It Ain’t Fiction!

Fictional Jeffrey Epstein (Jordan Hayes) Being Led Off By Fictional Feds

Law & Order SVU 2011 Episode, "Flight"

Fiction is the best way to tell the truth. Many writers agree with me and over the years they have tried to tell us many times about things that are going on all around us that we are too busy or too good to see. Good people, I find, can imagine evil, but they usually don’t. They usually assume most people are like them, busy minding their own business, not busy trying to hurt others.

To name a few fictional truth tellings - Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson, along with revealing certain CIA mind-bending antics, Conspiracy Theory was the first to call John Lennon’s death an assassination. Michael Clayton, “I am Shiva, God of Death!” aimed at a fictional Monsanto-like super company busy poisoning the world. Prime Suspect for its 1993 Season 3, "The Keeper of Souls," about the organized abuse and, sometimes, murder of street kids and orphans by rich and powerful men. Even comedian Seth MacFarlane tried to tell us with his 2005 Family Guy cartoon of Stewie running naked through the mall screaming, “Help! I just escaped from Kevin Spacey’s basement!”

For years, I have been reading in The Daily Beast about this fellow named Jeffrey Epstein who was a pretty intense partier. Thank you Daily Beast for your courage in speaking out. You’ve been telling us about Epstein’s Fantasy Island, about his ranch in New Mexico, about his buddy Ghislaine Maxwell who procured very young girls for him, about Prince Andrew, Trump, Bill Clinton, about the parties and the after-parties, and the wee small hour romps with under-aged girls in the manses of rich and powerful men. You have told us oh, Daily Beast, about the Catholic Church, about the Vatican, about the culling of child sex slaves from private schools, from orphanages, from the homeless children on the streets. We still haven’t paid attention to these last, “suffer the little children to come unto me” said Jesus to his disciples.

I find it remarkable that people still need to see it on TV before they will get it. No, that’s not so because it WAS on TV and they still didn’t get it.

Thank you Law & Order, Special Victims Unit, cast & crew, and especially creator, Dick Wolf, who along with writers Dawn DeNoon and Christina M. Torres, tried to tell us in their 2011 episode, “Flight,” about the exploits of super-rich financier Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically “Flight” echoes the time Epstein, fictionally called Jordan Hayes (cloyingly played by Colm Feore) received a French girl as a birthday present. (In real life, Epstein has been accused of having received three twelve-year-old French girls as a birthday present.) In the episode, the French girl is tricked into giving Jordan Hayes a massage, during which he requires her to be naked. (What is it about this guy and massages? Epstein seems to have gotten several nude virginal massages daily. Ugh!) She’s trapped in the room. Later, before she is allowed to leave, an attendant makes her offer up a friend to be Jordan’s next victim. In fact, SVU went on to describe several underaged girls paid to give weird, creepy massages to Jordan Hayes, Jordy to his friends, namely an older French girl who used to be is lover and was now his procurer of very young girls. This dark-haired young woman eerily reflects the real life older beauty, Ghislaine Maxwell, a beautiful socialite who allegedly procured Epstein’s victims, one wonders why she didn’t have better things to do with her life. Perhaps like many real life female sex slavery procurers, she’s angry about her own victimization and just doesn’t care about anyone else. Or maybe she’s just plain evil. According to the SVU episode and also the real life victims, the procured girls were kept hostage till they performed whatever bizarre sexual act Jordy (Epstein) wanted or the tender, underaged girls would be sent out to perform for Hayes’ (Epstein’s) rich old cohorts.

The Real Life Ghislaine Maxwell

Spoiler alert:

Unlike the real life Epstein who supposedly committed suicide (I think he was murdered, hung, dispatched by his old cronies who wanted to silence him. They always kill their friends.), in the SVU story, Jordan Hayes isn’t punished for his crimes. The Feds swoop down to save Jordan in a deus ex machina move because he is too valuable as a witness to allow him to rot away in prison with other Level 3 sex offenders. As Jordan is swept away by this accommodating nebulous Federal agency, his ex-girl friend turned pimp now facing 80 years in prison, is handcuffed and left screaming, “I love you, Jordy!” 

Fictional Ghislaine Maxwell (remarkable resemblance!) handcuffed, facing 80 years

In real life, Epstein’s facilitator, Maxwell, who was photographed aprés Epstein’s arrest having a carefree lunch at an In & Out Burger, seems to have gotten off Scott-free. I would think she knows too much. Remember, they always kill their friends. Her brain must be what we used to call “a little black book” full of names and dates and addresses. 

All perfectly useless now. Unless real life coppers step up to do what fictional ones have done.

Fictional Special Victims Unit

Next time you hear yourself talking about Jeffrey Epstein and others like him, don't just talk, do something - stop for a minute to give to the orgs that are out there fighting for the victims of sexual abuse. Anything you can afford, even $10, can help someone escape their captors. Here are two of my favorite orgs - The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Polaris.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2019

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

August 5, 1962 HOLY DAY

Marilyn Monroe, 1962

On August 5, 1962, 55 years ago, we lost her. 

Some of us were there. Though only a child, I remember my feelings vividly. So powerful an impact did her death have on me, so powerful an impact did her life have on me, that the following chapter of my novel Holy Days is the first chapter of the novel that I wrote. 

(Excerpted from the novel, Holy Days by Patricia Goodwin, all rights reserved.)

AUGUST 5, 1962
HOLY DAY

Daddy walked on to the porch where his brother, Jake, and some other men were working. Daddy dipped his love curl to light a cigarette - he was already my husband by then - rolling the remains of a pack of Luckies and matches up into his T-shirt sleeve.

        “Jake. Did ya hear about the great loss to womanhood?” Daddy asked, speaking into his hands as he lighted his cigarette.

       The porch wrapped around one side of the house and cupped its hand around the front where I’d sat on its broad rail at the age of ten and wrote my first story, “The Bright Red Color,” now immortalized in the little book with the star on it given by Mr. Mario Lanza. I loved to sit barefoot on the wooden porch rail with a book or a paper and pencil, feeling paper in my hands, holding the pencil, feeling wood warm on my bare soles. I loved to nest there as much as in a tree, its branches open like a hand to hold me.

          The afternoon sun lighted the sawdust round the workmen so they seemed the haloed angels of workmen. I stood at the front screen door, where Daddy had just passed through, watching their hard, white T-shirts aglow with the setting sun. Their cigarette tips burned fiery red; pencils were stuck behind their ears; their belts looped with tools, hammers, T-squares, wrenches. Ma was making them re-do the porch; under Ma’s command, the men were screening in the porch, killing the broad wooden rail with a screen right down the middle, right between my legs where they’d go on the flat railing, my summer home, no more.

      Uncle Jake, Paul, Daddy. Also, Uncles Salvi and Sonny, who were good carpenters and good men: out of their league here like priests helping to reform criminals, they lent a hand.

         I loved to watch them, softened by the lighted sawdust. In the world of men, I was invisible at the screen door, though I could be seen clearly enough. I was a fat, blonde child bursting her shorts, sticky with sweat, sticky with the black drips of watermelon and popsicle on her unshaved legs, her lumpy, mosquito scabbed legs.

         Uncle Jake, reaching for a board, turned his licking mouth grin to Daddy, who sucked on his cigarette, mysteriously holding in his secret a moment longer.

           “So, what’s this great loss to womanhood?”

         “Marilyn Monroe committed suicide.”

         “Ya shittin’ me!”

         “Get outta here!”

         “I just heard it on the radio.”

         Jake wiped his face with his handkerchief.

         “Jesus Christ.”

         “Jesus - ya sure?”

         “It wuz just on the radio.”

         “Well, wa’ happened?”

         “She took a bottle a’ pills.”

         “Jeez’!”

         “Why the hell’d she do a thing like that?”

         Silence.

       The men looked down at their feet; they poked the sawdust with their work boots. Jake scratched the board he was holding with his black thumbnail. Uncle Salvi frowned his disapproval of suicide; Uncle Sonny looked impressed. Daddy smoked thoughtfully, mingling grey smoke with clouds of golden sawdust. Perhaps, he considered the magnificence of his message.

         “She wuz naked when they found her. Sprawled naked on the bed.”

         “Naked?”

         “Naked?”

         “Yeah.”

         “Who found her?”

         “The maid.”

         “Christ.”

         They were silent. Deep lines instantly creased on their foreheads and held there, till Jake broke the silence with his three-toothed grin.

         “Wish I wuz on that reconnaissance,” he joked.

      The others agreed with a low murmur and a shuffling back to work, which continued in a silent tribute to her made by the concentration of the hammer slowly banging against the nail, the patient saw, the meditative sandpapering of board. I watched their tribute, their hard muscles flexing under their straining shirts, the square asses of men, broad across, leaning into a job, Daddy’s love curl bouncing vigorously as he worked thinking about - her.

         They knew her in a way I didn’t. To me, she was flat as a television screen, painted like a doll, sparkling with color and diamonds, which she said, “were a girl’s best friend.”

        They were thinking about her white skin, about the heat caught under her heavy white breasts, about the dewy moisture that grew there - and in the other place, like under arms, inside her thighs, wet, warm pockets to slide their hands in and that hard, dry thing always seeking - always - the warm, wet putting place. How they knew her.

         But, they did not know her painted red lips; those were less real than the rest. Less real: her white blonde hair. Her bottomless eyes, far less real than her very bottom, their fingertips, their penis tip, quivered every time she turned around.

      If I were Daddy, I would have carved her name, MARILYN, into one of the boards and, turning the board inward, secreted her name into the porch forever. But, I wasn’t him and he was not so much like me - reverent. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about her anymore. Maybe he was thinking about the hot sun burning on his back, about the dry sawdust in his throat, maybe he was thinking about his next ice cold, throat-burning beer.

         But, I was thinking about her. Thinking there was more to find out about her, more I didn’t know, but would, soon.

          I would think men made her do things. “Put your leg up, Miss Monroe, there, that’s it.” “Smile, Marilyn!” “Yeah!” But, maybe, she didn’t need to be told. Maybe she knew what to do and the men just thought they were in control. She knew how to lift her leg, how to roll in the surf, and bend, pleadingly, from the waist, how to stand over a blasting hot grate so that her skirt filled famously with the wind of trains, so that trains blasted through the crotches of every man who saw her, always smiling.

         I would learn she wished she was a housewife, but she wasn’t a housewife. She wished to lean, sleepy-eyed and barefaced out the sunny morning window. She wanted to be on the cover of Good Housekeeping where she said she never would be. She told a serious actress, “Oh, no! Don’t wish you were like me! People respect you!”

        As I watched the work of men, I saw much to admire. Their dirty, used tools, black with oil, powdered with wood dust and curly chips, tools that worked so often, they were never cleaned by the kind of men who quit at quitting time. I saw their muscles work and grow big and wet so that their T-shirts melted to the skin of their backs making wide, sacramental rings under their arms and ceremonial wet spots dead center of their hard breasts and between the wings of their shoulder blades. My father’s neck was written with black rings. Black hair came from his nostrils and his red brow dripped black lines down his pockmarked cheek. Jake grinned every grin lasciviously, whether he meant or felt lascivious or not, with only the three, blackened yellow spikes that remained. Paul was there, foolishly lapping up the atmosphere like a little brother tagging along. When Daddy or Jake lit a cigarette (Paul couldn’t light a cigarette worth a damn, he wasn’t bad enough.), and hushed their hands over their mouths in deep communion with the wrapped tobacco bitterly burning their lips, burning a wet hole right through the cool, white paper, I smelled the quick, startled pungency as the cigarette caught fire and Daddy’s head went back pulling smoke like lava into his lungs, letting it pour round his lungs, breathing it out his nose and mouth like a dragon breathing fire and smoke, then, no one had ever lit a cigarette before, no, not James Dean or Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando - no one.

         Sawdust and the slanting, orange sun and smoke filled the porch, now getting smaller and tighter with screen, losing more and more the sweet, green air of trees.

         I looked down at my nubs of breasts that were the tiniest tips of icebergs, the very topmost points of pyramids buried in a thousand years of sands, and my fat stomach, as though I had swallowed a balloon that would carry me aloft to wondrous lands, which I saw, at that moment, as my inadequacy and my gluttony and my cushion against the onslaught of the world, and I thought, I couldn’t help thinking, “What a poor substitute I am for Marilyn Monroe in my Daddy’s life.”

©PatriciaGoodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest book is Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author.