What does it take to get justice as a sufferer of sexual abuse? That’s the query on the coronary heart of No one’s Lady, the posthumous memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a girl recognized internationally for having been trafficked by the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Ordinarily, I’d be utilizing the phrase survivor quite than sufferer. That’s how Giuffre wished us to see her: within the introduction she calls herself “a warrior with a narrative to inform”, and her ebook is subtitled A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Preventing for Justice. However Giuffre didn’t survive. In April 2025, after the manuscript for her memoir had been finalised, she took her personal life. She was 41, and had by this level been combating for justice in a technique or one other for near twenty years.
However let’s begin with the fundamentals. Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts) was raped and trafficked by Epstein and his procurer-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 16. She was recruited by Maxwell whereas working for $9 an hour as a spa assistant at Mar-a-Lago, the luxurious Florida resort owned by Donald Trump, the place Giuffre’s father additionally labored on the time. Giuffre had a dream of coaching as an expert therapeutic massage therapist; Maxwell instructed her Epstein might make that dream come true. Giuffre spent the following two years as Epstein’s intercourse slave, travelling the US after which the world with him as he performed out his most sadistic fantasies on her, pressured her to recruit different younger ladies for him and pimped her out to his circle of wealthy and influential associates. Amongst them, she alleges, was Prince Andrew, who paid her a settlement reportedly within the multi-millions in February 2022, whereas persevering with to disclaim any recollection of assembly her.
There’s a query Giuffre is aware of sceptical readers shall be asking at this level: “How are you going to complain about being abused… when you would so simply have stayed away?” The primary part of No one’s Lady seeks to supply a solution. By the point she first encounters Maxwell and Epstein, Giuffre has suffered the sort of trauma that makes her an ideal goal. She reveals that she has already been raped repeatedly: from the age of seven by her father, whose years of molestation she recounts in harrowing element (he denies all allegations); by a household good friend with whom she was “traded”; by boys in school; by a random stranger who threatened to kill her; and by a paedophile pimp who picked her up from the facet of the street and saved her captive for six months.
The result’s a damaged, determined teenager who has been taught that every one the world will ever need from her is her physique and who craves safety and validation, nonetheless sordid the supply. This can be a teenager whose harm manifests in methods which can be solely comprehensible – reckless informal intercourse, makes an attempt to numb the ache with medication and alcohol, rebellions towards authority figures – but would additionally undermine her credibility have been she ever to hunt assist. She is a nasty woman, a troublesome woman, a woman who retains moving into hassle – probably even a prostitute. Who cares a couple of woman like that?
This issues, as a result of No one’s Lady is not only a memoir – it’s a template for the way troublesome it’s for victims who’ve been abused as soon as to flee the cycle. “Younger ladies (and boys, too) don’t find yourself being sexually trafficked in a vacuum,” Giuffre writes. “Serial sexual abuse doesn’t occur to them – to us – out of the blue.” Within the phrases of Giuffre’s cowriter, the investigative journalist Amy Wallace, Giuffre’s story is “a predator’s playbook”, a information for the way abusers can exploit such vulnerabilities to get away with it.
Entitlement oozes from the pages of this ebook. Primarily, it radiates from Epstein, whose depravity seems to haven’t any limits. Any woman who has had her interval, nonetheless younger, is truthful sport. Photographs of their bare our bodies adorn his home, which his infinite parade of associates – each those that partake in his sadistic actions and those that don’t – ask no questions on. He leaves copies of books on BDSM out for reporters to see, flaunting his proclivities within the certainty nobody will problem him. At one level, he and Maxwell attempt to persuade Giuffre to function their surrogate. To them, she is nothing however a physique for use – for intercourse or for childbearing.
And the way else to explain Maxwell, a personality virtually extra villainous than Epstein, motivated by the lavish way of life the financier’s wealth presents to lure younger ladies right into a nightmare, if not as entitled? Learn how to describe Prince Andrew, who in Giuffre’s account assumes that she is there for his pleasure and appears to have “believed having intercourse with me was his birthright”? Learn how to describe all the opposite males – some high lecturers, some main politicians, some billionaires – who’re given Giuffre as if she have been a toy, quite than an individual? Learn how to describe the remainder of Epstein’s circle, the chums who flock to his events and revel in his hospitality, who by no means cease to marvel why a person in his fifties is all the time surrounded by scantily clad youngsters?
There’s a photograph of Giuffre from Could 2001 within the ebook, on the thirty first celebration of the supermodel Naomi Campbell. The adults, together with Campbell and Epstein within the centre of the photograph, are wearing swanky night garments; within the foreground, startlingly misplaced, stands a waif in a pink tank high who seems to be like she must be on her strategy to faculty. No one at that social gathering appears to have requested why Giuffre was there. Epstein was assured he was working in a world the place penalties occurred to different individuals. And for a lot of, a few years, he was proper.
Right here’s a date that has nothing to do with Giuffre: 14 March 2005, two and a half years after Giuffre escaped Epstein and Maxwell at age 19 by disappearing in Thailand. That’s the date on which a involved girl first contacted the Palm Seashore Police Division to report that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been paid to have intercourse with a rich older man, and thus alerting legislation enforcement to Jeffrey Epstein. For over a yr investigators labored on the case: surveying Epstein’s vivid pink Florida mansion, noting the stream of younger ladies coming “to work”, monitoring down greater than 30 of them. One would possibly assume 30 younger trafficking victims, a lot of them underage, could be sufficient to convey anybody down. However the case went nowhere. Victims who had labored painstakingly with the police weren’t even knowledgeable that their testimonies had been dismissed in a botched try at a plea deal in 2006 till after the actual fact.
The second try and convey Epstein down concerned the FBI, however in September 2007 he was granted a secret non-prosecution settlement with the US authorities: if he pled responsible to 2 minor state fees – procuring a baby for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute – he would get immunity for all the things else. Once more, the victims who had bravely come ahead – which this time included Giuffre – have been instructed nothing. The deal was accepted by Alexander Acosta, who was later appointed to Donald Trump’s cupboard in his first time period. Epstein was sentenced in 2008 to 18 months in jail. He served 13 months, throughout which era he was allowed six days per week to work exterior the jail at a non-profit he himself had created. There’s proof that he continued to molest younger ladies, whereas technically serving his “sentence”.
It’s round this time that the victims realise that if there may be to be any justice, the burden will fall to them. It’s neither a clean nor a cost-free journey. Knowledgeable that civil motion is the one avenue open to her, Giuffre sued Epstein in 2009. She acquired a payout of simply $500,000. In 2016, she sued Maxwell too. In between, she gave an interview to a Each day Mail journalist about Epstein and Prince Andrew, oblivious to how it will upend her life. She cooperated with the FBI, handing over the unique {photograph} which reveals her, sickeningly younger, in denims and a tank high with Andrew’s arm round her waist. She recognized different perpetrators in Epstein’s circle, to whom she was trafficked. Some are named within the ebook. Some are usually not – Giuffre makes clear she remains to be petrified of them. All through all of it, she is accused of being a liar, a money-grabber, a celebration woman, a prostitute. Her previous trauma is uncovered and used towards her. Her household is stalked, her residence damaged into; she receives a reputable loss of life risk. Her well being – psychological and bodily – deteriorates.
Epstein was lastly arrested on federal intercourse trafficking fees in July 2019 – 14 years after police first noticed proof he was procuring underage ladies. A month later, he was discovered lifeless in his cell. Maxwell was convicted in 2021. It isn’t sufficient for Giuffre, who stays decided to maintain combating till all the boys who raped her, all of Epstein’s high-flying associates, resist what that they had carried out. “The place are these videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s homes?” she calls for to know, referring to the data Epstein saved of the encounters he orchestrated, maybe as future blackmail materials. “And why haven’t they led to the prosecutions of any extra abusers?”
These questions are but to be answered, however the proof is on the market. In September, a US congressional panel launched the notorious “birthday ebook”, filled with messages and images from associates as a present for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. Amongst them, is a drawing of a unadorned girl seemingly signed by Donald Trump. (Trump denies drawing the image and that it was signed by him.) The a whole bunch of pages teasingly alluding to Epstein’s sexual appetites and style for younger ladies counsel his associates have been totally conscious of what he was, even when they didn’t instantly partake in his perverse type of hospitality. They only selected to not care.
Within the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump mentioned he’d launch the so-called Epstein recordsdata that are rumoured to listing the boys to whom ladies have been trafficked. “The explanation Donald Trump’s want to launch the Epstein recordsdata was so necessary to Virginia and others is that these ladies had been instructed for years that they weren’t price listening to,” Amy Wallace instructed Instances Radio on 21 October, the day of the ebook’s publication. However Trump has since backtracked, calling the Epstein recordsdata a “Democratic hoax”. The ladies, it appears, are nonetheless being instructed they don’t seem to be price listening to. Survivors proceed to combat for his or her launch. However Giuffre is not amongst them.
When it comes to the sheer variety of victims and the lurid particulars concerned – orgies on luxurious yachts, jets and personal islands – the Epstein scandal appears sensational, an aberration too excessive to totally comprehend. However one level Giuffre defiantly hammers house is that Epstein isn’t any anomaly. “The best way he considered ladies and ladies – as playthings for use and discarded – just isn’t unusual amongst sure highly effective males who consider they’re above the legislation,” she writes.
The themes she dissects will be mapped throughout to any variety of sexual abuse scandals, from the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and different celebrities revealed underneath the Me Too banner, to the 1000’s of weak younger ladies raped and trafficked by grooming gangs within the UK. On one facet: males with energy who felt entitled to their victims’ our bodies, satisfied the foundations didn’t apply to them. On the opposite: victims who knew, both as a result of standing of their abusers or from bitter expertise, that the price of combating for justice could be too excessive.
There’s a very meta passage in direction of the top of the ebook when Giuffre is watching A Very Royal Scandal, the 2024 Amazon Prime dramatization of Emily Maitlis’s jaw-dropping Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew in November 2019. Maitlis (performed by Ruth Wilson) is reflecting on her personal expertise of being stalked and on what we ask of victims who come ahead, how we make them “parade their ache within the hope of even the slightest justice… the infinite bloody speaking about it, to get anybody to take it critically”. These phrases will resonate with any sufferer of a criminal offense like rape, assault or stalking who has ever contemplated making an attempt to carry their perpetrator to account. “Limitless bloody speaking about it” is what we demand of victims – whether or not a well-known journalist, a former intercourse slave of a multimillionaire, or a weak woman groomed by a rape gang – who wish to be taken critically.
That speaking doesn’t come free. “For 14 years, since 2011, I’ve repeatedly revealed to the world what was carried out to me within the hope of stopping others’ struggling,” Giuffre writes on the finish of her memoir, in a last try to indicate what being pressured to “parade” her ache has carried out to her. “With this ebook, I search to free myself from my previous.”
Giuffre didn’t free herself from her previous. There are a lot of complicated causes for an individual to take their very own life, however in her personal account she paperwork how years of trauma twisted her capability to see the world clearly, and the way the infinite hounding from attorneys and journalists decided to solid her as an opportunistic slut took their toll on her marriage, her psychological state, and finally her sense of self-worth. We get a real-time portrait not simply of how abuse warps somebody however how the battle for justice warps them additional nonetheless.
No one’s Lady isn’t all bleakness. There are seductive interludes, displaying Giuffre as a traditional, loving mum or dad between her many court docket and media appearances. But these solely serve to spotlight what she might have loved had she taken a distinct path and chosen to not change into a “warrior”. We see solely too clearly what she gave as much as inform the story we demanded she maintain telling. From past the grave, she shares that her “hope is that this ebook can intention some gentle on the darkness and pressure it to crawl again into its cave”. If it could, if we be taught from the template she attracts of how victims are trapped by their very own abuse and if we destroy the predator’s playbook, maybe her sacrifice can have been price it.
No one’s Lady: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Preventing for Justice
Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Transworld, 400pp, £25
[Further reading: The Trump regime wants to make America white again]