From beyond the grave Virginia Giuffre details her life of abuse
Finished just before her death, her second memoir traces her abuse by Epstein and Maxwell - and encounters with Andrew.
In her telling of an infamous night in London with Prince Andrew, what was ingrained in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memory was her outfit: a pink sleeveless crop top and sparkly jeans.
Ghislaine Maxwell had wanted Giuffre in a demure dress, something more appropriate for dinner with the Queen’s second son. But like any other teenage girl, she wanted to dress like a pop star.
“I idolised Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and the outfit was something I imagined the two of them might wear,” she wrote in her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, released today (Tuesday). “I told Maxwell it felt more like me.”
A photograph taken of Giuffre in her pink top and jeans - Andrew, 41, clutching at her bare midriff - would eventually lead to his downfall and one of the biggest royal scandals.
While Giuffre may only have been 17 years old, Andrew was the latest in a line of men accused of sexually abusing her. He has denied the allegations and claimed the picture was fabricated.
The story of Giuffre has been told and retold in the pages of newspapers and in the dockets filed in civil lawsuits, but the book offers the first full account of her life in her own words. “I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The bad decisions. The self harm,” she writes. “But please, don’t stop reading.”
Reflecting on the title of the 400-page biography, she explains that she had been “everyone’s girl” and yet “nobody’s girl”. Giuffre consequently chose Nobody’s Girl as the title of the book, a reference to the French author Hector Malot’s novel about an orphan adopted by a rich grandfather figure. Page after page tells of the alleged abuse and betrayal that culminated in Giuffre taking her own life in April, shortly after the manuscript was completed.
Giuffre grew up in the down-at-heel town of Loxahatchee, Florida, as the middle child and only daughter of Lynn and Sky Roberts. While her early childhood, marked by a poverty that verged on neglect, had been far from idyllic, it was fairly ordinary.
That was until she claimed her father started abusing her, an allegation he denies in a statement published in the book where he claims he “only tried to give my children a good life”. Sky Roberts did not respond to requests for a comment from The Times.
In her pre-teen and early teenage years Giuffre had come to see her value only in what her body could offer, having sex with any boy who so much as asked. She says the early abuse she suffered made her the “perfect victim” for Jeffrey Epstein.
Home life had become so intolerable that Giuffre ran away frequently. Aged 13 and living on the street, she fell into the clutches of Ron Eppinger, a local pedophile in his mid-60s. For six months he held her “prisoner” and sent her to be raped by his acquaintances. In a deposition given in July, Maxwell named Eppinger and said he was Giuffre’s “pimp from when she was 14 or 15”.
Eppinger was imprisoned for smuggling immigrants into the US for the purpose of prostitution, and Giuffre was rescued by an FBI swat team.
Recalling being a high school dropout living in a trailer in her parents’ back yard, Giuffre writes: “I thought I had nowhere to go but up … What happened next, then, seemed like a gift.”
In summer 2000 her father, a maintenance man at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach got her a job there as a dollars 9-an-hour locker room attendant. Roberts introduced Giuffre to Trump in his office. Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier”, she writes.
A week later, while reading a book about massage, in walked a woman in her thirties with smart, manicured nails and a clipped British accent, who introduced herself. Maxwell asked if Giuffre would be interested in earning money on the side, massaging her friend, “a wealthy man” and long-time member of Mar-a-Lago. That evening, the book alleges her father drove her to Epstein’s mansion.
Maxwell led her to a room where Epstein was lying naked. He peppered her with intimate questions, like whether she had a boyfriend or was on the pill.
She was taken aback by the grandeur of the home; its many butlers, gardeners, chefs and servants. “You need to learn how rich people do things,” she thought as she rubbed Epstein’s thighs.
Maxwell then allegedly took off her own clothes and unzipped Giuffre’s skirt and pulled her white Mar-a-Lago-branded polo shirt over her head. Maxwell instructed her to straddle Epstein while pinching his nipples before he forced himself on her.
Giuffre had done a “great job”, Maxwell is said to have told her as she gave her dollars 200 and invited her to come back the next day.
“So begins the period of my life that has been dissected and analysed more than any other,” Giuffre writes.
She started by massaging only Epstein, whom, she was told, had a biological need to climax three times a day. She had to be available at all hours of the day and night to “service” the financier.
Epstein told Giuffre what he insisted were “scientific” justifications for his errant behaviour. What he was doing was not wrong, because he would only have sex with girls who had started menstruating as they were “of age”.
She alleges Epstein threatened to hurt her younger brother if she ever told anyone of her life with him. Her obedience and loyalty were rewarded. She was invited to glamorous events with Epstein and Maxwell: Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party on a yacht in St Tropez, dinner with Bill Clinton. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Campbell or Clinton.
Epstein had succeeded in convincing Giuffre that he was protecting her from a mediocre life that she did not deserve. “I felt strangely indebted to him.”
Giuffre rose to become the “Number One” among the women and girls who attended to Epstein. She was flown around the world on his private jet - nicknamed the Lolita Express for its young female passengers - and offered up to his influential and powerful friends like a “platter of fruit”.
She has alleged that when she was 17 she was abused by Andrew three times: at Maxwell’s home in London, at Epstein’s in Manhattan and during an “orgy” with other girls who looked under-age on a private island in the Caribbean. “You are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey,” Maxwell instructed Giuffre.
The duke has always denied the allegations. He agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in 2022 with no admission of liability.
“It is truly impossible to communicate in words just how many men there were,” she writes. Some of them, like Andrew, were well-known enough that they did not need an introduction, others she would only be able to identify years later when presented with photographs by journalists and FBI officers.
Many of them are not named in the book by its publishers for legal reasons; one is “Billionaire No. 1”, another “Billionaire No. 2”, a man who apparently owned a chain of hotels.
She had preserved their faces in an “airtight vault in my head”, she writes, one that was waiting to be unlocked. Giuffre had wished to expose every one of her abusers, but worried there would be consequences for her and her family.
Swathes of the American public have in recent months been demanding that the Trump administration release Epstein’s so-called client list after the government closed its investigation into one of the worst sex-trafficking rings in history. While in all likelihood there is no such neat compilation of names, the Rolodex of men Giuffre was ordered to please during her 25 months with Epstein is a good place to start.
She claims he suggested at one point, after she had a miscarriage, that she bear a child for him and Maxwell. Epstein, she noted, never liked to wear a condom with any of his victims. It crossed a line for Giuffre, who decided she needed to get out.
She begged Epstein to send her to receive formal training as a masseuse in Thailand, one of his early promises. She used it as her chance to escape. When she was 19, she met a mixed martial arts instructor named Robert Giuffre in Chiang Mai. They married within ten days and moved to his hometown in Australia. She told Epstein that she would not be returning. He brusquely wished her well but reminded her of the need for discretion.
Seven years and three children later, Giuffre came forward with allegations of abuse by Epstein in a lawsuit she filed under the pseudonym Jane Doe in 2009, prompted by the birth of her first daughter. “Having a daughter changed me, awakening something fierce down deep inside,” she writes.
It would be several more years before she would come out publicly, however, first against Epstein and Maxwell and then against Andrew. She was tracked down in Australia and interviewed by the Mail on Sunday, which paid her dollars 160,000 for her story. Giuffre was pilloried in the press, labelled a liar and a money-grabber.
That only worked to strengthen her resolve. She then enlisted the help of a lawyer who sued Andrew and inspired dozens of other Epstein victims to do the same.
As this was playing out in America, tensions grew at home. Giuffre claimed her husband had grown uncomfortable with the publicity her case was attracting. The Times, which was given access to her diaries and texts, reported in July that Giuffre claimed she was assaulted by her husband during their 22-year marriage. They were estranged in 2024 and he was granted custody of their children.
Robert Giuffre’s counsel said that they were unable to comment on specific allegations of abuse due to live proceedings in the family court of Western Australia. His family expressed objections to Robert’s characterisation in the book and requested certain passages be edited to reflect the alleged “abuse” she suffered during her marriage.
The book’s publisher, Alfred A Knopf and the family, agreed to a foreword with a note by Amy Wallace, co-author of the book, explaining that there are “all kinds of reasons that a woman who had been domestically abused might choose to stay silent.”
Victims of child abuse are as much as 15 times more likely to be victims of abuse later in life, the foreword notes.
She took her own life at the family’s ranch in Perth, in April. One of her last wishes was that her memoir be released. “It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic [of sex trafficking] be addressed, both for the sake of awareness and for justice.”
The Times
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