By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
Nobody’s Girl
Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Doubleday, $36.99
Warning: Graphic content
Her name may forever be tied to powerful men – Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel – but Virginia Roberts Giuffre makes it known that she wants to stand alone now. And with Nobody’s Girl, she reclaims her identity from all of them.
The posthumous memoir, which follows Giuffre’s suicide earlier this year at the age of 41, is a devastating read. With composure and candour, the abuse survivor and sex-trafficking activist recounts a short life marred by sexual violence. It started in early childhood at the hands of her father, and proved unrelenting until adulthood. Only fleeing from paedophile Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell put an end to it.
Before she died, Giuffre insisted that she wanted her autobiography to be published, collaborating with ghostwriter Amy Wallace for four years to chronicle a tragic but fearless life. Her personal backstory had been repeatedly maligned and mischaracterised ever since she went public with her abuse. After sharing her trauma to courts and the media so many times, Nobody’s Girl was to be her final comment on Epstein.
No one should have endured the deep suffering that Giuffre endured. As a young girl, her father allegedly abused her, even giving her away to a family friend to be abused. (Her father “strenuously” denies these allegations.) Her mother then became distant and cruel, beating Giuffre with thorny rose branches as the young girl started to act out.
Virginia Giuffre in 2022, with a photo of herself as a teenager.Credit: Miami Herald via Getty Images
A “treatment” centre was next, where despair and disillusionment set in; repeated attempts to escape followed. During one jailbreak, the 14-year-old runaway was tricked into joining an older escort kingpin who proceeded to feed her hard drugs and trafficked her to other men. A chance encounter at 15 with Maxwell – a “molester with posh manners and an aristocratic pedigree” – elicited a fleeting glimmer of hope for Giuffre before a new hell began.
As Giuffre couldn’t turn to her parents or trust authorities, the Epstein and Maxwell “family” set Giuffre on a ruinous cycle of abuse and brutality. While many of Epstein’s horrors on young women have been recounted before, Giuffre’s own stories can be difficult to read in succession. (Some experiences are too harrowing to recount here.) The activist, sensing the intensity of her dark tales, gives readers regular interludes away from her recollections.
Powerful men from across the world, from politicians to scientists, descend on Giuffre to rape her and others. A “former minister” so brutalises Giuffre that she leaves the scene “bleeding from my mouth, vagina, and anus”. Epstein and modelling mogul Brunel abused her and others together, taking a “mutual malignant pleasure in our misfortune”.
Then, of course, there are her repeat encounters with Prince Andrew, who “believed having sex with me was his birthright”. Asked about Giuffre’s age, the then-41-year-old correctly guesses that his “daughters are just a little younger than” than the then-17-year-old. The royal, Giuffre writes, proved “particularly attentive” to her feet, “caressing” the toes and “licking” the arches. (Following renewed public backlash, Andrew has now relinquished his Duke of York title.)
Prince Andrew, who was last week forced to give up his royal title.Credit: AP
After Giuffre flees them, Epstein and Maxwell track her down in Australia, making veiled threats as the financier becomes a person of interest to authorities. Thanks to a forgiving arrangement with prosecutors, Epstein receives reduced charges, a short prison sentence and generous work release terms. Therapy, meanwhile, helps Giuffre start to confront the trauma that had never been fully purged from her tortured past.
It’s only against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and with renewed public interest in Giuffre’s story that a real reckoning can take place. Giuffre successfully sues Maxwell for defamation, a clever legal tactic that later incriminates Maxwell at her own criminal trial. Thanks also to an explosive exposé in The Miami Herald, prosecutors finally arrest Epstein in July 2019. A month later the financier is found dead in his jail cell under suspicious circumstances.
As the criminal justice system catches up with other assailants, Giuffre begins to become undone from the toll that repeating her abuse takes: “every retelling of my stories of abuse hit me hard … ate away at me”. Health complications (including a broken neck) compound her physical torment, while “thoughts of self-annihilation” become part of her daily mental warfare.
Thoughts of her own children are never far from Giuffre’s mind throughout Nobody’s Girl. It was the birth of her daughter that empowered Giuffre to finally challenge Epstein and reach beyond her trauma to a greater purpose, despite the many real threats that doing so would pose.
Giuffre finishes by adding that there are still other powerful men to name as her abusers. She decides against outing any more of them to safeguard her family’s future welfare: “My most important role is that of a mother.” Even so, she doesn’t believe the Epstein case can be closed yet: “Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s houses?” Through this project, Giuffre exorcises many demons that besieged her during her brief life. Trauma still lingers, a valve difficult to close, but her resilience and courage to advocate for other survivors helps to blunt that pain. It’s all the more tragic that the activist is no longer alive to see the impact this memoir will undoubtedly have on many others.
Nobody’s Girl makes it known that “Virginia Roberts Giuffre” should no longer designate an Epstein victim, but a vocal survivor of sexual abuse who finally reclaimed her name.
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