A woman who said she was drugged and raped by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has spoken publicly for the first time to BBC Newsnight about her ordeal. The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity and whom the BBC will refer to as Nicky, said she met the disgraced financier when she was 19, working as a model.

Encounter at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion

Nicky said she met Epstein at his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, where she gave him a massage. After the session, he gave her a drink of water, and she blacked out for hours, when she believes she was raped by Epstein. She said she felt encouraged to come forward by other survivors sharing their stories and is now calling for the US Department of Justice to release all its remaining files on Epstein.

In an extensive interview with BBC Newsnight, Nicky described in detail Epstein’s abuses. As other survivors of Epstein have recounted, Nicky’s interaction with Epstein began with a massage. He asked her to remove her top and bra. ‘I honestly thought, OK, maybe it’s just an old rich guy that has a fetish and so be it,’ she said. ‘Whatever. I mean, it paid my rent.’

But a few weeks later, when Nicky returned to see Epstein, her encounter was different. ‘So I took my top off just like last time, started at his feet, worked my way up, and when I got to his upper thigh and went on to his chest, he pulled at my jeans, like almost to unbutton them,’ Nicky said. She told Epstein she was on her period, which was not true. He encouraged her to have sex with him anyway and proceeded to masturbate in front of her, Nicky recalled.

Blackout and aftermath

She quickly got dressed and told herself she had to ‘get the hell out of here’. She went to the bathroom to wash the massage oil off her hands and when she returned, Epstein offered her a sip of water. ‘I took some water and I have no recollection of anything for a minimum of 12 hours after that,’ Nicky said. She said she woke up feeling sick, sluggish and heavy. Nicky said when she went to the bathroom, there were signs she had had sex, although she could not recall any intercourse.

‘I have done various psychotherapies to try to remember, to try and have a glimpse of something, and it’s black, I have no idea,’ she said of the interaction. ‘But I can logically make a variety of assumptions that I think would be very accurate.’ She believes Epstein drugged and sexually assaulted her.

Last November, US President Donald Trump signed into law legislation passed by Congress compelling the justice department to release all material from its investigations into Epstein. But after millions of documents were released, the agency faced bipartisan backlash, with US lawmakers accusing it of failing to obscure some identifying information about survivors while protecting the identities of those who were not victims. Some two million files have not yet been released by the justice department.

Call for full release of files

The fact that this public transparency had to be prompted by an act of Congress has infuriated Nicky. ‘That is absolutely a waste of my and everybody else’s taxpayer dollars, complete waste,’ she said. And more than that, the name of the law, the Epstein Transparency Act, frustrates her as she said it continues to glorify an abuser and his actions.

‘Why don’t you name it the Survivors [Act] or the Virginia Transparency Act or something?’ Nicky said. ‘But no, we’re gonna go ahead and continue to glorify this horrific, disgusting person who is a complete monster.’ The two million files that have yet to be made public are ones Nicky said she wants to see released ‘properly, honestly, ethically’.

‘I don’t think that’s too much to ask,’ she said. ‘I would love for us to be able to heal.’ But healing when your abuser feels inescapable, Nicky said, is difficult. ‘Having it constantly brought up and thrown in our faces at every turn, at every channel you turn on, the front page of a magazine in the grocery store line, social media, what have you, it doesn’t allow us to heal,’ she said.

‘We survivors are nothing more than pawns for political discourse at this point, and it’s disgusting.’