At 16, when she worked at the spa of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, Virginia Giuffre envisioned herself becoming a masseuse to help others find a kind of healing she felt she so sorely lacked.
This day job “gave me my first real vision of a better future,” Giuffre wrote in her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, which comes out Tuesday and tells in harrowing detail the abuse she suffered as a child and at the hands of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for facilitating his sex trafficking ring.
“I seized on the idea that, with the right training, I could eventually make a living by helping others reduce stress,” Giuffre wrote, in an excerpt that was published by Vanity Fair. “Maybe, I thought, their healing would fuel my own. For the first time in my life, I allowed a flicker of hope to build inside me.”
Giuffre died by suicide at age 41 in April, after spending years trying to get justice for herself and fellow victims. She writes about how she was lent out to some of the world’s richest and most powerful people, including a “politician” and a “former prime minister” whom she wouldn’t name, but who choked and beat her almost unconscious. She continued, “I believed that I might die a sex slave.”
She was allegedly first forced into an encounter when she was 17 with the disgraced British royal Prince Andrew, who relinquished his royal titles amid the scrutiny and allegations and on Friday announced he would no longer be known as the Duke of York.
Giuffre alleges that Andrew, who is King Charles’ brother, hired online trolls to harass her when she brought a civil case against the prince in New York in 2022, according to CNN.
Co-written by journalist Amy Wallace, the memoir is a brutal read, but it is “also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate,” according to a review in The Guardian, which also called it “an important, courageous, tragically posthumous book.”
Giuffre, who also allegedly suffered abuse from her Australian husband, with whom she had three children, was found dead on her farm in a remote part of the countryside. Before her death, according to The Guardian, she wrote to Wallace: “It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time.”
