NOBODY’S GIRL: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
With a grim nod to Ford Madox Ford, let me say that Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” is the saddest story I’ve read in years. Beginning with its posthumous publication.
Giuffre, the most prominent of the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s many victims (he called her Number One), died by suicide at 41 in April, on an isolated farm in Western Australia. Known as Jenna, she writes proudly of a band of Survivor Sisters, women who joined her in testifying against this diabolical creature, yet did not herself survive.
Despite all the Epstein files clamor, the revelations here are more personal than political, with Donald J. Trump a marginal presence.
Shortly before her death, the author told People magazine that she suffered ongoing domestic violence at the hands of her husband, Robbie Giuffre, with whom she was in a custody battle for their three children. Family members have said she wanted to revise her book, which depicts him as her savior (“part guru, part goofball”), to reflect this.
Court proceedings are ongoing, and his lawyer has declined to comment. Her co-writer, the journalist Amy Wallace, handles the matter in a foreword and otherwise proceeds with a previously approved manuscript.
Giuffre also writes in painful detail that her father, Sky, sexually molested her, including trading her to a family friend, when she was between 7 and 11 years old. He has “strenuously” denied doing so, according to Wallace, who corroborated Giuffre’s account with half a dozen close confidantes. The family friend spent 14 months in prison for abusing another minor, and a decade as a registered sex offender.
By now we’ve all heard of Little St. James Island, nicknamed Little St. Jeff’s, the 72-acre circle of hell in the Caribbean where so many girls were transported and coerced into servicing Epstein’s rich and powerful friends. I fear the torments cataloged in “Nobody’s Girl” will make the double X-chromosomed among us want to flee correctively to Themyscira, a.k.a. Paradise Island, Wonder Woman’s birthplace in D.C. Comics, from which men are barred.
Still, one would have to be wary of Circe figures like Ghislaine Maxwell, who appears so ominously in the infamous photograph of Jenna with Prince Andrew (taken by Epstein on a Kodak FunSaver camera), grinning from the corner like a jack-o’-lantern with her orange Bain de Soleil tan. In 2022 the prince settled a rape accusation lawsuit from Giuffre with a statement admitting no personal wrongdoing and undisclosed payments to her and her charity.
Maxwell (self-anointed as G-Max) is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and conspiracy at a minimum-security women’s prison in Texas. (The Supreme Court denied her appeal earlier this month.) But she wasn’t all bad, we learn here, companionably beachcombing for sea glass and once quick-thinkingly pulling aside her bikini bottom and urinating on a prone Jenna to soothe the stings from a smack of jellyfish. (Don’t do this.)
“I was no expert on mothers, but in those early days, I sometimes imagined her as mine,” Giuffre writes.
Born in 1983, she describes a modest but idyllic-at-first childhood in Loxahatchee, Fla., swinging upside down from cypress trees amid exotic animals, who seem higher beings than many of the humans in this sordid tale. After an alligator snapping turtle appeared in the Roberts pond, a neighbor made soup with it.
Jenna doted upon her little brother, Skydy, and her black-and-white horse, Alice. But around when the abuse started, causing severe urinary-tract infections, she writes, her mother grew distant and on occasion would ask her to select thorny rosebush branches for whippings.
Jenna loved reading and hoped to become a veterinarian, but grew into an adolescent so troubled she was sent to a ghastly, vermin-infested “treatment” center, Growing Together, later investigated and put out of business. There she was instructed to berate herself in front of a mirror, once forced to eat the dinner she’d vomited and encouraged (usefully, it turned out) to write journal entries, or as the staff referred to them, “moral inventories.”
Rape, for her, came to seem routine: by older teens; by a construction worker after hitchhiking; by the ringleader of a high-priced escort service, who introduced her to hard drugs; and by an associate of his busted by the F.B.I., which returned her to … her father.
By then Sky Roberts was working in maintenance at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, and got her a job there as a towel attendant. Observing the masseuses in the plush spa, she thought this might be a career path.
The rest is horror story. (“Please don’t stop reading,” Giuffre writes at one point, acknowledging the cumulative effect of her “trauma reel.”) Sex with Marvin Minsky, an M.I.T. scientist 56 years her senior, his face “shriveled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples”; orgies staffed by the model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who — like Epstein — died by suicide in prison; choking, beating and bloodying from a former prime minister, whom she refused to name because “I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here.”
Having been ordered to tuck Epstein, her chief tormentor, into pink satin sheets at night, and shown his snapshots of underage nude girls as if they were etchings, Giuffre still summons the compassion to speculate that he, too, may have been abused as a child.
It will take years to unfurl the tentacles Epstein wrapped around finance, law, media and politics. But “Nobody’s Girl” floats free, self-assured and self-contained — a true American tragedy. The devastation is in the details.
NOBODY’S GIRL: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice | By Virginia Roberts Giuffre | Knopf | 400 pp. | $35
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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