There’s a common thread from Nobody’s Girl — a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April of this year — in which the activist and Jeffrey Epstein survivor grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know this is a lot to take in,” she writes after a grueling opening passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she wrote: “I need to breathe. I bet you do too.”
Throughout the book, Giuffre seduces, apologizes, and gleefully breaks the fourth wall in an attempt to alleviate the disgust she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sexual abuse, and how institutions sided with abusers over their victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely made possible by Giuffre’s testimony. But it’s also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet, there she is, having to charm us so as not to recoil from her in horror.
Of course, his assumptions are not wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died and whose skillful and intelligent book was co-written with journalist Amy Wallace, knows that to be a victim of sexual violence is to be pitied at best, reviled at worst. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein’s Accuser Wasn’t a Sex Slave, But a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, His Former Friends Say.”) I contacted Nobody’s Girl with two questions. First, does this provide insight into the so-called Epstein List, the catalog of prominent men Giuffre and others were trafficked to? The closest thing to a new allegation is Giuffre’s description of one of several men with whom Epstein forced her to have sex as a “politician” and “former minister,” who choked and beat her almost until she was unconscious, but who, she writes, is too powerful to name. (When she told Epstein how violent the man had been, he said coldly, “You’ll understand that sometimes.”)
Second, does the book make life more difficult for Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently incarcerated in a low-security prison in Texas and is lobbying President Trump for a reduction in her sentence? (His latest appeal was rejected earlier this month.) On this point, Giuffre’s account must make the possibility of a reprieve even more remote. It was Maxwell — or “G Max,” as she insisted the girls call her — who spotted a 16-year-old Giuffre working as a locker room assistant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, and brought her to Epstein’s house to be “interviewed” as a potential masseuse. Giuffre was forced to have sex with Epstein that day and Maxwell participated in the assaults at that time and subsequent assaults. “Maxwell started picking on me during our threesomes,” Giuffre wrote. “If I complained, she hurt me even more.”
This brings me to a third question: given its punitive nature, why read this book? I’ve heard more than one person say that they “didn’t have the guts” for it – that’s not a phrase a victim needs to hear – but while the book is relentlessly and incredibly harsh, it is also a lucid and necessary account of how sex offenders operate. Giuffre’s greatest fear – that being raped and trafficked puts her beyond the reach of most people’s empathy – is not, in fact, what is happening. The story does what the deposition cannot do by taking us into the room with it. The book brings Giuffre’s legal status as a victim to life, showing us a girl like everyone else we know, like us, and bringing to life the reality of those who are trafficked while still being “free” to escape.
Abused since the age of six, when she met Epstein, Giuffre writes: “I had been sexualized against my will and survived by acquiescing. I was a people-pleaser, even though pleasing others cost me dearly. For 10 years, men had hidden their abuse of me under a false cloak of love. Epstein and Maxwell knew how to tap into that same twisted vein.”
Giuffre’s memories of Prince Andrew, a man with whom she was allegedly forced to have sex on three occasions – once in the context of an orgy on Epstein’s island – present him in an even more farcical and grotesque light. “We undressed and got into the bathtub, but we didn’t stay there long because the prince was eager to go to bed… In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.” Prince Andrew denies Giuffre’s allegations that he had sex with her, that she was trafficked to him by Epstein or that he ever met her. But so much attention has been focused on the prince that after reading this book, it was not him I thought of most; these included the occasional visitors to Epstein’s New York mansion, the famous men and occasional women whom Giuffre said he met at dinners there.
As for these people, I’d like to ask: who the hell did they think the 17 year old at the table was? What did they think she was doing there? Only Melinda Gates, who once met Epstein and cited him as a factor in the breakdown of her marriage to Bill Gates, sensed what apparently none of these people could put their finger on. Giuffre quotes a statement Gates made after meeting Epstein: “I regretted him from the second I walked in the door. He was hateful. He was evil personified.” It was an idea that clearly eluded geniuses like the MIT professors Epstein continued to advise long after he was convicted as a sex offender.
Giuffre was rightly proud to hold Epstein and Maxwell accountable. And yet, for any survivor of sexual violence, the cost of recovery — not to mention confronting your abusers in front of the world — can be incredibly high. Early in the book, Amy Wallace shares details of Giuffre’s difficult final months, including multiple health problems and allegations of domestic violence at the hands of Robert Giuffre, her Australian husband. (Robert Giuffre’s attorney declined to comment on the allegations, citing ongoing legal proceedings.) On April 1, Giuffre wrote to Wallace: “It is my sincere wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time.” » Three weeks later, she was found dead on her isolated Australian farm, leaving behind three children. In a lawsuit Giuffre filed against Epstein in 2009, her lawyers said the injuries she suffered as a result of his abuse included “a loss of the ability to enjoy life” and were of a magnitude that made them “permanent in nature.” The same could be said of this important, courageous and tragically posthumous book.
