Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet

by Alice Robb

In the early 2000s, the sex predator Jeffrey Epstein scouted for victims at New York ballet schools, including an Upper West Side studio where I took open classes. Young, precarious, naïve about the world, and accustomed to following orders: ballerinas-in-training were the perfect victims. Epstein’s lackeys would lure young dancers to his mansion under the pretense that he was looking for a personal trainer or a private dance instructor.

dancing on pointe was the milestone that made them a ballerina—a member of this “very niche, very beautiful pain cult.”

Women are especially prone to feeling detached from our bodies. We learn early to see ourselves from the outside, to always think about how we come across. “Men act and women appear,” the art critic John Berger wrote in 1972. His words have resonated with generations of women, repurposed for chapter epigraphs and Instagram grids. “A woman must continually watch herself,” he wrote.