The woman who took on a prince and a billionaire
Virginia Giuffre advocated for survivors of sex trafficking but childhood trauma took its toll.
The damage from sexual assault doesn’t go away. A victim can escape their abuser and report matters to police. They can get married, have children and experience the comfort of love. They can “own their truth” and “tell their story” – and their world still can come tumbling down.
This would seem to be what happened to Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life last week, aged just 41.
For 15 years Giuffre had been an advocate for survivors of sexual assault and sex trafficking. She took on a battle at least as tough and arguably tougher than those who fight the good fight against predatory schoolteachers, priests, scout masters and Hollywood movie moguls.
Giuffre took on the British royal family, in the form of Prince Andrew; and a billionaire, in the form of Jeffrey Epstein. Other names in her story include Bill Gates, who partied with Epstein even after the latter had been convicted of sex offences; and a former US president, Bill Clinton, who made trips on the so-called Lolita Express (the vile name given to the private plane that carried vulnerable young women to Epstein’s private island, where they could be used as playthings by wealthy men).
She knew, in so doing, that she would experience white-knuckle panic every day of her life. Even hiding out on a farm in Australia, would somebody try to get to her, silence her? And what if nobody believed her?
Giuffre’s story is, in many ways, typical of so many thousands of young girls who each year find themselves ensnared by the wealthy and depraved.
She was born Virginia Roberts in California in 1983. She had two stepbrothers and her family moved to Florida when she was four.
She told reporters from the Miami Herald that she was sexually abused at the age of seven by a family friend, an event that changed her life. “I went from being a very happy child to a completely different person,” she said in a 2017 interview.
She dropped out of school and in her early teens went into foster care, a disastrous experience for almost everyone.
At 14 she reunited with her dad, who was working as a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago, the now-President Donald Trump’s private club. In June 2000, when she was 16, her dad got her a job there.
Giuffre told NBC News she was employed by the hotel spa and wanted to be a massage therapist, a popular job for unskilled women in the early 2000s. She was happy when a “beautiful, well-spoken woman with an English accent, prim and proper” approached her soon after she started work.
It was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell. Giuffre told NBC in 2019 that Ghislaine Maxwell was already in the business of finding young women and girls for Epstein’s personal use and for his parties, although of course she didn’t know that then.
“She told me, he’s super rich. He flies around everywhere. If you want, you can come meet him. He’s got amazing abilities to help people out. That’s what he likes to do,” she said. She said Maxwell took her up the stairs of a Palm Beach mansion, where they found Epstein face down and naked on a massage table. Maxwell instructed the young Virginia to start massaging him and he unexpectedly turned over. Finally she understood what she was there to do.
“This wasn’t the first time I’d been abused,” she said, a response that rings very true, for it’s typical of girls who find themselves in such situations. They don’t know how to say no or how to report abuse. They feel shame and fear. Giuffre said she was caught in “invisible chains … You can’t run. You can’t tell anybody.” She has described events in the years that followed as “sex trafficking”. There is some confusion about what that means. She wasn’t kept in a locked room, forced to perform sexual favours.
Like many of the girls being trafficked around the world, she was vulnerable. These girls tend to come from unstable homes (they often have spent time on the streets or in foster care). Nobody is really looking out for them. They have been abused as children. They have low self-esteem. They may have tried to report their abuse and not been believed. They may have come up against authority figures who took further advantage of them. They feel worthless and ashamed of themselves. They are desperate for affection, security and safety. They will jump at any opportunity to feel something, anything. They are sitting ducks for abusers, easily coaxed into awful situations that make them feel even worse about themselves.
Before long, they are on a carousel of shame. Some end up addicted to drugs, which in time kills them. A precious few find a man and grab hold of him, and that is what happened to the young Virginia. She met her husband, an Australian, Robert Giuffre, while in Thailand in 2002 (she was still only 19 and had been flown there by Epstein to recruit other girls for sex and massages). She married Giuffre and tried to rebuild her life as his wife in Australia. She had three children, but it was only after she had her own little girl that she decided to try to bring the men who had abused her to account.
She ran into one brick wall after another. She made a complaint to the FBI in 2015 but it went nowhere. She co-operated with journalists in Miami who were hearing dark stories about sex trafficking at Epstein’s Miami mansion, and for years nothing happened, but then Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and it looked for a moment like justice would be served. Instead, he was found dead in his jail cell before he could be put on trial.
Giuffre kept going after Prince Andrew, saying he’d abused her at one of Epstein’s properties when she was 17 (he strenuously denies even having met her, saying the now-famous photograph of the two of them together must have been doctored).
It’s true Giuffre’s memory was not always accurate; she made plenty of mistakes with dates and times, and had to withdraw allegations she made against famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz, saying she was mistaken when she identified him as one of the men who abused her. This week some online warriors have said she had been complicit in the abuse of others since she had introduced other girls to Epstein and Maxwell. Others think she was a liar, out for the money.
Yet Prince Andrew agreed to settle with her (without any admission of liability), saying he wished to repent “his association with Epstein by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking”.
To some, this might have felt like vindication but the trauma of her childhood continued to take its near-inevitable toll: by 2023, Giuffre’s two-decade long marriage to Robert had collapsed and by March 2025 she no longer was in contact with her children.
Her final weeks were chaotic. She seems to have walked in front of a car or a bus and sustained injuries. She made confusing social media posts showing her face covered in bruises, begging for access to her kids. This was her life unravelling. Her thoughts muddled. Her heart broken.
Marci Hamilton, chief executive of Child USA, which advocates for child sexual assault survivors, said she considered Giuffre a true hero, saying the public “doesn’t understand the impact of trauma on child sexual assault victims … The horror and the trauma of this crime can affect an entire lifetime.”
In a statement this week, Giuffre’s family said: “Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. In the end, the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight.”
Maybe you don’t know what else in her story to believe, but you can probably believe that.
