Giuffre’s quest for justice lives on in posthumous memoir

Because sexual trafficking survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre was central to exposing elite abusers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, much has been written about her. After four years’ collaboration with writer Amy Wallace, Giuffre, who died in April 2025, is finally able to tell her own story to “aim some light at the darkness and force it to crawl back into its cave.”

Giuffre grew up in Florida, “buoyed by the knowledge that… mom loved having a daughter.” She describes sweet days filled with reading, drawing, playing and falling in love with her horse Alice. “With her I felt completely safe. I didn’t yet know there were reasons to be afraid,” she writes.

Giuffre is seven when her father introduces her to fear. Calling it “extra love,” he begins molesting her, ensuring her compliance by threatening to get rid of Alice. Simultaneously her mother becomes cold and remote, whipping Giuffre and suggesting she “was just a big mistake.”

The sexual, psychological and physical damage intensifies when Giuffre’s father lets his friend molest her. When she becomes “a rebellious mess,” her mother consigns her to “a tough-love treatment center” that “left the love out.”

Giuffre is 16 when she gets a job at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club spa. She becomes fascinated by massage therapy, imagining 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… I allowed a flicker of hope to build inside me.”

Before flicker can become flame, Ghislaine Maxwell spots Giuffre and persuades her to interview for a job as a travelling massage therapist for a rich man who will pay for her training because, as she tells Giuffre, “he loves to help people.” That very evening Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein — far older than Giuffre — sexually assault her, leaving her “gutted, as if someone had… scraped out my insides with a silver spoon.”

For 25 months Maxwell and Epstein — “two halves of a wicked whole” — along with numerous wealthy, powerful people (including a “well-known Prime Minister”) help themselves to Giuffre, who is “habitually used and humiliated — and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied.”

She fears she might die a sex slave. But it isn’t until Epstein and Maxwell ask Giuffre, now 19, to have their baby that she is shocked into action.

Giuffre escapes to Bangkok, where she meets and marries an Australian. They move to his country, where Giuffre is overwhelmed by tasks most adults take for granted. “I had never loaded a dishwasher… opened a bank account…made a good cup of coffee — the list went on and on,” she writes. And although she is fiercely attracted to her husband, her trauma limits their intimacy.

Nevertheless, they start a family, and Giuffre is pregnant with her second son when Maxwell phones. “‘I can’t believe this but, after everything he’s done for all those girls, Jeffrey’s being investigated,’” she tells Giuffre, warning her not to say anything. Then Epstein calls, his “threatening energy zinging through the phone line.” Giuffre assures both abusers she’ll keep quiet, but inside is screaming with fear for her family’s safety.

When the U.S. Department of Justice enters into a secret non-prosecution agreement with Epstein that amounts to a light slap on the wrist, Giuffre is livid and files a civil lawsuit against him; it reads, in part, that the “Plaintiff has suffered a loss of income, a loss of the capacity to earn income in the future, and a loss of the capacity to enjoy life. These injuries are permanent…”

They settle out of court, but after the birth of her daughter, Giuffre begins to shift from survivor to warrior, determined to stop Epstein once and for all.

Incredibly, Giuffre accomplishes that and so much more. Besides seeing Epstein and Maxwell imprisoned, her testimony sends privileged men, including Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, formerly known as “Prince Andrew,” tumbling from their plinths — with more likely to fall. Giuffre also starts a non-profit “to bring light to the issue of sex trafficking and empower survivors.”

Despite these and other triumphs, every retelling of her abuse hit hard. Giuffre endures threats on her life, family and finances, vicious mudslinging, nightmares, loneliness, illness, injury and exhaustion. Eventually trauma pulverizes Giuffre’s self-worth, leaving her suicidal.

An unsparing, propulsive account of Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s transformation from victim to warrior, Nobody’s Girl is a full-throated cry for an end to the trauma-inducing crime of sexual trafficking. Giuffre may have died in April, but her awe-inspiring spirit and hunger for justice live on in this unforgettable and important book.

Jess Woolford reads and writes in Winnipeg and beyond.