Background reading:

• LISTEN: “Fifteen Minutes of Feminism: What’s In The Epstein Files? Republicans and Democrats Want to Know (with George Conway)”
• WATCH: How Sexual Assault First Aid Revolutionizes Prevention | Jess Michaels | TEDxFolsom
• “The Part of the Epstein Story We Keep Ignoring? Survivors.” — Kelsey Morgan
• LISTEN: “‘Not My Type’: How Two Women Took Down Trump on Sexual Assault (With E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan)”

Transcript:

Welcome to On The Issues.  This is a show where we report, rebel, and tell it just like it is.  We begin this episode with a warning given the gravity of the subject matter.  In this episode, we will hear from Jessica Michaels, a sexual assault awareness advocate who was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein in her early adulthood.  I spoke with Jess about meeting Jeffrey Epstein, the manipulative way he recruited and trafficked young women, and  her experience as a survivor of sexual assault, her work as an advocate, and what she wants the public to know about sexual violence as news about Epstein and his connections to powerful men and women continues to spill forward.

This series is part of our ongoing coverage of the Epstein Files, attention to the women that continue to suffer and those that are fighting back.  In our series, we unpack the record, combing through the various emails, speaking with reporters, and asking the fundamental question: what does it take to treat women and girls with dignity and respect? 

For backdrop, in July, the Justice Department released a controversial report about Jeffrey Epstein, now a known and notorious sexual predator and human trafficker. As a result of the political fallout after this DOJ report, Jeffrey Epstein (and his alleged connections to President Trump) have spent more months in the headlines—but the voices of survivors have not been given equal coverage or consideration.

The House Oversight Committee has yet to hear testimony from Epstein survivors, despite urging by Rep. Ayanna Presley and others.

In this episode, we’re looking to shift the focus where it belongs: on survivors, and what justice means to them.

00:00:04 Michele Goodwin:

Jess, thank you very much for joining me for our Ms. Studios Ms. platform podcast. You’ve shown incredible bravery and courage by telling your story, by coming out to tell your story. So, let me just start with something that is open ended that just simply allows you to just speak. Tell us what you think that…tell us what you experience and what you think the public should know. 

00:00:35 Jess Michaels:

That’s a great question. Thank you so much for having me, Michele, and thank you so much for asking that question, because people aren’t really asking that question. I just had a discussion with my therapist today about this, and the things that I think people don’t know and don’t see is that I come on, and I speak, and I have a lot of…a great feeling of accomplishment, because I’m finding my words when I, for so long, couldn’t. I’m finding my voice when, for so long, I couldn’t.

And so, for me, every time I get the opportunity to speak, it feels like this wonderful sense of empowerment, but one of the things that I have been grappling with, and I explained to my therapist, I said, then why am I so tired and sad afterwards? And we know that I had a physiological response from having frozen by being raped. We know that that was my physiological response, and that is what I carried with me for 30 years of post-traumatic stress disorder, which I like to call post-traumatic stress injury, because I was injured, not disordered. That my body, A, could just be still in that habit of shutting down. That’s one.

Two, because of post-traumatic stress disorder, I deal with adrenal fatigue, having been stressed that long, and it just is exhausting to talk about, even though I don’t feel like I’m reliving it. I don’t feel re-triggered talking about it. I can still have an exhaustion that is otherworldly, that makes it difficult to climb stairs, but then, thirdly, we talked about something that I think is something that nobody recognizes, is that the more that I heal and the more I gain my voice and the more…I feel so proud of myself for what I’m able to now get to, the more I recognize that 22-year-old girl and all of the potential of that self-actualization that I lost at that young age, and I am grappling with a lot of grief right now.

00:02:51 Michele Goodwin:

I hear you, and in part, think what you’re sharing that is probably felt by so many of our listeners who have had a similar experience or know those who have had, is that the complexity of response…

00:03:07 Jess Michaels:

Yes. Yes.

00:03:08 Michele Goodwin:

The complexity of response at the time of being harmed, when someone is harming you, and the complexity along the way, because one version of that response is, in fact, to try to heal oneself in the immediate, to try to put some armor over oneself, where even there, is the question in the deep spaces of abuse and harm, where one questions, have I really been abused and harmed?

00:03:34 Jess Michaels:

Yes. Yes, and we push through. We just…you know, one of the things I was saying today, too, to my fabulous and amazing therapist, I said, the one thing I can go back and look at is that regardless of how deeply down this dark hole I went, I still just kept trying. I just kept trying, and I think that I have so much more compassion for that girl now that was in her 20s and struggling through her 20s and 30s, because I was beating her up to make it through. I think I was beating her up to make it through. Like, come on, you’re being lazy. Come on, get out of bed. Stop sleeping. It doesn’t hurt that bad. You can keep going, and I would berate myself for so long, and so, yeah, I know you can understand what I’m saying.

00:04:24 Michele Goodwin:

I can, and when one pulls back, aren’t those also the expectations in a society that, for so long, has not respected, given space for, shown consideration and grace for the concerns of women and girls? And it’s a history that is so unimaginable, in certain ways. The fact that we had, baked into American law, up until recently, that marital rape was permissible.

00:04:59 Jess Michaels:

It’s crazy.

00:05:00 Michele Goodwin:

That, with domestic violence, courts saying, well, just shut the door, and it’s private. In cases of incest even, State Supreme Court saying that it would be disruptive of family harmony for the daughters to receive any recovery, and it suggests that the disruption is not the assault, the rape, the victimization. The disruption is saying, I deserve better. I should not have been harmed.

00:05:33 Jess Michaels:

Exactly. Exactly. You know, one of the things I get frustrated with was that, in 1991, as I understood laws, rape was only determined by how much you resisted, and so, since I froze, I thought, well, sure, it’s my fault, and the reason we only heard fight or flight is because, then, they were only studying men’s trauma responses. They weren’t even really studying women’s trauma responses, because, as I understand it, and you can correct me, and probably know more of the actual studies in literature, we were not studied because they felt that our hormonal imbalances, on a monthly basis, would invalidate the study, and so, that’s why men, I believe, have such a hard time grasping why we freeze and why we can, in a moment of danger, through an automatic and involuntary trauma response, comply. Our body can be moving and look like we’re all there, when we are not there. We are not there mentally. We are not cognitively choosing it. It is happening as a defense mechanism in our bodies.

00:06:40 Michele Goodwin:

Well, it’s reminiscent, actually, to what happens to people in war, and this is a very interesting thing. That, of all the many protections that are understood and negotiated for and then baked into treaties and global policies, that are agreed upon by governments that otherwise agree about very little, and that is an understanding of the protection of prisoners of war, an understanding about what is traumatic in war, an understanding about things that should not take place in war against soldiers, et cetera, and what’s fascinating is that we don’t have that same level of understanding for the zone of terror, the assault of war that is rendered on the bodies of individuals who’ve been sexually assaulted, abused, raped, all of that.

And yet, there are aspects that could be so similar if we actually just looked at the ways in which we respond to soldiers and the ways in which we try to protect soldiers and look at the ways in which soldiers shut down this sort of trauma. Being so deeply intense that, actually, you do freeze, right? And there are so many aspects of that, too, because I also think about this aspect of solitary confinement, too, and this sort of sexual abuse is also something that…like, granted, there are times in which it’s broad public daylight, but so much of it is cabined in a secret space.

00:08:27 Jess Michaels:

Isolation, and what we know from research is that if we surround someone that has been traumatized, they’ve gone through a traumatic event, and if we surround them in safety, trust, and support, within those first 24 to 72 hours afterwards, with known, trusted people, and then we stay with them for up to 90 days, three months afterwards, we can completely diminish the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Significantly, not completely, but significantly diminish post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s the exact opposite that happens for sexual assault survivors. There is so much isolation. I cowered within myself. I stopped trusting myself. So, if I can’t trust myself, I really struggle to trust other people, but then, at the same time, would reach out for other people to try to be a safe harbor for me, and we don’t talk enough about the fact that sexual assault survivors have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than even combat veterans. So, in 2020…

00:09:33 Michele Goodwin:

That’s right.

00:09:35 Jess Michaels:

The Pentagon Inspector General’s managerial report came out, and it talked about sexual assault, and it said that 45% of women combat veterans that went through sexual harm experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. Sixty-eight percent of men who experienced sexual assault in the military had post-traumatic stress disorder. Whereas, if they were just combat veterans, it was 38.8.

00:10:05 Michele Goodwin:

It’s significant. Jess, as you share about this journey, still, of working through the experiences of your life that were connected to Jeffrey Epstein, a name that now has become known worldwide that, at a particular period of time, unless you, perhaps, were a person who was in philanthropy at a university, you might not have known the name, right? Or those who clearly were involved with the island and sexual predations, et cetera, they would know, but otherwise, somewhat obscure, but you came to know him, or at least be affected and abused by him, as did so many other young women and girls. Jess, can you tell us your story? What happened to you, and how did you meet him?

00:11:12 Jess Michaels:

So, I met him through a friend who was a fellow dancer. She was a friend, a very good friend, and my roommate, and she had been working for him for a couple of months, and after I came back from a contract, a dance contract, she was telling me all about him for about two months. It was a perfect side hustle for a performing artist, because he would allow her to go to auditions. He would allow her to take contracts, leave, and come back and still have her position. He was training her to be a massage therapist, and we didn’t actually call it a massage therapist. So, I want to clarify, we didn’t have those words, and even some areas, you could get by with doing massage and not having a license, even in New York City. So, at the time, it was just a great side hustle to be a masseuse.

00:12:03 Michele Goodwin:

And was this in New York, Jess?

00:12:05 Jess Michaels:

This was in New York City, yes. I was living in New York City. I was traveling to Tokyo. I was dancing. I was modeling. I was a working professional dancer, and that’s an important part of my story for people to know, because I know he took advantage of a lot of people that were aspiring and hopeful, and he was giving them connections. I was working. I was successful. I was happy and thriving in my career, in a career that is really hard to thrive in and doing it, and so, my friend and roommate gets this incredible job. This man’s going to train her.

He’s taking her all over the world, and she says I only have to do two or three massages a week when I go somewhere, and then I get the rest of the time to go explore the city on my own, and that sounded like the ideal situation, and I was jealous, and she spoke so favorably about him, and I think this is important to also note, because whenever I’m talking about it, I want people to understand that this is not abnormal. This is how grooming looks. It’s not just the individual person that does the abuse. There are enablers around them, there are people that are enabling it, and there are people that are a part of the grooming pipeline that help that predator get their fixation, and so…

00:13:33 Michele Goodwin:

And I’m glad that you mentioned that, right? The grooming pipeline. I want you to go back to what you were saying, but I want to just pause to acknowledge what you were saying. That there’s a satellite of individuals around that are on a spectrum, some who are in full knowledge, some you really should know because it’s almost in your face.

00:13:53 Jess Michaels:

Exactly.

00:13:54 Michele Goodwin:

But a variety of people, so these are…

00:13:56 Jess Michaels:

It’s a range.

00:13:57 Michele Goodwin:

A range. A range.

00:13:59 Jess Michaels:

It’s a range. It’s exactly what you’re saying.

00:14:01 Michele Goodwin:

It’s a range. Yeah, and so, then, you were saying that, okay, roommate, a little bit of envy and jealousy that you were successful, and then you were placed in contact.

00:14:12 Jess Michaels:

So, I was invited to meet him because she said I got a dance contract, and I’m going out of town, and he needs a backup masseuse, and I said, great, and so, she gave me the address, and how I even knew where I went now…like, when I went back to go confirm that it was him…I actually have all my 1990’s, 1980’s day planners, because I was a journaler, and I collected all of those, and when I didn’t have time to journal, I at least wanted to remember what auditions I went to, who I met, and so, I’d jot it down in my day planner. So, I have his name, his address, his phone number, his assistant’s name all in my day planner, and I show up at his office.

And there’s a couple of things that I think are really important to understand about when I meet him this first time. He’s actually very stoic, and he’s very professional, and he is very serious about someone understanding, through the body, to the point that he makes me feel like I don’t know enough, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I question whether I’m actually going to get the job, and I kind of thought I already had an in. I already thought this was a…he’s going to train me, too. He trained Christine. He’ll train me, too, and so, he’s asking me these questions about the body that I can’t answer, and he’s like, okay, okay, well, you’re going to need to study this book.

00:15:37 Michele Goodwin:

What kind of questions? Are these, like, anatomy questions?

00:15:39 Jess Michaels:

Yes. Yeah.

00:15:41 Michele Goodwin:

As if he’s really serious, like, he’s in the business of massage and he knows acupuncture and muscles?

00:15:47 Jess Michaels:

Like this matters to him. He is only very serious about people that want to learn from him, and he sets himself up to be an authority, and that’s the other thing that people, I hope, they take out of this conversation. It’s someone that set themself up to be an authority so that I am a student of him. So, he has me come around this side of the desk, and he said, you’re going to have to study this book, and so, he opens a drawer, and there is about a dozen books, the same book, the book of massage, and he hands it to me, and being the overachiever that I am, I go, and I grab a three-subject notebook, and I start studying this book.

But the most important thing I also want to say is that, looking back now, him having a dozen of those books of massage, this was a strategy that had been already perfected in 1991. It’s one of the reasons why I say his name and his date in my bios. I say I’m a 1991 Jeffrey Epstein survivor, so people remember, A, that this was going on so much longer than anyone is talking about, and I’m telling you that, in 1991, he had his act and strategy and plan and grooming style down to a science already, and we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about this. It was likely going on in the ‘80s.

00:17:18 Michele Goodwin:

Perfecting.

00:17:19 Jess Michaels:

Perfecting.

00:17:20 Michele Goodwin:

You know, so, we’ll come back to what happened next, but I do want to pause on what you’ve shared, because, for our listeners and the people who are adjacent to them, who want to provide support to them, who have, what you’re sharing is an affirmation in many ways, right? Because it’s to say that there is a planning that goes on, and there is a perfecting, over time, of predacious behavior, and that predacious behavior can have its eras. Era one, era two, era three, and by the time you get to era three, era four, where people might think that era four is the first era…like, this is the first of it, but no. Actually, it was building before. It’s almost like serial killers, right? Who, their first time out, it’s a little bit sloppy, a little bit clunky, right? And then, over time, they then further master…

00:18:23 Jess Michaels:

Exactly.

00:18:25 Michele Goodwin:

This art of harm, and that’s part of what you’re sharing when you’re saying the 1991 playbook of this.

00:18:32 Jess Michaels:

Exactly.

00:18:33 Michele Goodwin:

Like, literally had a dozen books associated with it, right? Here is the kind of narrative. Open up the book. Open up the drawer, and here are all these versions of the same book.

00:18:33 Jess Michaels:

Exactly. Yeah, he was already setting me up to feel and be sure that this was professional. This was only professional, and that is really important, because, again, that goes back to that strategy, that perfected strategy, of how do I get…how he could get what he wanted out of this meeting. It was already in his mind before I showed up, and this was something I had to grapple with. It was likely already in his mind, that, as soon as he saw me…because I looked young. I was 22, but I probably looked 16. I was a professional dancer. I was small, and I looked younger. I probably looked underage, right? I had that look, and that was…

00:19:33 Michele Goodwin:

Meeting a certain profile that we know now, from court cases, was something that was a desire of his.

00:19:39 Jess Michaels:

Yeah. Exactly, and so, he already knew, when he saw me, exactly what was going to happen. He was just reading me to find out, what was it going to take for him to get what he wanted? And that’s scary to look back on, because I initially felt embarrassed that I fell for all of this, but given, I was recommended by a trusted friend. I mean, I never, in a second, questioned my friend and her experience.

00:20:08 Michele Goodwin:

Look, there are people who stay married to people who break their jaws and break their legs and put them in the hospital, and family members all know that these are not the events of falling down steps. Maybe once, maybe the first time they say, well, okay, maybe she’s a little bit clumsy and she fell down the step, but 10 times, 10 steps, same flight of steps. So, again, this sense of blaming oneself.

00:20:34 Jess Michaels:

Yeah. Always. Yeah. Yeah, and I want to go back to something that, you know, you were saying earlier, that everyone in the sphere of Jeffrey Epstein was an enabler in some frame. One, if they knew nothing about what was happening, they were perfectly placed so that they could give him an alibi of good character and good intentions, and so, even the people that knew nothing were being groomed. Enabling maybe is the wrong word. They were being groomed so that he could present a valid, professional, creative, academic…

00:21:21 Michele Goodwin:

Right. Well, isn’t that also how people who are abusers and abusive are able to continue abusing, right? Because, if they showed themselves to be abusive, if they showed themself…

00:21:34 Jess Michaels:

To everyone…

00:21:34 Michele Goodwin:

Right, to be angry, unsophisticated brutes, right? They wouldn’t be able to survive in doing what it is that they do and to thrive.

00:21:47 Jess Michaels:

Exactly. Exactly.

00:21:47 Michele Goodwin:

So, you saw him again after that. So, you get the book and you study it, because now, you’ve been put in this position that, somehow, there was more that you should have known about how to touch the body. That, somehow, you’re behind.

00:22:01 Jess Michaels:

And I’m excited about the opportunity still, because I know I’m a good study. I know I can learn this, and so, that actually didn’t deter me. I just didn’t know if I actually got the job yet, but I felt pretty confident in my ability to study this book. I created a cheat sheet. Christine came home later that day, and she said, Jeffrey liked you. You’re going to call his office and make an appointment for a trial massage, and I felt confident. Made my cheat sheet. Went in the next week. Went to this penthouse, and one of the first things I said to him…and I share this in my…when I share my experience, I always tell this part because I think it’s really important.

I was a 22-year-old badass, strong, confident, assertive dancer. I imagined that, if something was going to happen to me, I would be able to take care of myself. I had the height and strength to throat kick at anyone. I had the ability to ninja my way out of anything that happened. I felt pretty confident in myself. Whether that’s naivete of a 22-year-old or accurate because I felt pretty sure of myself, I don’t know, but the first thing I say to him is, so, Jeffrey, why do you hire professional dancers when, clearly, you can afford to hire professional masseuses? I wasn’t afraid to say that, and I think that that shows that there was such a big break in my sense of identity from when I walked into that penthouse to when I walked out.

So, he says to me…and I want you to note, he was appealing to my ego. He said, dancers are…they take care of themselves. They have such beautiful bodies. They know so much more about the body than even, you know, professionals do. They’re amazing, and why would I want a fat personal trainer? And then he doesn’t look at me anymore. He drops his robe, and he said, and dancers are comfortable with nudity. Now, he didn’t ask me. He didn’t tell me in advance. Christine didn’t tell me, and so, I was taken aback in that moment, and I thought, well, he didn’t tell me about this, and Christine didn’t tell me about this, but because Christine was here, it must be safe. This still must be safe, but that was the first moment of question, and I’m going to…

00:24:35 Michele Goodwin:

It’s a moment where he takes off his robe.

00:24:38 Jess Michaels:

He takes off his robe, and he’s just naked. It’s not a big deal. It’s just professional. It’s just professional, and he lays the towel down. He lays down, and I grab my cheat sheet, and I sit down like the studious little, you know, young woman I am, and I lay out my cheat sheet, and I’m explaining everything I learned, how much I love the book, going through the patterns.

00:25:01 Michele Goodwin:

So, Jess, I mean, sometimes horror also has humor. It’s sad, right?

00:25:08 Jess Michaels:

I am overachieving.

00:25:08 Michele Goodwin:

It’s also horrible, but there it is. So, he is naked. Like, is the man just, like, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, naked, staring at you? Has he laid himself down on a sofa?

00:25:18 Jess Michaels:

Yeah, he’s lying on the floor on a towel.

00:25:18 Michele Goodwin:

Wait, okay, so, the man is laying on a floor on a towel naked, right? Which also says, like, just all of the perversity of it, right, and the craziness of it and also the boldness, right? The unchecked…

00:25:35 Jess Michaels:

Oh, yes.

00:25:36 Michele Goodwin:

Totally unchecked, because that’s not the kind of thing that we would do. If someone’s coming over or…

00:25:40 Jess Michaels:

You should formalize it, yeah.

00:25:41 Michele Goodwin:

Right? Like, we don’t do that. Someone’s coming over for a drink. They’re coming over for a meal. They’re coming back for a job interview. A housekeeper. So, someone might say, well, why would she go over to his house? Well, there are plenty of people who go to people’s houses for work. People who are housekeepers do that. People who do perform massages, they actually do their people like that.

00:25:58 Jess Michaels:

Go to people’s house. Yeah.

00:26:00 Michele Goodwin:

They go to people’s homes. They carry their tables, or maybe people don’t, you know? But there are many…chefs, they go to people’s houses. So, I want people to know and understand that it is actually not unusual to go to someone’s house to perform work. Gardeners, people go to…

00:26:15 Jess Michaels:

Christine went all the time.

00:26:18 Michele Goodwin:

But then the part that is crazy…and as you’re saying, this is the part that you didn’t know. So, he just takes off his robe, and then he’s just lying there on the floor in a towel…

00:26:18 Jess Michaels:

Just lying there.

00:26:26 Michele Goodwin:

As if that’s normal.

00:26:28 Jess Michaels:

Right, and at one point, like…because I really enjoy dark humor, especially around these really difficult things, you know, I joke around, and I’m staring at Jeffrey Epstein’s penis, and all I think of was, like, there shouldn’t be any penises at job interviews, like, ever.

00:26:47 Michele Goodwin:

No, I think that you’re right.

00:26:46 Jess Michaels:

There should never be penises. There should never be a penis at a job interview, and we need to maybe put that in writing somewhere, because that doesn’t seem to be understood, and so, he didn’t need to take off all of his clothes to do a trial interview. He could have sat there, and I could have explained everything I learned. I could have shown him a couple of hand positions, and that could have been enough, but he didn’t. He disarmed me. It’s a stepping over the boundary to see how far he can push me, is what it is. It’s a psychological trick to see how far can I push you?

And if you listen to any of the ways that Ghislaine Maxwell operated, that Epstein operated ever, it was just how far can I keep pushing this line to get someone…to normalize what is happening? The experience goes from me, studious overachiever, demonstrating all of my fabulous hand positions that I learned and really excited about learning. Him initially talking about massage, then, you know, international techniques that verge into sexual jokes, that diverge into him sitting up abruptly and going, you’re doing it wrong.

And his tone completely changing, and his demeanor, he’s not the same person I was talking to before. I’m not saying he’s angry. Everybody’s like, well, yeah, he got angry at you. He didn’t get angry. He just got annoyed, and he was then, in that moment, the authority figure, and he was like, look, I’m going to need to show you on your body what I mean, and you can take off your dress. It’s fine. It’s professional. Like, there was no…it’s so unnerving to watch that 22-year-old girl start to collapse internally in that moment. When he got angry, you know, we talked about…

So, 48% of those that have experienced child sexual abuse will be abused later in life, and the way I explained it to my therapist at one point was when he got mad at me, I said I turned into a stupid 5-year-old, and she said, did you experience anything at that age? And I did. I said yes, I went through child sexual abuse by my grandfather from ages 4 to 6. She said, Jessica, then you were a 5-year-old in that moment. So, I kind of started to fade internally, and a lot of people say when they dissociate, they leave their body. That is not what happened to me. I sunk in, and the light where my eyes were went very far away from me.

And I felt like I was just falling backwards into myself. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop it, and I was just going, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want this, and I don’t know why I can’t stop it, and I was already starting to blame myself. I must be so stupid. Why can’t I stop this? He raped me. All the while, I also want to point out, a couple of minutes before he actually raped me, he said, this isn’t a big deal. This is just professional. Even in that span of getting mad at me, getting annoyed…he didn’t get mad at me. He got annoyed. He shifted, and he said, this is just professional. It was back to that very stoic demeanor.

00:30:44 Michele Goodwin:

Authoritative.

00:30:46 Jess Michaels:

Authoritative, that’s the word. It’s authoritative. It is taking dominance in the moment and commend of the moment, and that just triggered a trauma response.

00:31:00 Michele Goodwin:

You’re right, and knowing that you can do that without recourse. Let me say, Jess, before we move, you know, on as you continue, is that it’s heartbreaking what happened to you. Heartbreaking what happened to you and to so many others, and that the journey to still have to educate people to understand what it is like in terms of shutting down. That the fight is within the mind. What’s very interesting is that…

00:31:43 Jess Michaels:

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What you just said. The fight is within the mind is exactly…

00:31:50 Michele Goodwin:

That’s it.

00:31:50 Jess Michaels:

Exactly how it feels. Thank you. Thank you.

00:31:55 Michele Goodwin:

Oh, that’s it, right? So, as people may think, well, why aren’t there scratches, and sometimes people get licks and scratches in, but it’s in the mind. It is in the mind where the fight is and where there are so many thoughts that are rapidly…why am I here? How do I get out of here? What happens after I leave here? Is it going to be portrayed as this was my fault? That I did this to my…all of those things rapidly in the mind where the fight is taking place as the body is shutting down, as compliance comes.

00:32:33 Jess Michaels:

And the brain. I want to also just clarify, like, what people don’t understand when…I get so many times, well, you heard the sexual jokes. He was naked. Why didn’t you leave? The cognitive part of our brain, that is the decision maker, as that part of the brain, the more primitive part of the brain, the amygdala takes over, that defensive system…which is a really important and natural thing to happen, which is for us to start to freeze, start to fawn or appease, which I think is a better word. That is automatic and involuntary, and it is completely disconnected from executive functioning, automatically and involuntarily. We don’t get to choose that. That’s why the thinking and decision-making gets confusing. If you listen to any trauma survivor, one thing they will say to you over and over again is, I was confused. This brain fog, because that part of your functioning is completely offline. Completely offline.

00:33:39 Michele Goodwin:

I think credit also has to be given to what kind of a society it is at any of those times.

00:33:45 Jess Michaels:

Yes.

00:33:49 Michele Goodwin:

And we don’t give as much credit to that, and that’s…

00:33:54 Jess Michaels:

Conditioning.

00:33:54 Michele Goodwin:

Right. Yes, it is, right? That, somehow, he made normal becoming naked and being on a towel on the floor, someone who’s very successful, who’s respected all around, and whose name is everywhere. So, who’s in the wrong? It’s kind of like one of those elementary shows, like which one is wrong? If he has wealth and if he has power, if he has influence, if he has…then who are you or anybody else to then feel uncomfortable, which is, it seems like, what he’s saying or sharing, right? That the oddity is not with him. The oddity is with any question of that. Well, how…after he harms you, what happens next for you? Do you leave?

00:34:47 Jess Michaels:

Yeah. So, I don’t remember getting dressed. He actually gets up, and he throws my…I can hear the crinkled money, and he puts it on the table, and he says, call my assistant next week for another appointment. So, that was very confusing, and I actually did a podcast with Laura Richards, who is the crime analyst, and she analyzes criminal behavior, and she said that moment of putting the money there and then saying…that was, again, another moment of just normalizing everything. Just complete, like, nothing untoward happened here.

Look, see, I’m giving you this money for it. It’s a job. You know, nothing went wrong here. So, I leave, and I’m so confused, and I remember walking past the doorman and just thinking how different I was as a human. I had lost something. My life had just changed immeasurably from when I had walked past him to go up to the penthouse. I got on the subway going the wrong way. I was still mute by the next day. I couldn’t speak. When I had a friend at work ask me, hey, how are you doing? What’s up? And she asked me three times, I couldn’t respond, and she grabbed me, and she brought me into the office, and that was when I broke down crying.

I told her what happened, and I didn’t even tell her everything. I just told her enough, and she said, in 1991, she said, Jessica, we need to go to the police, and I, in that moment, realized, oh, it is bad, and then I also thought, oh…and I froze, and no one’s going to believe me. No one’s going to believe me. I’m a 22-year-old dancer, and he’s this wealthy guy. No one’s…he wasn’t known then. He didn’t have this household name, obviously, and so, all I knew him as was this wealthy Wall Street guy that had a penthouse and a plane, and I thought, but nobody’s going to believe…it’s going to be a he said-she said moment. So, I just thought, I’m not going to ever tell anyone this, ever.

00:37:17 Michele Goodwin:

Did you ever go back again? Did you talk to your roommate about what happened?

00:37:21 Jess Michaels:

No. So, we were in a dancer apartment, which meant we were all leaving and coming and going, and I had another contract, and I left on a modeling contract for two months, but when I came back, I was so scared to be in New York City, the place I had worked years to get to. Like, this was my…I loved New York City, and when I came back on the plane from Tokyo, from that second modeling contract, I was in an audition within 24 hours off of getting out of that plane and had another job taking me out of the city, because I just was so scared to be there. I wasn’t eating. My stomach was upset all the time. I had headaches. I had insomnia. I had anxiety.

But we didn’t call it anxiety in the ‘90s. We didn’t have that word. We didn’t walk around saying, I have an anxiety disorder. No, no. I didn’t know what it was. I just was anxious all the time, and my stomach was upset, and within three, within six months after being assaulted, I had lost so much weight, I could pull a pair of size zero jeans down off of my hips without unbuttoning them, and I didn’t need to, necessarily, lose any weight, and so, the physical…you know, I asked a friend of mine, when I shared with her what had happened…I finally started sharing what had happened, and she was a friend that I had just met three months after all that happened. I said, what do you remember about me back then when you met me? And she said, I just remember that you slept all the time.

00:39:09 Michele Goodwin:

Right, right. Jess, as Epstein’s name has come back into the news, I’m wondering, at what point was it where, for you, that there seemed to be this added recognition that you were part of…or you had a story that was connected to this legacy, as it turns out. Was there a time…when was that time, if there was that time where you thought, oh my goodness, it’s that guy?

00:39:09 Jess Michaels:

So, I was actually working from home, and I was scrolling through my phone, just reading the news on a lunch break, and I saw his face, and I…all of a sudden, before I remembered everything about what happened, I saw his face, and my whole body started to react. I started to sweat. I started to have trouble breathing. I started to get shaky. My hands started just getting sweaty, and I started feeling really uncomfortable in my body.

And then I started reading the article, and it is Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice, and at first, I couldn’t read it. Like, I didn’t read it right away, and I didn’t remember his name. I couldn’t quite remember his name. I went and I looked up my day planners to see if I could find it, and I found his name, and do you know what I had done? Next to his name and address, I wrote asshole. I had written asshole way back in 1991, and I’d never looked at it again. I had never even remembered…like, didn’t remember it. I just saw it, and I was like, oh my god, it is him, and I start reading the article, and it’s, again, holding really complex emotions at the same time

I’m sitting there, and I’m crying about what happened, and at the same time, going, oh my god, it wasn’t my fault, and I’m not the only one. Like, it wasn’t my fault, like, the whole time. That was the first big wave of weight being lifted, was that it wasn’t my fault, because I berated myself. No one was harder on me than I was. Berated myself for 30 years and blamed myself for so long, and I was wrong, and if there’s one thing I hope that any of your listeners will hear me was that I was wrong that whole time, believing that it was ever my fault, ever. Nothing I did was my fault for being raped.

00:41:50 Michele Goodwin:

The work that you’ve been doing has been to bring greater recognition and greater visibility, the ability to be able to see folks who have been sexually assaulted, and your organization, 3 Joannes, you’ve emphasized the importance of changing the culture around assault, and you also lifted up principles about there being sexual assault first aid.

00:42:24 Jess Michaels:

Yes. Yes.

00:42:26 Michele Goodwin:

Can you tell us about that?

00:42:26 Jess Michaels:

Yes, I would love to tell you about that, and I want to tell you how I started thinking about it. One of the reasons sexual assault first aid even came to me was because I had been looking around for how do we teach people how to respond better to victims, because my mission is to lift that burden of shame and stigma off of survivors and bring in more of a community, peer-based support system. Not focus on it being a crime to send us off to somebody else. Not focus on, oh, well, you need to go to therapy, but how do we get families, friends, colleagues, community to be better supported?

So, I found this incredible workshop by two gentlemen from Johns Hopkins University, and it was called Psychological First Aid, and I was so excited, and it’s a free class, and you can order the book, and I’m looking at the book, and I’m reading it, and it says, you know, psychological first aid is really good for any situation that you’re in. I mean, they labeled everything. Active shooter situations, mass shootings, war, weather-related problems, getting mugged, having your house burn down. Do you know what? They named every single thing except sexual harm. So, I actually got into the group.

And I was like, hey, by the way, I’m a 1991 Jeffrey Epstein survivor, and it seems you missed out on the thing that causes most post-traumatic stress disorder than almost any other of the things that you’re listing, and I hope that, if you decide to, you will add this in the future, and if you need any help, I would love to talk with you about it. Well, a couple of years later, they did come out with a second version, and I was so excited. I was like, well, they didn’t reach out, but hey, maybe they got something here. They added a paragraph, and so, I thought, since you are not going to do it, I’m going to do it. I’m going to make sexual assault first aid, and so, what that is, is just like any other form of pre-crisis protocol.

We should all know what to do when something happens. We should know how to handle getting a disclosure from someone. Not just believe in that moment, but what do I do in two weeks when they can’t get off the couch? What do I do in a month when they decide to drop out of college because they got raped at a party? What do I do in two months when, now, they’re finally feeling like they want to go to the police, but they never reported before? What are the things that we can do for, like I described, those first 90 days to help someone feel safe? Because sexual assault, for me…and this is our mission. Is sexual assault is an injury first before it’s an interrogation, before it’s an investigation, before it’s any of those things, before it’s a crime.

We want people to respond to it like someone has been injured, and I’ve said this in other interviews. If I called you up and I said, hey, I went to this party last night, and I got raped, our natural response is, from a societal conditioning, is let’s go to the police. I want to change that, because when we say…I call you up the next day after I’ve gone to a party and I say, I got in a car accident, your first response is, are you okay? It’s a different response. It’s a different understanding of what both of those two things is, and so, we’re actually a for-profit company.

We’re a public benefit corporation. We are also going to be certified B Corp. We are using the opportunity to have the vast scale of this problem help support nonprofits. So, we will be giving back revenue into nonprofits that are on the ground and have been doing this work for a really long time, and who are now struggling because of the administration cutting services for sexual assault survivors. So, we’re really hoping to change how people respond to this so that we can have less people walking around with post-traumatic stress disorder and then being able to get justice, if they wanted, and in whatever way they want.

00:46:41 Michele Goodwin:

Jess, what’s your…I could spend so much time talking with you, and we’re coming towards the end of our interview. I wonder what would be the counseling, the advice that you would give to the 22-year-old Jess a couple weeks after that traumatizing experience? If she came to you, what would you tell her?

00:47:11 Jess Michaels:

What would I tell her now? That it was never her fault. That her body actually did exactly what it should do in that moment to preserve itself. It did what it was supposed to do, and it was never supposed to just stay stuck like that for 30 years, but I would also tell her right now, like, how proud I am of her. Like, that, because despite that, she really just kept trying. A friend sent me this really sweet text, and she’s like, all I keep picturing is you now, being this eloquent, you know, speaker and sharing about this, reaching down her hand to 22-year-old Jess and saying, look what we’re going to do.

00:48:12 Michele Goodwin:

That’s beautiful. Jess, on our show, we handle thorny, weighty issues in so many regards, but we try to wrap up with thinking about what comes next in terms of hope, silver linings, about what is there that’s uplifting, and we do that, in part…that’s forged from the sense of surviving and thriving. How do you transform all that is of ill will and all of which may be painful and harsh, even, such that we can create a better future? And so many communities have done that. So, Jess, what do you see as a silver lining, even as you’ve experienced something so traumatically horrible and that has a legacy of horror? But what do you see as hope or a silver lining?

00:49:16 Jess Michaels:

I think the biggest piece of hope I would like to pass on to everyone that’s listening is there was another myth that we have all grown up with, and that myth is that you can’t heal. That you will be stuck with this forever. It will weigh you down. You will never be the same, and as someone that lived with post-traumatic stress disorder for 30 years, and will always live with those symptoms, I am always navigating and mitigating those symptoms.

But what I can tell you is the time that I’ve spent in trauma therapy with a really good therapist and the time that I’ve spent surrounding myself with safe, trustworthy, supportive people, you can heal, and you can thrive, and you do not have to be weighed down by what has happened. You can alchemize it into whatever fulfilling purpose you find, and that can be anything. It can mean creating the most beautiful garden that brings beauty to the world. For me, it’s creating an app, but we all get to choose how we alchemize that.

00:50:26 Michele Goodwin:

Jess Michaels, it’s been wonderful spending time with you. Thank you so much for giving of yourself, such that we could have this conversation today. Thank you so much.

00:50:38 Jess Michaels:

Thank you. It’s been an honor to speak with you.

Michele Goodwin:

If the issues raised in this show reach close to home for you, please know that help is available.  RAINN offers free, confidential support through its hotline.  You can learn more at rainn.org or by calling: 800.656 HOPE or texting HOPE to 64673