A week after the death of sex criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein, Anya (not her real name) answered the door to his New York apartment. Outside was Epstein’s brother, Mark, telling him he had to leave, he says.

Anya had lived for years in one of several apartments on East 66th Street in Manhattan that Jeffrey Epstein used to house the women he abused. At one point he lost his home but escaped a nightmare. (Mark Epstein denies having been aware of his brother’s wrongdoing.)

“I’m still struggling to come to terms with the fact that I was abused for years,” Anya says. “You weren’t chained to a door or anything, were you? You weren’t locked in a basement. The chains were less obvious, but they were there.”

Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting charges for child sex trafficking, often said his operation was “like a cult, and he was the leader of the cult,” Anya says.

He has given the BBC a rare account of life as one of Epstein’s “assistants”, detailing how the financier maintained control over so many of his victims for so long.

The assistants were a group of women (about a dozen at a time, Anya estimates) who were housed by Epstein, worked all hours at his beck and call, and were regularly sexually abused by him.

Anya says they were lured by elaborate deceptions and empty promises of work, before he began coercively controlling almost every aspect of their lives, exploiting any weaknesses he could discover.

She says he controlled their finances, dictated who they saw and psychologically degraded them. He monitored their bodies obsessively, Anya says, and forced her to undergo unnecessary disfiguring surgery.

Sarah Kellen, another former aide, echoes her account of Epstein’s control. Earlier this year, he told the U.S. House Oversight Committee how Epstein presented himself as the aides’ savior. “He was very good at decimating your ability to make your own decisions and have your own autonomy. And that made you more and more dependent on him,” she said.

There’s a bias that tends to make people think that only children are susceptible to this type of coercion, but that “you can be groomed as an adult,” says Dr. Tara Quinn-Cirillo, a clinical psychologist who has worked with victims of coercive control. “You can be vulnerable to this,” he says.