‘He asked me if I wanted to meet a prince’: how Lisa Phillips survived grooming and abuse by Jeffrey Epstein

At 21 the former model was assaulted by Epstein on a trip to his island, starting a pattern that would last for years. She talks about the way that women and girls are manipulated, and what she has learned from other survivors

There have been times, says Lisa Phillips, when she has broken down during her new podcast series. In From Now On, she interviews survivors of abuse, including a member of the US gymnastics team, while weaving in her own story – one she is still coming to terms with. Now in her 40s, Phillips was 21 when she met the financier Jeffrey Epstein and was sexually assaulted by him. It was only after his death in 2019 – by suicide while detained on charges of sex trafficking girls as young as 14 – and meeting other survivors that Phillips started to understand the truth of what had happened to her. With the podcast also filmed for YouTube, she says you can probably “see me going from talking to, all of a sudden, I’m red and breathing weird, because I still couldn’t handle telling my story”.

In the series, she unpicks what makes abuse and grooming so complex. In Phillips’s own case, the initial assault was shocking, but Epstein kept drawing her back, and she met him fairly regularly over several years. “That’s one reason why it’s hard. The abuse is confusing to explain, because people will say, ‘Why did you go back?’ He did things in a way that doesn’t make you feel like it’s abuse, and he layered it with all these wonderful things. Until it got to the point where you started realising that you were being abused.”

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