Anya says she was dejected. Epstein told her to visit him in Palm Beach, Florida, where he was on day-release while he served his sentence. He had blamed his conviction on a girl deceiving him with fake ID, she says.
Anya had to sign a register kept by a uniformed police officer to see him. Epstein escorted her into a back room, where he sexually assaulted her for the first time. At least two other women have said he sexually assaulted them while serving his sentence.
After the assault, Epstein ushered her out of the back room and started joking with the other assistants waiting outside that Anya was “so shy”. They all laughed at her, she says, and their reaction made her blame herself.
“I thought maybe nothing wrong really happened here. Maybe it’s just my reaction that is wrong,” she says. “Maybe it’s my Russian upbringing, maybe it’s how strict my parents were, but there’s something off with me and not with him.”
It was only when the Epstein files were released that Anya says she realised what had really happened. Emails showed that despite her face-to-face meeting with Faith Kates, the agency founder had in fact rejected her a year earlier.
Anya says she realised she had been strung along for months by Epstein and set up to fail, in “a very elaborate grooming”. Then, when she was vulnerable, isolated and far from home, Epstein had struck.
The type of slow, steady grooming Anya describes is designed to avoid triggering the target’s sense of danger, “like stealth bombers are designed just to go under the radar”, says the psychologist Quinn-Cirillo.
Faith Kates’ lawyer told us in a statement that any claim her client had any knowledge or involvement in Epstein’s purported trafficking is false and defamatory. Suggesting Epstein would relay the agency’s decision to Anya was “unusual… false and uncorroborated,” the lawyer added.
The agency made its own decisions about which models to take on, and did not seek Epstein’s approval for such decisions, the statement continued, adding: “Obviously, there is nothing unusual about a potential model being considered and rejected from a modelling agency, even more than once.”
Next Management said in a statement that the company had no relationship with Epstein and Kates’ alleged actions had been “hers alone”.