Multiple times a week, Anouska De Georgiou described looking up Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s names because she knew the abuse she suffered was not an isolated incident. For years, De Georgiou did this. Until one day in 2015, she said she looked up their names and saw that another woman, Virginia Giuffre, had filed a civil lawsuit against Maxwell.
De Georgiou said she was abused by Epstein from the ages of 16 to 26, and became a key witness in the trial to officially dismiss the charges, known as a dismissal hearing, after he died in jail. She spoke to an Entertainment Reporting class at USC Annenberg last week. After the talk, De Georgiou sat down for an exclusive interview with Annenberg Media to explain how she became one of the primary advocates to release the Epstein files while protecting victims’ identities.
Immediately after discovering the lawsuit, De Georgiou said she contacted Brad Edwards, the attorney representing Giuffre, and told him she wanted to help Giuffre but did not want to discuss what happened to her.
De Georgiou said she offered to coach Giuffre, explaining that she knew what Giuffre could say to Maxwell that would “get to her.” However, a couple of weeks later, De Georgiou said she received a phone call in the middle of the night from an unknown number.
Over the phone, she heard a stranger’s voice telling her, “You have a beautiful daughter.”
The caller proceeded to say her daughter’s name, what hospital she was born in and that De Georgiou “should not be involving yourself in anything that might jeopardize her safety.”
Concerned for her daughter’s safety, De Georgiou said she removed herself from the trial.
Years passed, and in 2019, Epstein died in prison. De Georgiou said Edwards called her to ask whether she would speak at his dismissal hearing, along with other survivors.
De Georgiou explained she had two days to make her decision, but in the end, she flew to New York, where she met Giuffre and the 21 other women who stepped forward.
“We literally held each other up,” she said. “This sort of idea that all these women had been through, as either young women or children, almost exactly the same situation with the same people, and it was just, I mean, it was too much.”
The hearing was the first time De Georgiou spoke publicly about the abuse she endured at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.
Born to an affluent British family in 1977, De Georgiou spent her childhood moving around the United Kingdom until she and her mother settled in the South of France, according to Tatler.
De Georgiou recalled she was 16 years old when she met an early 30s Maxwell in a hotel lobby in Paris, where she said they quickly connected over having domineering fathers and both speaking French. At the time, De Georgiou said she had freshly moved back to London to attend high school at Marlborough College and had earned a spot at Oxford, just like Maxwell had.
“Ghislaine was everything that I needed and everything that I wanted. I aspired to be like her,” she said in an episode of the MeidasTouch Podcast earlier this month.
Feeling a genuine connection with Maxwell, De Georgiou said she accepted an invitation to meet Epstein, Maxwell’s philanthropist boyfriend, and she had told De Georgiou that his “favorite thing to do is to help young people, especially young women.”
In her first meeting with the New York financier, she said she dressed in her mother’s business clothes to look professional. She remembered Epstein asking what she really wanted to do, to which she responded that she wanted to be in the music business. Next, she recalled how Maxwell told her to go squeeze Epstein’s shoulder so he could see how “strangely strong” she was.
Soon after, De Georgiou said Maxwell called her asking for a “really, really big favor.” Maxwell told her Epstein’s massage therapist cancelled, and she needed De Georgiou to give him a massage as he was “really demanding,” only allowing certain people to massage him.
She said alarm bells sounded in her head.
“I’m thinking, how am I going to explain to my mother what I’m going to do,” she said. “I went to these people’s house, and then they asked me to give this guy a massage, and I did, what am I going to say?” she said.
At the same time, De Georgiou was 16, unsure of what was acceptable in what she described as these elite social “clubs.” She explained that Maxwell also reinforced her confusion, praising her and telling her, “You’re my hero,” and as a teenager inspired by Maxwell, it created an inner conflict.
“I think that’s the thing about the grooming aspect,” she said. “You are made uncomfortable enough that you feel uncomfortable and you feel shame, but not uncomfortable enough that you tell anyone.”
Within six months of De Georgiou’s first encounter with Maxwell and Epstein, she said the sexual abuse got incrementally worse, and she fell into substance abuse as a method of dissociation that lasted the entire duration of the 10-year period she knew them.
At 26, De Georgiou said she was “self-destructing on a whole other level,” but with the help of some friends, she became sober. As she began to wean herself off substances, she said she was no longer able to dissociate in the same way, leading her to realize the gravity and extent of the abuse she had suffered. De Georgiou said she was able to remove herself from Epstein, made easier by the fact that she had aged out of the target group.
However, in the years between leaving Epstein’s circle in the mid-2000s and Giuffre’s lawsuit in 2015, De Georgiou said she told only two people what happened. She said part of her silence stemmed from fear that she would be kicked out of the upper echelons of English society because many of her friends were connected to Epstein.
“There is a group agreement going on,” she said. “We’re in a club, and we hush up and sweep under the carpet things that are unpleasant, especially if it might affect our reputation or cause us some kind of loss of earnings or loss of standing.”
De Georgiou also said the subject of sex was taboo and she had never talked about it with her parents, or anybody else.
“And then, of course, the biggest fear of any survivor, which is I won’t be believed,” she said. “People will say I’m lying, which has been said repeatedly about me and to me, and still happens every single day.”
However, De Georgiou said that the birth of her daughter changed everything for her.
“When I had my daughter, I saw who I used to be,” she said. “I realized that I was that child, and I realized that I would do anything to protect this child.”
Seeing other survivors begin to speak up, De Georgiou said she was “overwhelmed” with emotion and, like with her daughter, she felt the need to protect them.
Meeting them, she said, was like meeting sisters.
“In so many ways, we came from the same place, even if we had different circumstances,” De Georgiou said. “We did actually come from this, this trauma bonding experience that we’d all had with the same people.”
After speaking at Epstein’s dismissal hearing in 2019, De Georgiou testified against Maxwell. However, De Georgiou said she found it difficult to do so because it felt like “testifying against someone in your family.”
She said there are still moments when she feels sorry for Maxwell, which has made it confusing for her and others to understand.
“I think the sort of insidious thing about grooming is that there are moments I still think she’s my friend. There are moments where I have these pangs of weird attachment,” she said. “I didn’t want to [testify] for me, because I felt like I was betraying a part of myself that loved her and cared about her, and I felt that way about him, too.”
Since then, De Georgiou has been a public advocate for justice for Epstein’s victims as well as the release of the Epstein files. She also founded the Kintsugi Foundation, a nonprofit focusing on helping women recover from addiction and trauma.
“I don’t think events in my life define me. I think the way that I respond to them is who I am, and if I can bring purpose to my life and demonstrate to other people that there are a number of different ways to respond to events like this, then I can be useful”, she said. “I can be helpful, and potentially, I can help somebody else have the information and maybe the courage to handle it in a way that they might not have.”
De Georgiou said she has focused on who she is, rather than who she is not, reaffirming herself and developing an identity that she alone is in charge of.
“I think it’s important to talk to yourself as if you’re talking to or about a small child,” she said. “And to also know that who you are as a person can’t be damaged in any way, like your soul, who you are as a being living in this world can’t be destroyed, can’t be harmed, can’t be broken in any way.”