Virginia Roberts Giuffre — one of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s most vocal and prominent victims — was born in Sacramento, California, in 1983, but soon moved with her family to Palm Beach County. When she was 16, her father found her a side job as a towel girl in the spa at the Mar-a-Lago Club, where he worked as a gardener.
In her newly published memoir, Nobody’s Girl, edited by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, she recounts that when she started working at Mar-a-Lago, she was determined to leave her previous years as a runaway teenager behind her and give herself another chance. However, just as she was starting to envision a brighter future, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a regular client of the Mar-a-Lago spa, approached her for the first time.
The Louvre and the hero’s journey
Although the book follows a clear chronology, there are numerous flashforwards, as seen in the opening chapter. In this initial passage, 16- or 17-year-old Virginia, who had never traveled outside the US until accompanying Ghislaine and Jeffrey, finds herself at the Louvre. Here, Epstein explains to her what she describes as a magnificent tapestry. She is probably referring to the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, which has several rooms devoted to 16th-century Renaissance tapestries, many of which once adorned royal palaces.
Several pages later, we see her return to the museum. Over a decade has passed, and she is back in Paris, ready to testify against Jean-Luc Brunel, one of Epstein’s closest associates and a French modelling agent.
I think the parallel with the Louvre in these two very different moments in her life marks the hero’s journey narrative and the overcoming story she is striving to communicate. In the same hope-filled spirit of triumphing over evil, she dedicated her book to anyone who has suffered sexual abuse.
Megalomania and the shield of self-proclaimed genius
I find it fascinating how megalomaniacs and con artists like Epstein often draw on self-proclaimed genius and academic status to build their social power. Virginia’s memoir mentions that she was trafficked to a number of “academics from prestigious universities”, and recounts how Ghislaine first introduced Epstein to her as a “genius”.
After all, according to the person who hired him for his first teaching job, Epstein, a college dropout, lied about having degrees in mathematics and physics in order to secure a position at the prestigious Dalton School in New York. It was there that he took the big leap. The father of one of his students was a millionaire who was impressed by him and secured him a job at an investment bank.
The weight of trauma and the limits of public belief
When discussing Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, it’s important to acknowledge her death by suicide in April 2025, when she was only 41 years old. Symbolically, at the very least, her death highlights the toll that trauma and continued victimization can take on a person.
In the public narrative, her death is inextricably linked to the lasting effects endured by victims of sexual abuse, especially when they are not believed. While no one can claim to fully understand the complex emotional, medical or social reasons that led Giuffre to take her own life, it’s clear that confronting some of the most powerful elite groups by pursuing legal cases against deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein; Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now incarcerated; and the recently destitute former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — to name a few — was extremely difficult.
Disclosing sexual abuse is heroic in any situation, regardless of socioeconomic status. Patterns of victim-blaming tend to prevail whether one is wealthy or poor, as there’s typically an added burden of having to prove one’s credibility. However, most of Epstein’s victims did come from economically challenging and precarious situations, which always adds a layer of vulnerability.
#MeToo and the power of public scrutiny
Giuffre’s life story, as told in Nobody’s Girl, is both sadly universal and historically unique. In her memoir, she suggests that the 2017 #MeToo movement probably helped raise awareness about Epstein, who was finally imprisoned in early July 2019 and subsequently committed suicide.
It is true that the flood of testimonies led by actresses such as Alyssa Milano brought new light to how sexual violence is institutionalized, how it is part of the economy and how it is a defining characteristic of many powerful businessmen. Specifically in Virginia’s case, the added sensation that royalty brings to the media may have increased her exposure.
To the public, Andrew’s involvement may have seemed more scandalous and unusual than that of a Hollywood celebrity. British monarchs are still the titular heads of the Church of England since its foundation by King Henry VIII. Like Andrew, born second to the heir, Henry was also the Duke of York. However, after his brother Arthur died, Henry became king, a fate that Andrew has never come close to experiencing. This is far-fetched, but I’m still unsure whether Henry VIII’s womanizing and violent tendencies would have been enough to remove him from the throne in the #MeToo era.
Settlements, credibility and the pursuit of justice
Despite having her credibility questioned at every turn, I would argue that Virginia accomplished more than she would have if she had been born ten years earlier. One notable takeaway from the reading is her point that it’s unfair to doubt victims who reach economic settlements. She presents several arguments, such as the fact that trauma incurs material costs in the form of therapy or lost work income.
When Giuffre reached a settlement with the then-Duke of York, her team couldn’t get a direct admission of guilt from him. However, they did obtain a statement in which he acknowledged Virginia as a victim. For him, this was a concession; for her, it was a means to compensate her for repeatedly dismissing her status as such. He also paid her an undisclosed sum of money. The sense of not being believed or of being unworthy of belief is a central, recurring theme in Nobody’s Girl, encompassing the emotional arc of her life.
Cartoonist Ella Baron published a drawing in The Guardian depicting Virginia standing triumphantly on a podium while a caricature of Queen Elizabeth II’s son lies on the floor far below her. When disclosing her encounters with the prince, Virginia provided a photograph of the royal holding her waist. This piece of evidence made it nearly impossible for him to deny meeting her when she was 17.
Just a few days before the memoir’s publication, King Charles III began the process of removing his brother’s titles and honors. Though probably insufficient, this serves as poetic justice. As the cartoon suggests, she emerged victorious while he was expelled from “paradise” — and recently from the palace where he lived.
The tragic connection between Virginia’s and Jeffrey’s suicides at the end of their lives speaks to an absence of justice from different standpoints. Nevertheless, Ghislaine Maxwell did receive a jail sentence. Giuffre recalls how, at her trial, Maxwell’s defense team asked: “Why would an Oxford-educated woman do this?” Although intended as a rhetorical question, it alludes to the elitist delusion that sexual abuse is beyond the reach of intellectual and class prestige.
Along these lines, we could discuss the public corruption of the monarchy as a symptom of the decay of outdated systems based on privilege and kinship. According to a few former employees, Andrew has very specific instructions about the placement of his teddy bears and tends to humiliate and insult his employees for minor infractions regarding this and other matters. As Carol Hanisch once said, “The personal is political.”
The mechanics of complicity
In her memoir and in various interviews, Virginia emphasizes that this case is not about two psychopathic monsters. A level of abuse like this can only occur with the participation, silence or complicit approval of countless people, ranging from bystanders to co-perpetrators. This is true for nearly every case of sexual abuse. Perpetrators rely on religious cultures that silence all things sexual and on the complicity of those who look the other way for various reasons, sometimes for their own profit.
Though scarce and delayed, collaborating with Epstein’s associates was crucial to the investigation. For instance, one of the pilots provided his flight logs, and the Palm Beach driver confirmed that Maxwell ordered him to stop the car as soon as she saw Virginia enter the Mar-a-Lago spa to start her shift as a towel girl. The driver also mentioned seeing many young female visitors.
In her memoir, Virginia recounts meeting Maxwell. She stresses that no one would suspect the beautiful, posh woman who approached her and spoke with a British accent. It seemed like a stroke of good luck when, out of the blue, she asked if Virginia was interested in interviewing for a job as a travel masseuse for her millionaire friend.
The flight logs, in particular, provided proof that Virginia and other victims had traveled with Epstein and Maxwell. Conversely, the testimonies of victims and bystanders wouldn’t be as compelling if not for their abundance. Together, they are very powerful, as are the striking similarities in the descriptive details, such as the constant presence of underage females entering and leaving the house as described by employees, or the almost identical pattern of grooming retold by all the victims.
Power, denial and the unraveling of truth
The banality of evil — the apparatus and collective organization behind the sexual exploitation of minors — is also evident in British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist Emily Maitlis’s account of her visit to Buckingham Palace, during which Andrew granted her his infamous first interview. In it, he denied Virginia’s allegations and failed to properly apologize or explain his association with Epstein. When Maitlis retells her first time visiting the palace, she mentions the abundance of cooks, butlers, assistants, guards and cleaners who keep the machinery running, comparing them to a society and a macro corporation.
In the aforementioned BBC interview, Maitlis questioned Andrew about his continued relationship with Epstein after the millionaire was imprisoned in 2006. This information went public because a photo of the two of them walking in Central Park was taken. Andrew did not provide a satisfactory explanation. He conceded he had made the mistake of being too honorable and thinking that he had to end the friendship in person. When asked why, after ending the relationship, he stayed several days as a guest in Epstein’s house, Andrew simply said it was a convenient place to stay.
Due to recent revelations from police files, we now know that Andrew continued to email Epstein and express his support until just a few days before that same interview, writing, “keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
When asked by Maitlis about the photo with 17-year-old Virginia, Andrew deflected, saying he didn’t remember and that the photo might be altered. He focused on a part of her testimony that referred to the first night they met, when she said they were dancing and he was sweating. Out of the blue, he offered the unsolicited explanation that, after serving in the Falklands War, he had temporarily lost the ability to sweat.
In his book The Kingdom, French writer and Goncourt Prize winner Emmanuel Carrère reflects on the metafictional question of truth in stories, such as biblical ones, where distinguishing historical data from fiction becomes difficult. He mentions a detail from the story of Jesus of Nazareth’s arrest by Roman soldiers who take him on the Via Crucis. During the arrest, chaos reigns, and the narrator recounts that one of the disciples drops a handkerchief he is wearing. Carrère calls this type of detail a “detail of truth”: something so insignificant that it could have been omitted yet recounted because of the impression it made.
I mention this because, as with the accounts of many other Epstein and Maxwell victims or associates, Virginia’s life story contains such details of truth. For example, she specifically remembers Andrew’s sweat.
Nonetheless, the arrest and global condemnation of these perpetrators did not result from these narratological characteristics; rather, it resulted from the existence of multiple pieces of evidence, including flight logs that recorded the minors’ air travel alongside the millionaires.
After hearing one of the former Buckingham Palace security guards speak on 60 Minutes Australia, I feel compelled to mention Andrew’s sweat again. The former guard said he decided to speak out because of the mistreatment he witnessed the royal inflict over the years. He emphasized one scene in which Andrew came in from playing golf, threw his bag on the ground, and watched as police officers retrieved his balls while a butler handed him a towel to wipe off his sweat.
Justice and the defense of the truth
Given the ongoing debate and controversy surrounding the release of Epstein’s files, Virginia’s memoir is very timely. New emails were released this week suggesting that US President Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein’s house with a victim. However, this information appears to contradict her account of the president in Nobody’s Girl; she claims that she did not see him do anything inappropriate. Ultimately, the emails alone will not mean much unless the totality of the files is released and there is an in-depth investigation.
In her memoir, Virginia describes how achieving justice requires a collective effort from lawyers, experts, prosecutors and — in this case — other victims. Most of the time, simply speaking the truth is not enough. For a truth to be considered legitimate, it must be defended.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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