USA TODAY National
In many ways, this was going to be Virginia Giuffre’s emancipation.
Writing a book would free her, she thought, from the necessity of chronicling sex abuse at the hands of some of the richest and most powerful men again and again. To investigators and lawyers, reporters and counselors.
Giuffre would finally be able to focus on advocacy, pushing for stronger laws targeting sex traffickers and protecting children, and really, living her life.
But she is no longer here. Her words will have to be enough.
Her memoir “Nobody’s Girl” was released Oct. 21, six months after her death by suicide. The mother of three, one of the most outspoken victims of financier Jeffrey Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, was 41.
To the people that knew her and loved her this moment feels bittersweet. A woman who survived so much, who inspired other victims to speak out against abusers and seemed to have found a way to allow the pain and the beauty to live alongside each other isn’t here for the book’s publication.
“She really thought that telling her story was going to give her the freedom again,” her publicist and friend Dini von Mueffling told me.
Giuffre kept the abuse a secret for nine years before she broke her silence in 2011. She had filed a civil suit in 2009 against Epstein and Maxwell, but it was as Jane Doe 102.
When she first shared her story publicly to a British tabloid reporter about how Epstein and Maxwell sexually assaulted her and trafficked her to Prince Andrew, politicians and businessmen, she was dismissed along with their other victims.
At best, people saw her as a teen prostitute, at worst, a greedy lying whore.
Undeterred, she continued to repeat herself. Louder even – in civil suits and her accusations in criminal suits. Eventually it would be the downfall of Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew – who settled the civil suit, withdrew from royal duties and announced he would cease using his title Duke of York.
But the book – her book – was on her terms. As if telling it one more time would prove its truthfulness and her worth. (Wasn’t it always that with survivors? The need to be believed.)
Perhaps her account – factchecked and corroborated – would stop her from reliving the memories.
Or maybe just maybe the photo of the innocent girl who was 17 but looked far younger that the world came to know from a photo on a yacht in St. Tropez at Naomi Campbell’s birthday would fade away.
The book, says Amy Wallace who helped her write it, was a triumph.
“It would allow her to just be a mother,” Wallace says. “That was always the hope. That once the book was published she could move full-heartedly where she didn’t have to keep on opening up a vein over and over and over again like so many survivors have to do.”
Whether or not she would have succeeded in her attempt, is another question entirely. Her memoir comes at a time when interest in Epstein has, in part, defined President Donald Trump’s presidency, as he faces calls from both sides of the aisle to release all the files. Reviewers have praised Giuffre for her vulnerability and honesty.
More than simply persevering in civil lawsuits, Giuffre married and became a mother. She learned to live along with the pain and to trust and love. And still Giuffre wanted to help.
“She knew firsthand what it was like to feel shame and have trouble getting up in the morning because the PTSD was so hard,” Wallace says. “She wanted to say to other victims: ‘I know you. I see you. I am you.’ To make them feel less alone. In best case to give them a little grace.”
Wallace spent four years working with Giuffre on the book, living with her family at times in Australia. She got to know the comfortable rhythm of normal family life. She went to school volleyball games and morning walks. She observed the morning routine, permission slips to sign, lunches to make. She also was there to talk to Giuffre after a suicide attempt sent her to the hospital.
With the book’s release this week, Giuffre would have appeared on morning shows and news programs. She would have recorded podcasts and shot videos. Wallace, as her ghostwriter, would have remained in the background.
“I told her I would be here for her, to hold her hand, but this is her story,” she says in a phone call between interviews with CBS and the BBC. “This isn’t what I do. I have written two books with other people. They tell their stories.”
She pauses.
She finds herself wanting Giuffre’s words to hold.
Her friends want readers to know something else
The book was released into some bookstores early, and media outlets published dozens of stories, mostly focused on the most salacious sexual details or biggest revelations of which bold face names were listed in the book.
Virginia Giuffre’s Posthumous Memoir: The Biggest Bombshells, reported People.
Virginia Giuffre feared she 'might die a sex slave', was 'raped' by Epstein associates and lost her baby days after 'orgy with Andrew', memoir claims, The Daily Mail read.
Virginia Giuffre raped by ‘well-known Prime Minister,’ US version of posthumous memoir claims, CNN proclaimed.
USA TODAY published at least 19 headlines about the book on Oct. 20 and 21, from how to buy the memoir to what Giuffre said about Prince Andrew.
None of her friends or people who work with her disagree that these details aren’t newsworthy. It’s partly why she wrote the book.
But they also want readers to notice something else.
They want to talk about how Giuffre was brave, but equally endearing, compassionate and funny. If she talked to you or worked with you, you became her friend, von Mueffling told me.
The two met when they began working on the book. The pair talked across time zones with Giuffre drinking her morning coffee in Perth on FaceTime 12 hours ahead of von Mueffling who cooked stew or pasta for her family on Long Island during the pandemic.
It said something that Giuffre had this light, that she found humor and beauty.
Her book tells the story of what can most kindly be described as a tragic childhood. Abused by her father and a close family friend, dropping out of school after 9th grade, running away before landing a job at Mar-a-Lago making $9 an hour as a locker room attendant.
The rest of the story has been well documented. She was recruited by Maxwell under the guise of becoming a massage therapist for Epstein. She was forced into bondage and orgies, she says, before forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew and other men the next two years. Andrew and Maxwell have denied the allegations.
Maxwell sent her to a school in Thailand to learn massage and bring back a Thai girl for Epstein when Giuffre was 19. There she met Robbie Giuffre, a martial arts instructor visiting from Australia. Within 10 days, they were married in a Buddhist temple. She never saw Epstein and Maxwell again.
Giuffre writes in the book that she fell in love. But when the majority of your life, you are abused, can you recognize love? We now know that the brains of children who are sexually abused are altered. The changes to the prefrontal cortex can impact their decision making and control their impulses. Is love something you understand? Maybe it was an out? Regardless, it ended the abuse by Epstein and the couple moved to Australia.
Sex abuse ends, it doesn’t go away. Experts now know it lives in the body. It controls emotions. It informs who and how you love, who you trust.
Somehow, through therapy and counseling, sheer grit and stubbornness, Giuffre found a way to build a life. And that, along with the book, is what maybe we celebrate now.
When she got pregnant with her first child, she said she loved the feeling. “I had something someone bigger than myself to live for,” she wrote. She sang the alphabet song to her stomach and "Itsy Bitsy Spider." She’d heard music was good for the baby’s brain.
She was a world away from Epstein and Maxwell. It was her first chance at a normal life. She had a son in 2006.
“I love being your mummy” she wrote in his baby book.
“Watching (him) grow was like medicine for me. I adored every inch of him, but there was something else, too: (He) made me feel essential. He depended on me. And the simple fact that I mattered so fundamentally to him gave my life purpose in a way nothing else had before,” she wrote.
There was nothing Giuffre loved more than being a mother, von Muelling said. “She was the best at it, so cared about others more than she cared about herself.”
Motherhood helped transform her, Wallace says. And helped her find her strength.
All she wanted to talk about was them, remembers Sigrid McCawley, Giuffre's closest legal advisor and one of the lawyers who represented Giuffre and many of Epstein’s victims.
“They were everything to her,” she says. The managing partner of Boies Schiller Flexner and the mom got to know each other in 2014 and remained friends.
She understood that the 17-year-old blonde teenager smiling in the pink crop T-shirt and low-rise embroidered jeans, Prince Andrew’s arm around her waist in a blurry photo was so much more.
Her photo had been scrutinized, as if a window to her character.
Looking at the photo now with 20 years distance, it is easy to see a girl who was so young. So innocent she grabbed a Kodak Funsaver disposable camera to ask Epstein to snap a photo to show her mom that she met someone famous.
Giuffre had another son the next year. And a few years later, a third child, a girl.
It was then, von Mueffling said, Giuffre realized she needed to do more.
“She knew that she couldn’t look her little girl in the eyes and not do something,” von Mueffling says. “Her daughter made her look at things in new ways, she needed to protect her and other girls.”
Giuffre would write that she had “hung back, hoping someone else would take the lead in holding abusers accountable. (She) ended that period of passivity. Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I knew I had to act to keep other girls from suffering the way I had. Not long after that, I began to fight.”
It would lead to her talking to investigators, filing lawsuits, and talking about the painful past. So much so that other women would say it encouraged them to tell hers.
It came at a great cost. And she knew it as she did it. She and her husband whispering each other to sleep about what they would lose. Her privacy. Missing her daughter’s first fifth grade dance in Perth while she was in London testifying in a criminal abuse case.
But maybe we are having the wrong conversations. Giuffre needed to share her stories of abuse, but what the book should talk about is the toll of the abuse.
In her book, she wrote: “Trauma is such a cunning enemy. Those of us who’ve survived its terrors often marvel at how quickly it can recede, at least at first. Once you get to safety, your visible wounds – your cuts, your bruises – heal and fade. But recovering victims like me know too well how trauma lurks in the shadows, always there. No matter how many years go by, or how many therapists you see, it can rise, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere.”
Details came back to her, the scent of a stranger’s cologne, a song on the radio.
Wallace told Giuffre that she didn’t need to put everything in the book. This is your memoir, she told her. It is your life, but that doesn’t mean you must include every overdose attempt, every panic attack.
Giuffre was adamant that the pain, including several attempts at suicide in the past few years, was part of her story.
“Virginia said it felt unfair to not include it. She worried that if she didn’t talk about all of those things that she would be doing a disservice to other survivors. She didn’t live the life of an advocate who just got past it all,” she says. “She lived with it.”
McCawley says it is a testament to Giuffre that she pushed forward.
“Seeing her, you notice the resilience of the human spirit. It was hard to reconcile with losing her that way,” she says now. “With sexual abuse victims, we can help them get justice through the legal system and potentially help them monetarily, it never erases the trauma of what they have been through, you can’t take that away from them.”
She almost made it
The two finished the book in fall of 2024. In early 2025, Giuffre told Wallace that she and her husband had an argument and that he had assaulted her. She reported it to the police, and her husband made allegations, too. Neither was charged with a crime.
In February 2025, he took out a restraining order that prevented her from seeing her children until June of 2025. The book was unclear of the reason.
Giuffre's children are now 19, 18 and 15.
Wallace would remember something Giuffre had told her as they wrote the book, about a time in 2015 when her husband was arrested for assaulting her when they lived in Colorado. Wallace tracked down the sheriff’s deputy who told her that a restraining order had been issued against Giuffre’s husband. The deputy told her that the document no longer was available.
USA TODAY was not able to independently track down this record.
Giuffre had told Wallace it was an isolated incident and she wanted to keep it out of the book, for the sake of their children.
Giuffre’s brothers told Wallace they supported the book’s release, but think Giuffre underplayed the domestic violence she alleges by her husband.
Wallace doesn’t know, except that there are many reasons why a victim of domestic violence might not want to share the details. And in the end, Wallace listened to Giuffre and told her story as she wanted.
She died in April. And with suicide, we know there typically isn’t one reason that leads to a death.
We know that young victims of abuse are at higher risk of suffering abuse – both sexual and domestic – when they get older.
With Epstein’s death while awaiting trial on federal charges, the case was never prosecuted. In the end, the inside look comes in Giuffre’s book, the closest we'll get to his victims taking the stand and facing an alleged predator.
We don’t get to see what was next.
Wallace now sees the book as “not a victory lap, but a time to remember all that she did, that she stood up for others. She almost made it.”
So we thumb through her book again, looking for clues to guide us, folding corners of pages.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 or visiting 988lifeline.org
Laura Trujillo is a national columnist focusing on health and wellness. She is the author of "Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter's Search for Truth and Renewal," and can be reached at ltrujillo@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Virginia Giuffre survived Epstein's abuse. There's more to her than salacious details
Reporting by Laura Trujillo, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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