grandchild of a wealthy British baron who rubbed elbows with Ghislaines father, become ensnared in this web of perversion? And how can Ghislaine, along with three other women involved in my abuse, now claim to have known nothing about the assaults I actually witnessed them orchestrating? Some of these questions still confound me. All, among others, Ill explore.

In a world where a lot of lip service is given to female empowermentwhere sisters stand arm in arm in the name of #MeToo and #TimesUpJeffrey employed scores of women in carrying out his crimes. Some of those he abused became abusers, putting forward their own families as his casualties. This master puppeteer, crafty as he was, couldnt have sustained this transatlantic operation on his own. In addition to the enablers whose silence he purchased, Jeffrey had the alliance of a tribe of women who, as they profited, knew precisely what was happening to the girls they sent him. I was lured by such a woman into Jeffreys crosshairs, on a day I now wish I could do over.

Youll read much, in these pages, about the process of groominghow connivers woo victims by first forging an emotional connection, how they maintain control through threats and carrot dangling. In our yearslong conversation on sexual violation, our culture hasnt yet truly grasped the nuances of that conditioning. We understand it in broad strokes: an antagonist sets a trap, a hapless deer wanders in. But many dont absorb the particulars. They dont recognize how a perpetrator sniffs out the most vulnerable prey, how a would-be victim actually emanates despair. They dont realize just how frequently assailants sit at our dinner tablesnot the Stranger Dangers we spot coming, but the charmers weve grown to trust. Then when a survivor discloses her abuse, some forget the manipulation and look instead at her skirt length. What was she doing in a club? How much cleavage did she bare, how red was her lipstick, how high were her stilettos? She brought it on herself, the thought often goes. She flirted, drank too much, asked for it.

A certain kind of woman is most likely to be believedthe chaste, the young and doe-eyed, the white, and the heterosexual. I aim to widen the circle of whom we deem credible. Ive made regretful choices in the name of survival and acted, at times, in breathless desperation. I am not perfect, and that is the point. I want to encourage a culture in which survivors, even if they havent led spotless lives, even if theyre not proud of all their behavior, still feel the right to stand in their truth. Because while were in rapidly changing times, when more and more sufferers are daring to speak up, rape remains one of the most underreported violent crimes across the globe. If only the fully virtuous deserve a hearing, then no one born human should ever have a day in court.

The Story that follows is all my own: at turns raw and revolting, lilting and unmeasured. Its an account not just of trafficking and sexual subjugation but of generational patterns, of spirits passed down from parent to child, of songs and prayers whispered in the dark. It is the memory of a girl, lost and utterly broken, who leaned on her faith and somehow found her voice. Its the secret Ive kept hidden in my hearts back room until courage, one morning, finally shook it awake.

I no longer believe that people are born without virtue. It gets beaten out. Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.

DANIELLE TELLER in All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderellas Stepmother

T he Story does not start with my beginning. Its genesis is decades in the making, stretching back to before my mom was banished from her fathers palatial Essex estate and sent to South Africa. It commences earlier than when Mum inherited her moms anguish, before whiskey loosened her tongue and dimmed her light. It also started prior to the era when my grandpa and his father mingled with British royalty. Still, I will begin there. Because youll never understand how I stumbled into Jeffrey and Ghislaines hell until you glimpse the one that paved my way to it.

Power flows paternally in my family. My maternal grandfather was the late Honorable Lord James Gordon Macpherson, 2nd Baron of Drumochter, a member of the UK Parliament, and a multimillionaire. He was the only son and thus heir to the fortune of his father, Thomas Macpherson, 1st Baron of Drumochtera Scottish businessman, Labour Party politician, and chairman of Macpherson Train and Co. Limited. My great-grandfather amassed his wealth by importing and exporting food and produce. He reared his three childrenmy grandpa and his two sistersin a Downton Abbeytype estate in Brentwood, Essex, amid the high-society sensibilities he passed on to his offspring.

My grandfathers boyhood was bookended by global battles. He was born in 1924, six short years after the close of the Great War, which shifted the worlds political tectonic plates and redrew its map. The cultural, political, and social tremors were felt throughout my grandpas early years as his homeland mourned its losses. Though the British Empire had extended its territory during the clash, it also drained its resources and weakened its stance as a superpower. The First World War, the conflict meant to end all others, failed spectacularly in that respect. Just as my grandpa came of age, he and his countrymen were called on to fight in the Second World War. He served as a tail gunner, spraying the enemy with machine-gun fire. It was in the military that Grandpa met the demure and stunning Ruth Coulteralso known as my grandmother.