Virginia Giuffre is Jeffrey Epstein's most famous victim. Half a year after her suicide, her memoirs are being published

On page 49 of "Nobody's Girl," Virginia Roberts Giuffre asks the reader: " Please don't stop reading." She knows the story is difficult to bear. Up to this point, she has described her first eleven years of life. It is a childhood filled with violence, which later made her "the perfect victim" for the powerful financier Jeffrey Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell. She interrupts her childhood memories for a brief ray of hope, recounting a dinner with her husband Robbie, "half guru, half joker," and their three children in Australia, her adopted home.

These forward-looking interludes give the text a further tragic dimension. After her suicide in April 2025, the present she described no longer exists. Moreover, the familial idyll she had created for herself was said to have been quite different in reality. A few weeks before her death, Giuffre recounted years of domestic violence in an interview with People magazine. She was separated from her husband, apparently fighting with him over custody, and was ill and exhausted. Her memoirs, which she completed in 2024, have now been published. They read like a last-ditch attempt to put her life in order before it completely slipped away.

Giuffre's story has been recounted in numerous media reports and documentaries. For years, her name has been at the center of this dark universe collectively known as the "Epstein scandal." Giuffre accused Epstein and Maxwell of running an abuse ring involving underage girls. As one of the first victims, Giuffre spoke out, giving a face to the years of exploitation. Once again, one reads what one has long known, and only now does one realize how little one understood.

The violence in the posthumously published memoirs is repeated daily, and Giuffre describes it with forensic precision. Her father began abusing her at the age of seven. The sentence that he "left her with a friend" also stands as a dead ringer in the book. One brother was in boarding school, the other was still too young to understand, and her mother ignored the incidents.

Giuffre's work is simply composed: the first part focuses on childhood and early abuse, followed by the encounter with Maxwell and entry into Epstein's system. Giuffre recalls meeting Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, the private club of future President Donald Trump, where the then 16-year-old worked in the spa in the summer of 2000. It was her first glimpse of a better future. Giuffre describes enormous golden bathtubs, how everything sparkled, as if the air itself were gilded. It smelled of lavender and sandalwood.

Maxwell asked her if she wanted to become a massage therapist; she knew someone who could train her. Her father eventually drove her to Jeffrey Epstein's mansion in Palm Beach. She was determined to do everything right there, hoping for a different future.

Epstein promised her a better life, education, and travel. Maxwell, Epstein's partner for many years, appears not as a mere accomplice, but as a teacher of abuse—one who suggested intimate closeness in order to establish control. "I was no expert on mothers," Giuffre writes, "but sometimes I imagined her as mine." In her memoirs, Giuffre ultimately calls the wealthy British woman a "predator" and their first meeting "her recruitment."

For three years, Giuffre was involved in a pyramid scheme of sexual violence in which young women were recruited, blackmailed, and passed on. Giuffre also writes of three encounters with Prince Andrew.

Giuffre claimed she was seventeen years old when Maxwell introduced her to the prince in London, and she was allegedly abused by him. He denies all allegations to this day. The case never went to trial, only an out-of-court settlement was reached. Shortly before the publication of the memoirs, it was revealed that Prince Andrew had renounced his remaining royal titles and honors, presumably in the wake of the scandal.

Epstein's circle included politicians, entrepreneurs, professors, and celebrities. Who was an accomplice, who was a perpetrator, and who was merely a bystander remains unclear. Giuffre writes in a legally sensitive area. Many of the people mentioned or implied have never been prosecuted. "The monsters are still out there," she notes. What allegedly happened to Virginia Giuffre is based on her statements. There are no witnesses to support her story, only other women with similar stories. Giuffre refers to some of her tormentors with the code names "Billionaire 1," "Billionaire 2," and functions like "the Prime Minister." She names power relationships, not individuals—out of fear, as she writes.

She fled in 2002. In Thailand, she met Robert Giuffre, married him, moved with him to Australia, and had three children. She told Epstein over the phone that she wasn't coming back. He replied, "Goodbye," and hung up.

But the trauma remained like an echo, overshadowing every new experience. She writes: "In the second part of my life I tried to recover from my first."

In 2021, Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of "sex trafficking" of minors, i.e., human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, and sentenced to twenty years in prison . Epstein himself never went to trial. He committed suicide in 2019 while still in custody. Here, Giuffre indulges in conspiracy theories that undermine the otherwise confident narrative.

The force of her accounts expands in the second part into the agony of repeated memories: meetings with lawyers, court appearances, arrangements with other survivors. "My trauma reel," she calls it—the endless repetition of the same sentences in front of different faces. The public doesn't save her; it devours her. The decision to go to trial, she says, meant letting Epstein and Maxwell back into her life.

Giuffre's memoirs do not mark a turning point in the investigation of the Epstein complex. The known allegations are not expanded upon, but rather consolidated. The printed version preserves what has long been public knowledge – but the allegations are given a face. And they carry the authority of final words, the legacy of a broken man.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre: Nobody's Girl. A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. Random House, New York 2025. 400 pp., Fr. 36.90. – The German translation will be published on November 18 by Yes Publishing (Munich).