A survivor of Jeffrey Epstein has candidly spoken out about the horrific abuse she endured at the hands of the paedophile financier after she was lured into visiting his home.
Jena-Lisa Jones was just 14 years old when Epstein sexually assaulted her at his Palm Beach mansion after she was hired as a masseuse.
In a lengthy interview she recalled how the attack began when the paedophile rolled over during the massage – and a ‘crazy clown face’ expression spread across his features when he realised she had no idea what he was about to do to her.
The mother-of-four has spent close to a decade tirelessly campaigning with other survivors for the release of the Epstein files, and she recently sat down with YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly to speak out about her horrifying encounter with the billionaire predator.
In an emotional, hour-long interview, she revealed how she crossed paths with the disgraced financier when a popular girl from her school told her and her friends about ‘this guy named Jeff,’ who was willing to pay them $200 each for a massage.
To Jena-Lisa, whose mother was a drug addict and would often forget to buy her and her siblings food, the offer was appealing.
‘[It] didn’t sound like that bad of an idea,’ she recalled. ‘Like, where else am I going to make that kind of money and be that age and not be able to work?’, she recalled.
But ‘Jeff’, she would later learn, was Jeffrey Epstein, a then 51-year-old billionaire who would, by 2006, come under investigation by local and federal authorities in Florida for alleged sexual crimes against dozens of underage girls.
As Jena-Lisa and her friend got ready to be taken to his house, the girl who had arranged for them to meet Epstein told them that they would each have to go up alone and massage him for 30 minutes.
Jeffrey Epstein survivor Jena-Lisa Jones has candidly spoken out about the struggles she endured after being subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of the paedophile financier
Jena-Lisa, pictured at the age of 14
Epstein kisses an unknown girl in this image recently released by the DOJ
‘That’s just how he liked it,’ the girl told them, ‘and that he may ask us to take our shirt off.’
But they were assured that ‘you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do’.
When the girls arrived at Epstein’s waterfront mansion, Jena-Lisa’s friend was taken upstairs to meet him first.
But within minutes, her friend was back.
Jena-Lisa was confused, as the girls had been told the massage session would last half an hour.
‘He didn’t like me because I was too developed,’ her friend told her after the encounter.
It was Jena-Lisa’s turn next. She was led to a room where a massage table had been set up, but ‘Jeff’ was nowhere to be seen.
‘I just thought it was weird that he wasn’t already in the room since my friend was just up there,’ Jena-Lisa recalled.
‘We [get] into the room…and she’s like “he’ll be in in a minute, go ahead and take your shirt off”, and pretty much tells me to get naked.’
Jena-Lisa did as she was told and waited, unaware that her life was about to change forever.
‘He walks in with a towel, and he [lies] face down and tells me to grab the massage oil, and he’s directing me the whole time on what to do’, she said.
Epstein had set an egg timer next to the massage table to keep track of the session.
‘I knew how long I had to stay, so in my head I was like “just get through this, and you’re going to be done. It’s only 30 minutes”.’
And in the beginning, it was just a massage, Jena-Lisa recalled.
But she described how Epstein suddenly flipped over and had ‘a crazy clown face expression’.
‘He went from this normal man [who] had walked into the room to when he flipped over, [in which] there was excitement in his face like he knew what was about to happen, and I had no clue.’
‘And he just takes his towel off, he pretty much tells me to take all my clothes off, and does horrific things,’ she added.
The front exterior of Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, where Jena-Lisa’s abuse took place
Epstein abuse survivor Jena-Lisa Jones holds up a photo of her younger self during a news conference with lawmakers on the Epstein Files Transparency Act outside the U.S. Capitol on November 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.
‘I had never kissed a boy at that point…and now I have this old man [taking control] over me, and I couldn’t say anything, or I didn’t know how to say anything. Where was I going to go? I was in the room by myself.
‘There were so many things in that moment at 14 that I just couldn’t even process all of it.’
All Jena-Lisa could do in that moment was look at the egg timer, trying not to make eye contact with Epstein while following his instructions, praying it would all be over.
‘The whole time I’m just dying inside, and I just want to go home.’
She felt angry at the girl who had brought her there, saying: ‘She knew this was going to happen. There was no way she didn’t know that this wasn’t going to happen…This wasn’t her first time bringing people.’
‘He sexually assaulted me….he touched me inappropriately and put his hands in places he shouldn’t,’ she said tearfully.
Epstein then proceeded to perform a sex act on himself, she said, and once the 30 minutes were over, he got up, grabbed his towel and walked out, leaving the terrified 14-year-old alone in the room again.
‘I’m just standing there. I hurry up and get my clothes back on. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I’m so confused [about] so many aspects of what had just happened to me.’
On her way home and struggling to process what had happened to her, Jena-Lisa suddenly burst into tears.
‘Shut the f**k up, you just made $200,’ she was told, as the girl who had brought her there threw money at her.
But her nightmare was far from over, and she would carry the weight of those 30 minutes with her well into her adult life.
Jena-Lisa felt intense shame after her encounter with Epstein, and for a long time, she blamed herself for the abuse she endured.
‘I went there on my free will…you hold that guilt of like, you kind of set yourself up for that,’ she explained.
That shame, she said, led her to become a stripper at the age of 16.
‘I didn’t have control in that situation, so it was like, “How can I get control back?”
Files released by the DOJ included numerous disturbing images of Epstein with young women
‘I never liked doing it, I always knew it was wrong. I went from wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer or a school teacher to taking my clothes off for men to survive, and I wanted a way out. I just wanted someone to come and save me.’
At 19, Jena-Lisa married a man who was 22 years older than her, and became pregnant with her first child soon after.
‘He had a house, and he was normal. I just wanted what I had always wanted growing up, I just wanted a normal family, I just wanted a normal life.’
But it was a difficult marriage, and Jena-Lisa, then a mother to two children, decided to leave him for good.
It was only then that she began processing what had happened to her as a child.
And it was during that time, in 2017, that she encountered Epstein again.
Jena-Lisa had been mindlessly scrolling through Facebook when she suddenly came across a picture of the billionaire with former President Bill Clinton, alongside an article.
‘I hadn’t seen him in all these years, and I’m freaking out,’ she recalled.
It was then that she learned that Epstein had been arrested over a decade ago for soliciting prostitution from a minor, for which he was registered as a sex offender.
And as she dug through years-old news articles, Jena-Lisa became furious to learn that Epstein had gotten nothing but a ‘slap on the wrist’ and feared that he was continuing his sick abuse of underage girls.
‘At that time, my daughters [were] going to school on Palm Beach Island…I had never thought of him like that, in the proximity of my kids…And when I’m reading that this man didn’t even get in trouble…I knew in my heart that he was still doing all of this.’
Jena-Lisa was enraged, and all of the emotions she felt that fateful day at Epstein’s mansion came back up.
But now she felt she was strong enough to stick up for herself and decided to take action.
After reaching out to a lawyer, she discovered she had been a victim of a massive sex trafficking network.
‘I thought it was just this small group of us girls that were involved in this.
‘I’m finding out all of this horrific s**t, and it’s so much more, and there’s so many more girls, and I’m enraged.’
Jena-Lisa Jones, centre, hugs Haley Robson, right, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., left, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, in Washington
Around that time, the Miami Herald was working on an investigation into Epstein, and Jena-Lisa agreed to be interviewed alongside other survivors, including the late Virginia Giuffre.
When the investigation came out, Jena-Lisa said she felt the ‘first glimpse of hope’, but sharing such an intimate part of herself with the world was hard, she said.
‘My world changed. I allowed myself to [come out] publicly about something I was extremely embarrassed about.
‘A lot of fear started coming into play with all of that…Yes, I wanted him to get in trouble, but I also didn’t want to lose my privacy.
‘I kept thinking, am I doing this for the right reason? And I knew I was, but I also knew it was at such a [high] cost to myself.’
But all of her self-doubt finally seemed worthwhile when, on July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested for the second time, on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.
‘I just broke down in tears,’ she recalled. ‘This is what we [had] been working for.’
A month later, as Jena-Lisa prepared to come face-to-face with Epstein in court to tell him what he had done to her, her phone rang.
Epstein had killed himself in his prison cell, she was told, and there would no longer be a court appearance.
‘I had done everything, and still wasn’t going to get what I needed…I was never going to have my day in court. He was never going to have to face me. He was never going to have to listen to me; he was never going to have to hear my words.
‘Whether they would have affected him or not, it was for me. I needed that, and it was stolen from me.
‘People say “he’s dead, that’s a good thing”, yeah, great he’s gone. But he still won. He never had to be held accountable in a way that was fair.’
But now that she has told her story and fought tirelessly for the release of the Epstein files, Jena-Lisa continues on her path to self-healing.
A mother of four, Jena-Lisa continues to live in Palm Beach alongside her partner and works at a local church.
Her testimony comes amid the recent release of millions of Epstein files.
Included were documents concerning some of Epstein’s famous associates, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and email correspondences between Epstein and Elon Musk and other prominent contacts from across the political spectrum.
The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and longtime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Lawmakers complained when the Justice Department made only a limited release, but officials said more time was needed to review additional documents that were discovered and to ensure no sensitive information about victims was released.
January’s disclosure represents the largest document dump to date about a saga the Trump administration has struggled to shake because of the president’s previous association with Epstein.
Criminal investigations into the financier have long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and others who have suspected government cover-ups.
