Thu, Oct 23, 2025 page11

• Book review: A devastating expose of power, corruption and abuse

  Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes — but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a hero

  • By Emma Brockes / The Guardian
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  There is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl — a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April — in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse.

  “I know it is a lot to take in,” she writes after a grueling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.”

  After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.”

  

  Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

  Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologizes and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims.

  Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

  Of course, these assumptions of hers aren’t wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died and whose deft, smart book is co-written with the journalist Amy Wallace, knows that to be a victim of sexual violence is to be at best pitied, at worst reviled. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, but a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, Her Former Friends Say.”)

  I approached Nobody’s Girl with two questions. First, does it give any insight into the so-called Epstein list, the catalog of prominent men to whom Giuffre and others were trafficked? The closest we get to a fresh allegation is Giuffre’s description of one of the scores of men Epstein forced her to have sex with as a “politician” and “former minister,” who choked and beat her almost unconscious, but who, she writes, is too powerful to name. (When she told Epstein how violent the man had been, he said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.”)

  Second, does the book make life harder for Ghislaine Maxwell, currently in a low security prison in Texas and sucking up to US President Donald Trump to have her sentence reduced? (Her latest appeal was rejected earlier this month.) On this score, Giuffre’s account must shunt the possibility of reprieve further out of reach. It was Maxwell — or “G Max” as she insisted the girls call her — who spotted Giuffre working as a 16-year-old locker-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, and brought her to Epstein’s house to be “interviewed” as a possible masseuse. Giuffre was forced to have sex with Epstein that day and both then and in subsequent assaults, Maxwell participated. “Maxwell began lashing out at me during our threesomes,” writes Giuffre. “If I complained, she hurt me more.”

  This brings me to a third question: given its punishing nature, why read this book? I’ve heard more than one person say they “don’t have the stomach” for it — not phrasing any victim needs to hear — but while the book is relentlessly, shockingly hard, it is also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate.

  Giuffre’s greatest fear — that being raped and trafficked puts her beyond empathetic reach of most people — is not, in fact, what happens. Narrative does what deposition can’t by taking us into the room with her. The book breathes life into Giuffre’s legal status as a victim, showing us a girl like any we know, like us, and enlivening the reality of those who are trafficked while being “free” to walk away.

  Abused since the age of six, by the time she met Epstein, Giuffre writes: “I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing. I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For 10 years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love.’ Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

  Giuffre’s recollections of Prince Andrew, meanwhile, a man with whom she was allegedly forced to have sex three times — once in the context of an orgy on Epstein’s island — present him in an even more buffoonish and grotesque light.

  “We disrobed and got in the tub, but we didn’t stay there long because the prince was eager to get to the bed … In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.”

  Prince Andrew denies Giuffre’s allegations that he had sex with her, that she had been trafficked to him by Epstein or that he had ever met her. But so much focus has been put on the prince that after reading this book, it wasn’t him I thought about most; it was the casual visitors to Epstein’s New York mansion, the illustrious men and occasional woman whom Giuffre says she encountered at dinners there.

  In respect of these people I’d like to ask: who the fuck did they think the 17-year-old at the table was? What did they think she was doing there? Only Melinda Gates, who met Epstein once and cited him as a factor in the breakdown of her marriage to Bill Gates, sensed what apparently none of these people could put their finger on. Giuffre quotes from a statement made by Gates after her meeting with Epstein: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified.” It was an insight that evidently escaped geniuses like the MIT professors Epstein continued to advise long after he’d become a convicted sex offender.

  Giuffre was rightly proud of holding Epstein and Maxwell to account. And yet for any survivor of sexual violence, the cost of recovery — let alone of confronting her abusers in front of the world — can be impossibly steep. At the beginning of the book, Amy Wallace shares details of Giuffre’s fraught final months, including multiple health problems and alleged domestic violence at the hands of Robert Giuffre, her Australian husband. (Robert Giuffre’s lawyer has declined to comment on the allegations, citing ongoing court proceedings.) On April 1, Giuffre wrote to Wallace: “It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time.”

  Three weeks later, she was found dead on her remote Australian farm, leaving behind three children. In a lawsuit Giuffre brought against Epstein in 2009, her lawyers stated the injuries she suffered as a result of his abuse included “a loss of the capacity to enjoy life,” and were of a magnitude that made them “permanent in nature.”

  The same might be said for this important, courageous, tragically posthumous book.

  For your information

  Publication Notes

  Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice By Virginia Roberts Giuffre 400 pages Doubleday Hardback: UK
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