In her telling of a now-infamous night in London with Prince Andrew, what was ingrained in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memory was her outfit: a pink sleeveless crop top and a pair of sparkly jeans.
Ghislaine Maxwell had wanted Giuffre in a demure dress, something more appropriate for dinner with the Queen’s second son. But like any other teenage girl, Giuffre wanted to dress like the pop stars of the day.
“I idolized Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and the outfit was something I imagined the two of them might wear,” she wrote in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, released on Tuesday. “I told Maxwell it felt more like me.”
A photograph taken of Giuffre in her pink top and jeans — the then duke, aged 41, clutching at her bare midriff — would eventually lead to Andrew’s downfall and one of the biggest royal scandals in modern history.
While Giuffre may only have been 17 years old, Andrew was the latest in a long line of men accused of sexually abusing her. He has always denied the allegations and claimed the picture was fabricated.
The story of Giuffre has been told and retold in the pages of newspapers and in the dockets filed in civil lawsuits, but the book offers the first full account of her life in her own words.
Giuffre warns early on that it will be a difficult read. “I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The bad decisions. The self harm,” she writes. “But please, don’t stop reading.”
Reflecting on the title of the 400-page biography, she explains that she had been “everyone’s girl” and yet “nobody’s girl”. Giuffre consequently chose Nobody’s Girl as the title of the book, a melancholic reference to French author Hector Malot’s novel of the same name about an orphan adopted by a rich grandfather figure.
Page after page tells of the alleged abuse and betrayal that culminated in Giuffre taking her own life in April, shortly after the manuscript was completed.
Giuffre grew up in the down-at-heel town of Loxahatchee, Florida, as the middle child and only daughter of mother Lynn and father Sky Roberts. While her early childhood — marked by a poverty that verged on neglect — had been far from idyllic, it was fairly ordinary.
That was until she claimed her father Sky Roberts started abusing her, an allegation Roberts strenuously denies in a statement published in the book where he claims he “only tried to give my children a good life”. Roberts did not respond to additional requests for comment from The Times.
In her preteen and early teenage years Giuffre had come to see her value only in what her body could offer, having casual sex with any boy who so much as asked.
She recalls lying in her bed one night and thinking of a quote from one of her favorite children’s books, Charlotte’s Web. A lamb tells Wilbur that pigs mean “less than nothing” to her. Wilbur is outraged and argues there is no such thing. Giuffre says she “tried to remember a time when I’d been more than nothing”.
Writing in her book, she says the early abuse she suffered made her the “perfect victim” for Jeffrey Epstein.
Home life had become so intolerable that Giuffre would run away frequently. Aged 13 and living on the street, she fell into the clutches of Ron Eppinger, a local pedophile in his mid-sixties.
For six months he held her “prisoner” and sent her to be raped by his various acquaintances. In a deposition given this July, Maxwell named Eppinger. She described him as Giuffre’s “pimp from when she was 14… or 15”.
Eppinger was imprisoned for smuggling immigrants into the US for the purpose of prostitution, and Giuffre was rescued by an FBI Swat team.
Recalling being a high-school dropout living in a trailer in her parents’ back yard, Giuffre writes: “I thought I had nowhere to go but up … What happened next, then, seemed like a gift.”
In the summer of 2000, her father — then a maintenance man at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club & Spa in Palm Beach — got her a job there as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant.
Roberts introduced Giuffre to Trump in his office. The two men were “not friends exactly” but had been close enough that Giuffre says there were pictures of them posing together. Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier”, she writes.
A week later, while reading a book about massage, in walked a woman in her thirties with smart, manicured nails and a clipped British accent, who promptly introduced herself. Maxwell asked if Giuffre would be interested in earning money on the side, massaging her friend — “a wealthy man” and longtime member of Mar-a-Lago.
That same evening, the book alleges her dad drove her (she was still 16 and without a license) to Epstein’s house — a palatial pink-wash mansion at the end of a dead-end road.
Maxwell greeted Giuffre and led her to a room where Epstein was waiting, naked and prone. Giuffre recalled her first impression of Epstein’s bushy eyebrows and Cheshire cat grin. He peppered her with intimate questions, like whether she had a boyfriend or took birth control.
She was taken aback by the grandeur of the home; its many butlers, gardeners, chefs and servants. Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach was just 16 miles from Loxahatchee but the vast economic divide made it seem much further, she writes. “You need to learn how rich people do things,” she thought to herself as she rubbed Epstein’s thighs.
Maxwell then allegedly took off her own clothes before unzipping Giuffre’s skirt and pulling her white Mar-a-Lago-branded polo shirt over her head. Maxwell instructed her to straddle Epstein while pinching his nipples before he forced himself on her.
Giuffre had done a “great job”, Maxwell is said to have told her as she handed her $200 and invited her to come back the next day.
“So begins the period of my life that has been dissected and analyzed more than any other,” Giuffre writes.
She started by massaging only Epstein whom, she was told, had a biological need to climax three times a day. She had to be available at all hours of the day and night to “service” the financier.
Epstein shared with Giuffre what he insisted were “scientific” justifications for his errant behavior. What he was doing was not wrong, he told her, because he would only have sex with girls who had started menstruating as they were ‘of age’.”
She alleges Epstein threatened to hurt her younger brother if she ever told anyone of her life with him. Her obedience and total loyalty were rewarded. She started getting invited to attend glamorous events with Epstein and Maxwell: Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party on a yacht in St Tropez, dinner with the former president Bill Clinton. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Campbell or Clinton.
Epstein had succeeded in convincing Giuffre that he was protecting her from a mediocre life that she did not deserve. “I felt strangely indebted to him.”
Giuffre rose to become the “Number One” among the women and girls who attended to Epstein. She was flown around the world on his private jet — nicknamed the Lolita Express for its regular young female passengers — and offered up to his influential and powerful friends like a “platter of fruit”.
She has alleged that she was abused by Andrew three times — at Maxwell’s home in London, at Epstein’s in Manhattan and during an “orgy” with other underage-looking girls on a private island in the Caribbean — aged just 17. “You are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey,” Maxwell instructed Giuffre.
The duke has always denied the allegations. He agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in 2022 with no admission of liability.
“It is truly impossible to communicate in words just how many men there were,” she writes. Some of them, like Andrew, were well-known enough that they did not need an introduction, others she would only be able to identify years later when presented with photographs by journalists and FBI officers.
Many of them are anonymized in the book by its publishers for legal reasons; one dubbed “Billionaire No 1”, another “Billionaire No 2”, a man who apparently owned a chain of hotels.
She had preserved their faces in an “air-tight vault in my head”, she writes, one that was waiting to be unlocked.
Giuffre had wished to expose every one of her abusers, but worried there would be dire consequences for her and her family.
Swathes of the American public have in recent months been demanding that the Trump administration release Epstein’s so-called client list after the government closed its investigation into one of the worst sex-trafficking rings in history. While in all likelihood there is no such neat compilation of names, the Rolodex of men Giuffre was ordered to please during her 25 months with Epstein is a good place to start.
Giuffre claims Epstein suggested at one point — after she suffered a miscarriage — that she bear a child for him and Maxwell. Epstein, she noted, never liked to wear a condom with any of his victims. It crossed a line for Giuffre, who decided she needed to get out.
She begged Epstein to send her to receive formal training as a masseuse in Thailand, one of his early promises. She used it as her chance to escape.
Aged 19, she met a mixed martial arts instructor named Robert Giuffre while out in Chiang Mai. They married within ten days and moved to Robert’s hometown in Australia. She informed Epstein over the phone that she would not be returning. He brusquely wished her well but reminded her of the need for discretion.
Seven years — and three children — later, Giuffre came forward with allegations of abuse by Epstein in a lawsuit she filed under the pseudonym Jane Doe in 2009, prompted by the birth of her first daughter. “Having a daughter changed me, awakening something fierce down deep inside,” she writes.
It would be several more years before she would come out publicly, however, first against Epstein and Maxwell and then against Andrew. She was tracked down in Australia and interviewed by The Mail on Sunday, which paid her $160,000 for her story. It pre-dated the MeToo era, coming at a time when accusers of rich and powerful men were viewed largely with suspicion. Giuffre was pilloried in the press, labelled a liar and a money-grabber.
It only worked to strengthen her resolve. From the age of 13 she had been the type of girl who would “walk a mile for a fistfight”, one who “liked confronting bullies”.
She enlisted the help of the powerhouse lawyer Sigrid “Siggy” McCawley, who sued Andrew and negotiated millions of dollars in a confidential settlement. She inspired dozens of other Epstein victims to do the same, becoming the nucleus of a group of “Survivor Sisters” fighting to bring alleged wrongdoers to account.
As this was playing out in America, tensions grew at home. Giuffre claimed her husband had grown uncomfortable with the publicity her case was attracting.
She largely writes lovingly of her husband, a man who “rescued her from Epstein and Maxwell’s clutches”, but her family have alleged since Giuffre’s death that the marriage was more complicated.
The Times, which was given access to her diaries and texts, reported in July that Giuffre claimed she was assaulted by her husband during their 22-year marriage. They became estranged in 2024 and Robert was granted custody of their children which, her family say, devastated her.
Robert Giuffre’s counsel said they were unable to comment on specific allegations of abuse due to live proceedings in the family court of Western Australia.
Giuffre’s family expressed objections to Robert’s characterization in the book and requested certain passages be edited to reflect the alleged “abuse” she suffered during her marriage. The book’s publisher, Alfred A Knopf, and the family, agreed to a foreword with a note from Wallace, co-author of the book, explaining that there were “all kinds of reasons that a woman who had been domestically abused might choose to stay silent”.
Victims of child abuse are as much as 15 times more likely to be victims of abuse later in life, the foreword notes.
And as is common with victims, recovery is not often a linear process. The years of abuse continued to haunt Giuffre. She struggled with eating disorders, self-harm and attempted suicide at least twice (on one occasion swallowing 240 pills before being treated with Narcan in hospital).
Giuffre ultimately took her own life at the family’s ranch in rural Perth, in April this year aged 41.
One of her last expressed wishes was that her memoir be released. “It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of circumstances at the time,” she wrote in an e-mail foreshadowing her suicide three weeks later. “It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic (of sex trafficking) be addressed, both for the sake of awareness and for justice.”
Josie Ensor is a New York–based British journalist
