Can Siegal make a comeback? Several people I spoke to pointed out that only a few months have passed since her P.R. crisis; maybe she’ll have better luck next year. “I have been told to go away,” Siegal said. “ ‘Go away for a year so everybody forgets.’ Well, I’d like to know where I should go.”

A fellow publicist observed that Siegal may be her own worst enemy: Is she having a publicity crisis or publicizing a personal crisis? “She came up to me at a party and said, ‘You know I can’t get any work,’ this whole kind of pity thing,” said a person in Siegal’s social orbit. “Woe is me. Feel sorry for me. And you know what? I almost did.” But, “there are a lot of much nicer people that this happened to, that deserve our sympathy and support.”

Siegal can talk for hours about being treated unfairly. During our interviews, she went out of the way to name three ex-employees she believes spoke to the press and are poaching her clients, including one she believes stole her list. Ironically, Bobby Zarem has long held that Siegal stole his list. He’s 83, working on his memoir in Savannah, Georgia, and still mad. (“I did not steal his list,” said Siegal.)

In December, Siegal attended the world premiere of Cats, her first major studio premiere since her fall. It took work. She lobbied NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer by email before securing the invitation. Before the movie, she stopped by a cocktail party in the Manhattan home of Greece’s exiled crown prince—across the street from Epstein’s town house. She observed that the lights were still on.

Why not retire? I asked Siegal. Be a full-time lady who lunches? She glanced at Fields, who is 18 years her elder and still goes to the office. “If I would be happy with that, I would have married a dentist 50 years ago and moved to Scarsdale like Marjorie Morningstar,” she said, referring to the 1958 film in which Natalie Wood, in the title role, plays a Jewish American actor deciding between career and marriage. Defying her mother’s vision for her, Siegal never married.

At the end of our first sit-down, Siegal asked me to turn my recorder back on. The sun had set during our two-and-a-half-hour interview, prompting Barbara Guggenheim to joke that we looked like we were having a séance. To get that first job as a showroom model, Siegal said, she’d been forced to stand in a bra and slip in front of the store’s owner, who came too close, looked at her lasciviously, and touched her shoulder. “I was 16, and that was the first time I experienced fear of a man who I didn’t know,” she said.

When she was 24, Siegal said, she would walk to the factory that manufactured her jewelry line. “The truck drivers always used to whistle. And I always used to say hi to them because I wanted to just be so cool.” One summer day, she said, one of the whistlers followed her. When she got into the factory building elevator, he jumped in, trapped her, held a knife to her ribs, and demanded to see her breasts. He pinned her to the wall. She screamed. He repeated his demand, and she kept screaming as he held the car on an empty floor. Eventually, he ran off, she said. She broke down and cried. “To this day, I will not stand in an elevator with a single guy,” she said. “I never went in a subway again. I took taxicabs everyplace. I never walked home alone after an event or a movie.” She was teary and shaking as she told me this.

At our next sit-down, Siegal was more composed as she discussed Epstein’s victims. “The idea of these women, what he did to these women, is so incomprehensible to me,” she said. “To be a part of this, and to be accused of being part of this, it’s so humiliating.”

“I keep thinking, What did I do to deserve this?” she said. “And then I say, ‘Nothing.’ ”

A version of this story appears in the April 2020 Hollywood issue.