“I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I’ve had moments I’m not proud of. But I haven’t let those human flaws keep me from telling my story.”
The reading of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir is made more difficult by her death by suicide in April of this year. The reader knows that the book, which begins with candid descriptions of abuse and neglect, will not end with clear justice, retribution, or recovery. It is a tragedy.
“But please,” she insists, “don’t stop reading.”
Nobody’s Girl is challenging from cover to cover. There are moments in which the author acknowledges that descriptions of abuse are unrelenting, that one account follows another without so much as a breath to process the meaning of the words.
Giuffre guides her reader through the chaos, showing how an ordinary childhood, coloured by memories of watching The Simpsons and family dinners, can so rapidly descend into violation, homelessness, and despair. Behind the headlines, she reveals a human being trying to make sense of it all herself.
To understand how a 16-year-old girl came to know Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, Giuffre first addresses the betrayals of her youth. Her childhood is abruptly ended by a stark description of alleged abuse by her father, which he “strenuously” denies, and later by a family friend. Her mother, “once so warm and loving”, becomes “cold and remote.”
Woven into the chronology are moments of reflection, in which she draws on later therapy to articulate how children abused by people they love “start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together.”
She identifies how, following years of continued abuse, she thought there was something “freeing about choosing sex for myself”. In later life, she understood that she was “trading on the only part of me that anyone seemed to care about – my body – while my soul remained on the sidelines, ignored.”
The book, which begins with Giuffre’s childhood and ends with a flurry of court cases, gives those betrayals a name and a narrative.
By the time the memoir arrives at Epstein, there is a welcome reprieve. Giuffre’s father found her a job at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club as a locker room attendant, where she earned $9 an hour and hoped to get her life back on track.
For the first time in her life, she wrote, she found hope in the prospect of working as a massage therapist: “I seized on the idea that, with the right training, I could eventually make a living by helping others reduce stress. Maybe, I thought their healing would fuel my own.” And then, she said, she was approached by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Giuffre does not set out to pen a list of her abusers in the years that followed. This is partly because she does not know some of their names. It is also out of fear. Epstein’s duality as a “master manipulator” is laid bare by his ability to pay Giuffre’s rent one moment and allegedly threaten her family the next.
The later chapters of the book detail the anxiety and fear that followed from speaking out: receiving credible threats on her life, tweeting that if she died suddenly, it would not be an accident, and allegedly being “hassled” by internet trolls she claimed were hired by Prince Andrew’s team. Health problems – mental and physical – followed.
None of this should be a deterrent from speaking out. “Each one of us can make positive change”, she reasons, putting forward the need to speak openly about sexual trafficking to tackle it. Giuffre says it was the birth of her daughter that “ended that period of passivity”, telling her she “had to act to keep other girls from suffering the way I had.”
Doctors and healers assessed in the years after escaping Epstein that Giuffre’s body had withstood so much sexual trauma that it was staging a kind of revolt.
Throughout, she describes in detail how she would have to follow as her abuser “experimented” with sexual kinks and fantasies. She recalls a “contraption” that would cause so much pain that she “prayed I would black out”. “When I did, I’d awaken to more abuse.”
Other times, she describes being “lent out” to Epstein’s circle of the wealthy and powerful. “I was habitually used and humiliated – and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied,” she says. “I believed that I might die a sex slave.”
Whiplash is the result of moving between scenes like these, foreign visits, and theatre tickets. Giuffre, still a teenager, is caught between recording moments with photographs – including meeting Prince Andrew – and “numbing” herself into oblivion with benzodiazepines and painkillers.
Giuffre alleges that there were three times she was “trafficked to Prince Andrew.” She claims that he correctly guessed she was seventeen and that Epstein took the infamous photograph of them together because her mother “would never forgive me if I met someone as famous as Prince Andrew and didn’t pose for a picture.”
She claims to have had sex with him that evening and then later, twice more. The third time, she claimed, was with a group of “approximately eight other young girls”, who she said “all seemed and appeared to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English”. Prince Andrew vehemently denies all allegations.
Giuffre feared that thousands of women and girls may have been “hurt” by Epstein and Maxwell over the years. Early on, she remembers Epstein taking her into what she understood to be a ‘trophy closet’ filled with “raunchy, not demure” pictures of naked girls, “many of them quite obviously underage.”
“A stack of shoeboxes in the corner held the overflow,” she said. “He had so many photos that he’d run out of display space.”
Giuffre wrote that she was told Epstein’s criteria for victims. The key requirement, she said, was vulnerability. “Recruits had to be enough ‘on the edge’, as Epstein and Maxwell put it, that they would submit to sex in exchange for money.”
In a painful admission, Giuffre wrote that she “needed to believe that while Epstein was afflicted with an illness – sex addiction – still, deep down, he believed in me and had my best interests at heart. I needed him not to be a selfish, cruel pedophile. So I told myself he wasn’t one.”
In an effort to understand him, she wondered whether he may have been abused as a child. The one time she quizzed him about his experiences growing up, she felt cut off and realized it was a topic she should never raise again.
The death of Jeffrey Epstein in police custody in August 2019 brought no end to her suffering. “This wasn’t how justice was supposed to work,” she wrote, later assessing that she went into a period of “mourning” over the “death of my ability to hold him accountable for what he had done.”
Virginia Giuffre continued her work with Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), a non-profit that helps survivors to “reclaim their stories and bring an end to sex trafficking”. Nobody’s Girl, a harrowing and emotionally challenging book, wrestles to give this story structure and purpose. In telling and making sense of her own ordeal, Giuffre gives a voice to those who cannot find their own.
Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse. You can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673)
If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected], or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch
If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org to access online chat from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you
