Literally all of these powerful men and women were looking at us as toys and as jokes and as playthings

and didn't see fit to tell anyone or try to stop it.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Best People podcast.

The Best People are often the ones going first and telling the truth, especially when that

truth is painful.

They're not always women, but we find more often than not, they are.

This is the Best People podcast, and this is Jess Michaels and her attorney, Jennifer Freeman. Thank you both for being here.

Good to be with you. Thank you so much for having me here, Nicole.

I'm so moved by everyone who comes on the show, but I'm only changed by a handful of interviews

and guests, and I was changed by my conversation with you on the show. So that's why I wanted to

have a chance to talk to you a little bit more today. Thank you. That means the world to me. Thank you.

How do you find the courage, not just to survive what you survived at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, but to make talking about the trauma part of your healing?

That's a great question because talking about it was a very clear mission for me early on because I couldn't. When I first started

even processing what happened, I could go five minutes. And this includes writing because I'm a big

journaler. So I would try to write and I could go five minutes, ten minutes, and I would be

hit with a stomachache, a headache. I would fall into coma-like sleep because I just wasn't

capable of handling the truth of it all and really facing all of the feelings around it. And so it

is taken, I made a concerted effort, I would say, by 2020,

I was slowly day by day inching my way into finding my words and healing this injury.

And a lot of people don't understand that when we go through sexual harm, we can injure

this part of our brain, like for trauma, any kind of trauma.

You can injure a part of the brain called the Brockess area.

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