Shawna Rivera was fourteen years old when she was first brought to Jeffrey Epstein. She gave a detailed account of her recruitment and the abuse that followed in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich[8].
Rivera had an extremely difficult childhood. Her mother struggled with drug addiction throughout her upbringing. Her father was incarcerated when she was three and, after his release, became involved with a woman whose children had previously been abused. When Rivera was approximately twelve years old, her father and his girlfriend beat the woman's eight-year-old son to death in front of her. Rivera ran away from home and spent time living in shelter homes[8].
She was fourteen and living in those circumstances when a girlfriend asked her to come along to a man's house, saying she could not go alone. Rivera accompanied her. A man came into the room and lay down, and Rivera's girlfriend told her they were going to give him a massage and that they had to take their clothes off. Rivera was then left alone in the room with Epstein[8].
During the encounter Epstein asked her to apply lotion to his chest and to grab and squeeze his nipples. On a subsequent occasion she was called and told to take a cab to his address. Assuming she would receive more money and being poor, she went. She continued to return for three or four years[8].
Rivera's account illustrates the pattern described across multiple victim testimonies: Epstein and his associates identified girls from backgrounds of poverty, family instability, or prior trauma, and used financial inducements to establish initial contact before the abuse escalated[6, 8].