Transcript of Jeffrey Epstein Survivor Jess Michaels Speaks Out. Share Her Story.

Today, I am truly honored to be joined by Jess Michiels, who is a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's Horrific Crimes, who is the founder of Three Joanne's. Jess, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really honored to be here with you.

I want to talk about your story, and I want to give you this platform to share your story so that other people can hear it and maybe speak up on their own. I do want to start off by just talking about the present day. What are you feeling today with everything in the news, everything drawn up again after years of real silence about this story?

Yeah, it's almost worse than silence. It's very strategic silencing and ignoring. That is part of the problem. Also, the beauty of this moment is that people are finally listening. There's this real extreme happening in my body of horrific dread and grief, because that's the other thing that comes up that people don't talk about is how much grief of the reminder, the constant reminder of what I lost. Then the beauty of this moment of people finally listening and recognizing, Oh, this is what I've been healing for and where I've been trying to find language for. This is where people are now disclosing and sharing what's happened in their lives. And so I think it's this horrific, horrific moment and beautiful at the same time.

Yeah, I can only imagine. I do want to take you back to the early '90s. Could you just walk me through your story and tell those who may have never heard of you or the pain that you underwent just a little bit more about what actually happened?

Yeah. I I always like to start with July eighth because that feels so significant to me of who I was on that date and before. I had been a working professional dancer for a year and a half. So working, I had contracts, I was traveling the world, I worked in Tokyo. I was modeling. I was making money at my chosen career. I had great relationships, friends. Absolutely, my star as a dancer and a model and a performer was rising. I was on the rise. I wasn't aspiring. I wasn't hopeful. I was working. The significance of July eighth was that I was actually sitting there in my Brooklyn apartment And I was reading my name on my paycheck for doing an Aretha Franklin job. And that just felt so incredible. The week before that, my roommate, because this also felt like a wonderful A piece of my life coming together. My roommate... Let me take you back. I just come back from Tokyo in May, and my roommate at the time, Christine, tells me she's been working for several months with this wealthy Wall Street guy. He's training her to do massage. She's really happy and ecstatic.

She's making a ton of money. It sounds like a perfect opportunity, so I'm excited. I am never offered an opportunity. I'm never It was for two months, I just keep hearing about Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey everywhere. It gets to be the week before, and she said, I actually got a dance contract, and Jeffrey is looking for some backup masseuses. That was exciting for me as a professional dancer. A wonderful opportunity. I was excited because I had been jealous of her. She sets it up that I can meet him. I meet him at his office for an interview first, and then he basically acts as if I may not get this job. It felt like the old conman thing of the takeaway. Like the old car salesman, like, This car might not be It's great for you type of feeling and gives me a book to study. I go get a notebook. As soon as I leave the office, I start studying. Christine comes home that night and says he liked you.

What book is he reading? He Did he give you to study?

It's the Book of Massage. It was an old massage book. This is the part... He had a dozen of them, Aaron, in that desk. I wasn't the only person in 1991 that he was doing this, too, or before then. I go to the address I'm given to this penthouse that is a sunken living room. He comes out in his robe, and he drops his robe, and he says, And professional dancers are comfortable with nudity. That moment stuck to me. I had someone ask me, When is the moment when your first red flag came up? It was that moment. What I felt like was Jeff Jeffrey, from the first interview to this next trial massage part of the interview, was setting me up to not know what I was doing and that he was the authority. He was the one that was going to teach me from the get-go. I was not expecting there to be nudity. I will tell you that at the time, I was very much of a bit of a prude, too. They had asked me to wear a thong in the Aretha Franklin video that I did, and I said no, because I said, I'm not going to do any work that my grandma can't see me do.

That was really jarring for me to But he was like, It's just professional, not a big deal. I played it off because I wanted the job. I'm not going to go into the details of the assault. In fact, there's one place that I tell the details. I had to write it out. I Actually, there's a chapter in Lucia Osborne-Crowley's book, The Lasting Harm, which is witnessing the Glaine-M Maxwell trial. That's, as far as I know, the only book on the whole trial, and my story isn't there. He raped me. I heard him pull $100 bills out of the robe, and he threw them on the table. I was devastated. I remember laying there, Erin, and as I'm fogging out, it's happening, and I can feel myself sinking inside. The words that kept coming to me, where, You don't want this to happen, why can't you just stop it? Why can't you just get out? Why can't you stop it? I didn't scream. I didn't run. I didn't fight him at all. I just froze I suppose, which is also where I think a lot of self-blame comes in, because we think as an adult at 22, I should be able to do that.

I should be able to protect myself. I should be able to make a different decision. I didn't understand that when you freeze, you no longer have access to that part of the brain to make a decision.

I will say this, that story is not uncommon. No. Young women all the time in situations like that experience almost exactly what you experience. I don't want you to blame yourself ever for that because it's a natural reaction that the body has. I guess he takes out the money. You have the money on the table. It's $200. You leave. How are you feeling walking out of the building that day?

Yeah. I distinctly remember walking past that doorman that had let me up and not being able to say anything, noting that everything had just changed, that I'd somehow just lost everything. I remember walking past him and thinking, and he can't even see it. He can't even see it, and I can't tell him. I got on the subway the wrong way. There's a lot of brain confusion that's happening. I stayed pretty catatonic throughout the night and into the next day.

Did you ever speak to your roommate about what happened?

That's a great question, and I don't remember if I answered it on Katie's interview. The way it works in New York when you're a performer, you're often subletting in different apartments. I was subletting in her apartment, and she had left for that dance job when I had met him. Then I left on a job. I didn't see her again before I left for another job. Then when I came back, I could no longer stay in New York City. I was afraid to be in New York anymore. Something that I had worked years to get to that I loved. I loved New York City. It was my dream to be there. Within 24 hours of landing, I moved out of New York.

That was your only interaction with him?

That was my only interaction with him, and that was my only interaction with her. I was so embarrassed and humiliated. I thought she couldn't possibly have known. I must be the only one. I was really embarrassed. She was happy with him. I didn't think she'd believe me either. I didn't think she'd believe me either. I only started to note over the years, I was Wait, she never reached back out to me either to see what happened. It didn't occur to me that she hadn't reached out to me. Then I would find out, Erin, this is the part, and this is why I called the FBI in the first place. I would find out that she stayed working for him at the very latest till 1998, and that the one mutual friend that we had that was a roommate of his after me She would tell me later on when I shared with her what happened, she said, Yeah, she tried to get me to go, too.

Oh, wow.

So she was recruiting. There were recruiters before Ghislaine Maxwell.

Okay.

That was what I tried to tell the FBI. I felt like nobody was listening to me at all.

When did you talk to the FBI? What year, approximately?

I saw his face in the Julie K. Brown's article in December of 2018. It was right after Thanksgiving. I told my therapist about it. Then I have a dear friend who happens to be a private investigator. I told her who I sent the article, and I said, This man raped me when I was living in New York as a dancer. I said, Should I go to the police? Because all these girls have come forward. They were so brave. She said, You do not want to go to the police right now. I know exactly who he is, and you don't want to It wasn't until he was arrested that I felt safe enough to say something. Then I didn't right away. I was still grappling with it, and I was working. I was like, Okay, after I finish this five speaking to her with the nonprofit I was working with. I was like, I'll call them then. She said, That's not a big deal. This is going to be going on for years. Then he's dead. I I was devastated by the lack of any place. I didn't feel like I had any place in the story.

I didn't have any place to say anything. It wasn't until the FBI kept asking us to come forward with our stories that I called in September. It was just a hotline person that answered the phone. Then a couple of days later, there was a detective with, I think it was New York Police Department, like sex trafficking, worked with the FBI. They reached out and said, Well, we have to call everyone that has called. But it was 30 years ago. What do you want us to do?

Well, I guess I want to talk about the intermediary period between the early '90s and his ultimate arrest in the late in 2017, 2018 time, because there was a time in the early mid-2000s where he was arrested initially. He got that sweetheart deal in Florida that not really anyone talks about anymore. Did you ever feel like you could speak up during that time?

No. I never saw the news. I didn't see his face before then, so I didn't know it was happening. It missed my radar. I even lived in the area. I lived in Palm Beach County. I owned a business in Palm Beach County because my family is around Florida. At the time, I went back. I was like, Why didn't I see this? I was preparing for a wedding. I was planning a wedding. I was really focused on that. I was running a business. It just it escaped me. We also weren't at the #MeToo movement. That's not for For people to say, Why didn't you report sooner? At no time did my understanding of even what happened, get past what my original understanding of the law was, was I didn't resist, and so it wasn't rape. It didn't equate to me that something had happened. It didn't equate to me that I was also a victim. Even when I called the lawyers initially to try, I just wanted to tell them about Christine. I read all these articles about survivors having lawyers after he was dead. I was like, Maybe if I just tell these lawyers about Christine, they can find her and it will help their cases.

I actually had a lawyer's image. You realize you're You're a victim, too, right? It's like I couldn't sit in that place right away. It took a really long time for me to even say, Oh, wait, that was me, too. I saw it in the article, and it released the shame. But for me to That was the only time I had to hear about these other girls for me to believe that I deserve to even be considered a victim of this man.

Yeah. You are a victim. You are. I'm just so grateful that you're sharing your story because I know it's going to help so many people around the country. I do want to ask you about something that not really many people talk about. In crime situations, in really heinous murders, things like that, you rarely say the person's name. You don't say Brian Kouberg, or you say defendant. In this case, everyone says his name. How do you feel when you hear His name every day now in the news versus just this horrific monster or this defendant tied to Trump? They say His name over and over again.

Over and over again, they show his face over and over again. Everybody giving a hot take about this person that personally harm me. It feels personal every time I see his name and face, but mostly his face. His face is jarring to me to see it. Hearing his name and people saying it all the time and only focusing on him. This is the other reason I put his name in my bio. It was like, I'm an Epstein survivor. It's like, no, I'm the survivor of this man. It's a different take. I'm trying to get people to look at this differently. But people often prefer the outlandish, the drama, the glamor of talking about the world of Jeffrey Epstein rather than the pain and the torture and the the betrayal of institutions to Epstein survivors.

I think something that when I was listening to your interview with Katie, that really struck me. You said the line, We don't believe women have pain. For years, We did not believe, or the victims, we did not believe that there could be victims. We just normalized the situation as it just happened with some wealthy white guy in Palm Beach or in New York. Now we do believe women have pain, but I don't know. I mean, for me, society seems to be shifting a little bit back into the old mentality these days.

Yeah. I even hate the term just trauma-informed. I think trauma-informed is really an important aspect of what we have to shift into as far as language goes and understanding. But I also think that when we say trauma, it's this ethereal word that people can't identify as what does that exactly mean. And so that's why one of my goals as an advocate is how do I define that in a way that makes sense for people, that narrows it down to me saying, my heart rate accelerates, I can't breathe, my stomach suddenly goes into a tight... Not my whole body tightens and becomes like a rock. My shoulders clench. My head, the back of my head, the back of my head feels like somebody hit it with a bat. Then that goes on and it It turns into insomnia. It turns into me walking into every single place I go and looking for exits and windows. It's a clear experience within my body, and I feel like that's what people don't talk about. They just say trauma. That doesn't bring a lot of understanding of what my experience, what every survivor's experience is, and the understanding of how sitting in that level of a lack of safety makes that part of our nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, overcompensate and constantly stay on.

So we are hyper vigilant every single moment of the day. And now, that's just a normal life, Erin. That's just a normal life, all right? Now, I pick up my phone and I see his... Can I swear? Yes. I see his fucking face everywhere. And everywhere. Then I have people sending me articles about him. And I have to be honest, people want me to dissect the whole conspiracy theories, and they want my opinions about it. I actually Don't go deep into it because it's too personal. But can I say two things that I think are really important in this moment? There's There's a house committee, I guess, that are deciding on meeting with Glenn Maxwell, right? Congratulations. They have fallen for the exact same manipulation and coercion tactics that teenage girls did and young women. The fact that she has not presented demands, they are falling for the same manipulative tactics and coercion skills, master for skills that teenage girls and young girls did. So that's one thing. I also keep hearing, I think this is the part that just really jarring is that people are pointing to Delaine Maxwell as a victim. And you and I both know this.

Why is she not a victim, Erin? She's not a victim. There's no power imbalance. There was no power imbalance with her relationship with Jeffrey. There was no power imbalance. She actually probably brought in more powerful connections and status than he even had. So if we were to argue it, she had more power than he did.

You're right. If you listen to the testimony of any farmer or any of the other victims who were directly impacted by Maxwell herself, you would see that, and the public would see that. I just read the transcripts that that are publicly available. Jess, I want to ask you a question not about the past, but about the present. Who is Jess Michiels today?

Thank you for asking. I have one mission in life, and that is what my company is founded on. It's Three Joans. It's a public benefit Corporation, and it is to lift the burden of shame from survivors and educate the people surrounding a survivor to know what to do when someone says me to. Because where there's a huge gap right now in support is all the people around us. I heard support from people initially when I told them, and then no one knows what to do. And so I remember distinctly sitting in my therapist's office and I said, I can sit here and I can talk to you about it in here, but as soon as I walk out that door past these four walls, I feel like I'm walking around alone and really isolated because there's no one outside of these four walls that can sit and hold space for me at all with this because it's such an uncomfortable topic. I believe we need sex education in schools so kids have language so that we are actually giving them language when something happens. If we take away language for kids to understand how to get help, we're part of the problem.

I believe that we teach that through healthy relationships. I'm actually working with a couple of nonprofits that I advocate with. That reminds me, Erin, if you don't mind, I'd like to say this, because one of the things we're seeing in the comments is disclosures from people, people feeling safe enough to say something. I would be remiss as an advocate if I also didn't even give them resources. I have to say I've tried to go into the comments everywhere and just either like a comment or respond to what saying, I see you, and I can't do that for everybody, but I'm reading them. But I'm reading them. I mean, I don't know if you've had a chance to read them. There's a couple of resources I just want to be able to tell people to go look for. There is an organization called Valor. It's valor. Us. They have a tab that says Get help. If you go to that tab and you click on your state, it will give you all of the resources in your state, local resources. That, interestingly enough, are also getting their funding cut. But just try to find any resources there because it doesn't matter when it happened.

The minute you start sharing it. So that's the other thing is everybody thinks, Oh, well, it was so long ago. What do you do? Ptsd is not the event. Trauma is not the event. It's the absence of an empathetic witness. And so if I share with you right now, Erin, you are my empathetic witness. Right now, how this affects me is greatly determined on how you respond. I highly recommend talking to three people that you know that you trust, and also going to those, finding a resource in your area. The second resource I want to tell everybody that's really, really important, especially now that the T app has been hacked and all that's happened with the tea app. There's an organization called Callisto. Projectcalistot. Org. Under Services, they have what's called Callisto Vault. This is available to college students. Did you know that college offenders offend an average of six times in their college career? An average of six times. Callisto It is a revolutionary technology. It's encrypted. A survivor can put in their information, and it's very safe. They can put in the identifying information about the person that harmed them. If by By chance, there are two people that were harmed by the same person, those two survivors are connected to an advocate.

It's very safe. It's not about whether something's legal or not. This is also something that's really important for me to say. Harm is not determined by what is in the law, how the law breaks it down. Something can be really, really horrible, and it doesn't fall within those lines. That doesn't determine harm. It determine the level of the injury.

Jess, I just want to say thank you. On behalf of everyone watching this, thank you for sharing your story, for being brave. I really hope that your story empowers others to share their stories. I hope that people hear your story, not for the person that caused the trauma, but rather the person that you have become in fighting for others and fighting to get it out, because that is the story, not the person. So thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Erin. Hey, folks.

Erin Parnas here. Thank you so much for watching the Parnas Perspective. Please consider subscribing to support our work as we grow this independent news media entity into something that rivals mainstream every single day. Thanks so much, and I'll see you soon.