Nobody's Girl summary

Entering teenage years is a perilous time for girls, even under the best of circumstances. For girls growing up who have been repeatedly violated and abused, it is often catastrophic.

For Jenna, it meant she started staying out late, skipping school, experimenting with drugs and boys. Then, around aged 13, she got raped in the back of a car for hours by two older teenagers. The boys were caught, but the local police knew that she had drunk alcohol and smoked pot with her rapists, and so claimed she had consented. Instead of the offenders getting punished, Jenna was sent off to a rehabilitation camp for out-of-control teens.

When she stepped into Jeffrey Epstein’s pink Palm Beach mansion on El Brillo Way as a sixteen-year-old, Jenna Roberts could hardly have known the horrifying circumstances it would lead to, nor the years of suffering she would endure. 

Maxwell led her to a lavish room in the mansion with a massage table, and Jeffrey Epstein stepped into the room in only a towel. Both he and Maxwell encouraged Jenna to rub the naked Epstein more and more intimately, and even in this first session forced sexual contact with her. Disoriented and confused, Jenna had two hundred dollars thrust into her hands, was given back her Mar-a-Lago uniform, and was dropped off at home by the butler with a promise that she would return again tomorrow.

Jeffrey Epstein liked young girls, so when Jenna was 16, he considered her special. As the years went by, and she turned more and more to drugs to cope, he was less attentive. Jenna could also see Ghislaine’s anxiety over her own aging, knowing Epstein’s predilection for youth. Maxwell took these feelings out on Jenna during their threesomes, often hurting her with sex toys to take revenge. 

Epstein also developed an interest in BDSM, and began physically abusing Jenna during their sexual encounters. He enjoyed her fear that he might kill her. Meanwhile, her own body was breaking down. When she needed to be rushed to the hospital for an ectopic pregnancy when she was still underage, doctors never spoke to her with Epstein out of the room. No mandated reporting happened, either.

This is the part in most fairy tales where the story ends: the fair maiden has been rescued and found her handsome prince. Happily ever after time. But life isn’t a fairy tale, and so Jenna’s story was just beginning. 

First, she had to grow up. She’d never cooked or cleaned for herself, paid a bill or balanced a budget. She was an actual child who was addicted to powerful drugs. Slowly, patiently, her new family taught her, and it wasn’t long before she was building a family of her own. 

Modern fairy tales might end here. The princess was rescued, fought back against her enemies, brought down their mighty empires, and then lived happily ever after as a total badass. But this isn’t that kind of fairy tale, either. It is the story of a real woman who was born, and lived her life as best she could, and then died by suicide at the age of just 41.

She was already in physical and mental trouble by that point, having endured so much torture from such a young age. By now she had broken her neck in a fall and needed two surgeries. Yet the neck injury caused chronic pain. Then in early March of 2025 she was in a car accident when a vehicle she was riding in was hit by a bus. Initially believed to have only minor injuries, she went into organ failure and was posting on Twitter about being given only days to live just weeks later.