NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
Nov. 17, 2019
By Jesse McKinley
By now, the contours of Teresa Helm’s account have become familiar. She was 22 when she met the man that she now knows was Jeffrey Epstein.
She came to Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion for what she believed to be an interview with a wealthy client for a job as his traveling masseuse, she said. There was talk of lavish parties, exotic travel and educational opportunities.
With no one else in the room, Ms. Helm said, the man, whom she knew only as Jeffrey, asked for a foot rub. Once she began, she said, he moved his foot into her “intimate parts.” When she tried to leave, he grabbed and sexually assaulted her.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she recalled him saying as she left.
Ms. Helm returned home to California, deeply disturbed by the experience. Embarrassed and scared, she did not call the police, and she did her best to banish the episode from her memory. It was only 17 years later, when she heard Mr. Epstein’s name while listening to a YouTube channel shortly after his arrest in July, that she began to realize who had assaulted her in 2002.
“I can’t even describe, it was beyond my heart sinking,” said Ms. Helm, now a 39-year-old mother of two living in Oakwood, Ohio. “It was something like a force. I was literally overtaken by horror.”
Ms. Helm is one of five women who sued Mr. Epstein’s estate in Federal District Court in Manhattan last week, accusing him of rape, battery and false imprisonment and seeking unspecified damages.
But the lawsuits have another purpose: to build momentum for changing the statute of limitations in New York and elsewhere for civil claims stemming from sex crimes, which are under growing scrutiny across the United States.
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