Since the Jeffrey Epstein saga seized the national consciousness toward the end of 2018, a kind of recurring parlor game has emerged for politicians on both sides of the aisle, gambling websites, and late-night hosts and podcasters. When a new batch of court documents was set to be unsealed amid the sprawling legal proceedings, these far-flung sets of Epstein watchers sprung into action, speculating about who would next be named in the case, or who might be added to what is now sweepingly known as the “Epstein list.”
What often went unsaid at these junctures was that, in many instances, the documents in question were the product of one Epstein victim’s quest, over several years, to bring attention to the horrors she said she suffered at the hands of the late financier and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s account of her relationship with Maxwell and Epstein is out in a new memoir Nobody’s Girl, which details some of the inner workings of their operation.
After Giuffre accused Maxwell of sexual abuse in 2015, the British socialite went beyond denying the allegations and branded Giuffre a full-blown liar. That claim, in turn, prompted Giuffre to sue Maxwell for defamation, leading to the streams of discovery and depositions that animated so much of the criminal scrutiny and amateur sleuthing that followed. (The defamation suit was settled in 2017. Maxwell was ultimately charged for child sex trafficking among other infractions and is serving a twenty year prison sentence.)
It was one of the many ways in which Giuffre, who grew up in Palm Beach and died by suicide in Australia in April, shaped the conversation around Epstein and Maxwell. Giuffre claimed that she was forced into sex with Prince Andrew at 17 years old after Epstein trafficked her to him among other wealthy and prominent friends. (Andrew has repeatedly denied this.) In 2022, Giuffre and Andrew settled a lawsuit she brought against him, but the allegations sent the royal family into an ongoing spiral. On Friday, just days before the publication of Giuffre’s much-awaited memoir, Andrew announced that he would no longer use his royal title.
Giuffre met Maxwell while working as a spa attendant at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, as she recounted in an excerpt from Nobody’s Girl, which Vanity Fair exclusively published last week, and after breaking free from Epstein’s clutches, she became the foremost voice in the fight for justice for his scores of victims. Amid the current wave of outrage surrounding Trump, Maxwell, their prior relationship, and the possibility of a presidential pardon, Giuffre’s posthumous memoir may offer few surprises. Still, the book is among the fullest and most vivid pictures to date of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s modi operandi.
“Writing a book with someone is always an intimate exercise,” Giuffre’s co-author Amy Wallace writes in the memoir’s foreword. Doubly so given the subject matter at hand, and the complications in this instance go even further. Shortly before her death, Giuffre claimed that her husband, Robert, was violent with her for years, and after her suicide, her family members said that she wanted to revise the book to that end. (A lawyer for Robert has said he cannot comment amid ongoing court proceedings.) Wallace mostly dispenses with this tension in the prologue, writing that the finished product represents a manuscript that Giuffre had previously approved. But as Giuffre’s many loving recollections of Robert unfurl—she portrays him as the key figure in helping her move past her time with Epstein and Maxwell—the unresolved matter inevitably hangs over the book.
Maxwell’s 2021 federal trial often revolved around a grim pattern. Her victims testified about troubled childhoods involving addiction and abuse and how an elegant and cultured woman suddenly appeared in their lives to exploit them, as if seeming to smell the vulnerability.
In harrowing detail, Giuffre offers her own experience of that template by describing a long trail of sexual assault that she says began when she was 7 years old and her father and a family friend took turns molesting her. (Giuffre’s father has denied this; the family friend was convicted for abusing another minor.) The intrigue around Epstein has naturally centered on his connections to the global elite, but here Giuffre tells a less sensational but perhaps more damning story of privilege. Maxwell, Giuffre recalls, taught her how to hold a knife and a fork and fold a napkin in her lap. “I’d be lucky, I thought, if I could grow up to be anything like” Maxwell, she writes. “This only makes sense, of course, when you consider how little I’d grown up hoping for.
Giuffre refers to a “Billionaire Number One” to whom she says she was trafficked by Epstein. Sending her by taxi from his Palm Beach mansion to a nearby luxury resort, Giuffre writes, Epstein instructed her to “give him whatever he wants…just like you do for me.”
The book does not significantly change the account Giuffre had long given of being assaulted by Andrew, but she tells it here at a more relaxed—and therefore more excruciating—pace. She also resurfaces some not altogether new but comparatively little noticed allegations about what she witnessed in her time with Epstein and Maxwell. She was trafficked, she writes, to a man whom she “also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself.” Amid Maxwell’s boasts of her friendships with famous men, Giuffre claims, Maxwell enjoyed “repeating that once, at some random event, she’d taken the actor George Clooney into a bathroom and given him a blow job. Whether that was true or not, we’d never know.” This alleged boast of Maxwell’s initially surfaced in a manuscript of Giuffre’s memoir that had been submitted to the court in her defamation suit, and which the court released some years ago. (A representative for Clooney did not return a request for comment.)
President Trump’s friendship with Epstein remains a fascination for the media and speculators alike. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes and is suing the Wall Street Journal over its report that his name adorned a sexually suggestive contribution to a book of well-wishes that Maxwell organized for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
Giuffre revisits the news-dominating dust-up from Trump’s first term, when his Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who signed off on Epstein’s notorious sweetheart deal as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008, resigned over the scandal. But for the most part, Trump, the dominant character in today’s intrigue around the case, is a bit player in Giuffre’s memoir, connected to the story only insofar as his club provides the setting for her initial encounter with Maxwell. In a footnote, Giuffre even commends Trump to a degree, citing reporting that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member. In 2010, she notes, three years after Epstein became a registered sex offender, he held a party attended by Andrew, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and Woody Allen. “Only later would it become clear that Epstein had been shunned by at least one powerful person he’d previously wooed,” Giuffre writes. “Donald Trump.”
The task is beyond the scope of the memoir, but it is difficult to arrive at the end of Nobody’s Girl and not be left with additional questions about the final days of Giuffre’s troubled and highly dissected life. The month before her suicide, Giuffre said on Instagram that a car accident had left her with only four days to live, a sudden development that sent Epstein conspiracists into overdrive. While in the hospital, she first made her abuse allegations against her husband. After her death, which her attorney described as not “suspicious in any way,” her father claimed that “somebody got to her.” As with so much of the broader Epstein case, the fogginess ensures that conjecture will outstrip restraint.
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The post Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s Memoir Nobody’s Girl Offers a Graphic Picture of a Life of Abuse appeared first on Vanity Fair.
