"We were made uncomfortable enough to feel shame, but not uncomfortable enough to tell anyone."

Anouska de Georgiou shares the story she lived in silence—and the courage it took to survive Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Here’s what it felt like to witness her tell it.

Anouska De Georgiou walked into my Entertainment Reporting class last Wednesday. Her kindness glowed in the slight flush of her cheeks and her presence immediately filled the room. It signaled me to close my laptop and turn my phone over. They would stay that way for the rest of class.

Her Story

Anouska met Ghislaine Maxwell when she was just 16, on a trip to Paris with friends. She came from wealth — an upper-echelon London society, the kind where everyone knew everyone and no one said too much.

Everyone wanted to be part of “their club” because it meant status. A club Maxwell knew quite well.

“You are incredible,” she told Anouska. “And I have this incredible boyfriend. He’s a philanthropist and he loves helping young people. Maybe you’’ll be lucky enough to meet him one day.”

That boyfriend was Jeffrey Epstein.

To a 16-year-old, it sounded appealing. “These people could get me to where I wanted to be, very quickly,” she said. And being chosen felt intoxicating.

She was invited to Maxwell’s home in London to meet Epstein. An encounter that felt wrong almost immediately.

“You’re so strong,” Maxwell said. “Go on over and give [Epstein] a squeeze on the shoulder. Show him how strong you are.”

So, she did.

“As the level of inappropriateness escalated over the first sort of three meetings, I felt shame,” she said. But she wouldn’t dare tell anyone.

“How do you tell your mother you gave a much older man a massage? How do you even frame that conversation when you’ve never talked about sex before? How do you explain something you don’t fully understand yourself?” she said.

“I didn’t want to be in trouble.”

That sentence felt painfully young. And painfully relatable.

Anouska remained connected to Maxwell and Epstein for nearly ten years. But her ambition for success slowly turned into a feeling of “I already sacrificed everything, I should get something,” she said. So, she stayed.

Even now, she admitted, that thought carries shame.

Power, Manipulation and Grooming

From the beginning, she said, nothing happened without Maxwell. She gave Epstein his credibility. “[Epstein] wasn’t connected. He wasn’t polished. If I’d met him at a party, I would’ve thought he was vulgur,” Anouska said.

To Anouska, Maxwell presented herself like a sister. “We’re just girlies,” she’d tell Anouska.

“I’d always wanted a sister,” Anouska shared with us. And in some ways, that’s who Maxwell became to her.

With that bond came a level of secrecy, attachment and confusion.

It takes a certain kind of monster to construct a reality in which everyone around them is convinced that they are above all. Maxwell and Epstein succeeded in that.

“There are moments were I still think she’s my friend,” she said referring to Maxwell.

And when the moment to testify against Maxwell came, Anouska “felt like she was betraying a part of herself that loved her.”

That’s the cruel paradox of grooming: abuse and attachment can exist at the same time. “I hadn’t realized or reconciled how wrong what happened was,” she said. “When you don’t tell anyone, you don’t get to see their face and be like, ‘What you did to me was awful.’ There’s no frame of reference.”

The Moment Everything Shifted

Then she had her daughter.

Looking at her child, Anouska realized she would do anything to protect her—and in that reflection, she finally saw how wrong her past had been.

When Epstein died in 2019, Anouska chose to stand at the courthouse during the dismissal hearing, knowing it would break her.

But for the first time, she wasn’t alone. She stood with more than 20 other women who had endured similar pain. The shame she had spoken of before.

“We held each other up,” she said. They didn’t need to share what they had gone through, but they could all feel it.

Even I did. Years later, in an entirely separate environment. I felt that heaviness in my chest.

My Moments

After class ended, I approached her to say thank you — for feeling safe enough to share her story in a room full of young college students.

Before I could finish, she grabbed me by the arms and pulled me in. I immediately felt the weight of everything she was carrying.

And that was the moment I understood what she had gone through. How she felt standing with those women. The strength it took for her to mask her vulnerability.

My arms grew weak and I felt myself letting go of everything I was holding inside of me.

She hugged me tightly and said, “I feel everything.” And I believed her.

Because that was the first time that I didn’t have to say anything too — explain how I was feeling or what I’d gone through — for someone to understand exactly how I felt.

It made me realize that people who have endured something unspeakable in their lives can recognize it in others without words.

Anouska is brave. Not just for surviving, not just for speaking, but for walking into spaces like ours and trusting strangers with her story.

I will hold her honesty carefully. And I hope, in some small way, I reminded her that she is not alone.

Thank you Anouska.