Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre Book Review

Trigger Warming: Graphic Content of Sexual Abuse

Virginia Roberts Giuffre was one of Jeffery Epstein’s victims. She was working at Mara Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell noticed and solicited her to come work for Epstein as a massuese-in- training. Neither Maxwell nor Epstein, she would immediately discover, had pure intentions.

As you might imagine, this book is not a read for the faint of heart. Giuffre’s life of abuse began long before Epstein and Maxwell came into the picture, and this woman’s story is... awful. No child should have to experience life in the way these pages describe. So, I definitely advise using your own judgement about whether or not this book is the one for you.

If I were going to write a synopsis of the book, I’d say you can describe her story in five parts - with the last really unwritten. In part one, Virginia talks about the childhood traumas that groomed her for Epstein. And, I say traumas plural, because there were many. Incest, rape, being shared around sexually. By the time she met Ghislaine Maxwell, Vitginia was hoping for a new beginning. When that hope was crushed, I got the sense that she was at least looking for a surrogate family.

In the second part of the story, Virginia tells of her time with Epstein. She details the gradual way her experiences changed there. From being abused by Epstein and Ghislaine exclusively, bit by bit her sexual pairings are extended. She is trafficked. She earns an income, but there’s no sense of a direct payout. Although it’s not stated directly, there seems to be more of a payroll thing going on. Either way, she’s financially dependant on Epstein.

She’s emotionally dependant, as well. She wants a father figure, and in a horrible way, he becomes that. The book clearly shows how the predator knows how his prey. He knows exactly what she needs, and gives it to her -- until he doesn’t. She wants to please him, thinks his care for her is greater than that of his other girls. It’s twisted, and not something that is easy to comprehend, but at the same time, it makes complete sense. She was starved for love. He provided some pseudo form of that emotion, and it creates not only dependancy, but also attachment.

Of course, as she ages, things change. No one stays naive forever, and in part three of the story, she begins to see the truth of who Epstein is and who she is in his eyes. The sexual encounters she has with some of the men become more brutal, and she falls into addiction. This, ironically, is the first dawn of freedom, because Epstein won’t permit it, and sends her away. She gets clean, gets a restaurant job, and then her boyfriend steals from the restuarant and she is fired. Desperate, she returns to what is familiar. She goes back to Epstein. But the seed has been sown. She begins to pull away.

She convinces Epstein to send her to a real massage school, and he sends her to Thailand. It seems like mostly he and Ghislaine would like her to be their surrogate. To soften her to that plan, they are willing to finance her education. In her mind, though, this is too much. She won’t provide them a child to raise in their messed up world. While in Thailand, she meets and marries an Austrailian man, and he ultimately gets her away from Epstein. They move to Australia and begin a family. She has a lot of healing to do, but slowly she puts her previous identity and life behind her and steps into her role of wife and mother. She says she is happy, and it reads that way.

Possibly, that would have been the end of her journey, just living her life loving the people who loved her, but the investigation into Epstein begins. In part four, she gets drawn into this destiny. She is part of the case, and she is proud of this part of her story. In the book, it is called “Warrior.”

She gets financial awards from the trial verdicts, and she gives imperfect accounts of some of her history and memories. For example, she is incorrect about the age she was when she met Ghislaine. This is projected as her being a liar and her testimony being detrimental to certain elements of the case against them. She is allowed to participate in giving her testimony sometimes, but not in other moments. This is hard on her.

In fact, the stress of these trials and reliving her most awful moments is also hard on her. She suffers with her health, incurs some injuries, and ends up abusing the pain medication she is prescribed. She eventually makes several suicide attempts with the pain medication. We know before reading this book that she dies by suicide, but in the book, she is yo-yo-ing. You see the struggle between her exhaustion and depression and her desire to be right for her children. She promises them she will make it through.

She doesn’t. And that, in my opinion, is the fifth part of her story. It is unwritten. There is no precise death scene, no proclamations of this and that happened, but there is enough going on in the last chapters to give a definite impression of what kills her in the end. Her husband, whom she consistently credits with saving her and being strong for her, has left her by the end. We do not see much of that journey, and nowhere is he blamed for what happens to her, but neither is he exonerated, especially since it is revealed in the forward that he hit her.

Her death hangs over the ending. Yes, Epstein and Maxwell are convicted and go to jail, which is a high point, but by then, it is clear she is not going to make it. That moment of their conviction might be a win, but overall, Virginia’s life feels as tragic at the end of the story as it starts off in her early years. It really feels like her choice to participate in Epstein’s prosecution is ultimately what kills her. If she’d chosen a different path, it seems possible that she would still be alive today. That is never stated, but it is how the story resonated with me, and it is how I walked away from the reading feeling.

I had some major takeaways from this memoir. It really is truly a horrific account of lifelong abuse of one kind or another. Her family failed her. Society failed her. It seems her husband failed her. You can’t read this book without your heart aching for her.

One of the biggest traumas of her life wasn’t the abuse itself, it was when the family sold her horse. That loss really hurt. I think this is because she spent a lifetime searching for love, and she had it with her horse. That might be a sad commentary, but as a rider myself, it’s one I can understand.

She also answers one of the main questions I have had over the Epstein situation -- why did the women go back to him more than once? Anyone can understand being victimized, being tricked by an older, powerful man or woman. But once he’s shown you who he is, why go back? Virginia makes it clear that her entire life up to that moment had groomed her for Epstein. She went back because life had normalized that kind of mistreatment in her mind. From reading the book, though, I think she also went back because that need for family, for a place to be loved and valued and to belong, is such a consuming part of being human. And eventually she kept going back because she had nowhere else to go -- she was trapped.

I found it very interesting that there were some big names she dropped and there were some clients who she refused to name. She drops George Clooney’s name, although she is careful to say she is unaware of him using Epstein’s girls. She talks repeatedly about Prince Andrew. She absolutely refuses to identify the man who brutally rapes her. She was still afraid of him. You could argue that both Clooney and Prince Andrew are men with power, but it was the man who still was a shadow in her mind that scared her most.

As a writer, I found the book impressively and skillfully written. The tone of the narrator has a very ingenue quality. If feels like you are inside the head of a young girl. There is not a lot of overt emotion in the telling. The undertones are there, but this retelling is factual and restrained, even when the details are horrific and give the real sense that Virginia has very transparently exposed herself and her life. The pacing and buildup are masterful. Reading it, you can just feel the development of her story. This is true in regards to the progression of her trafficking and relationship to Epstein and Ghislaine, and it is true as it pertains to Virginia’s development from child to woman.

Because the author didn’t explicitly state a lot of things -- the deatils of her death, the details of her crumbling marriage -- you get a stronger emotional understanding of this story. It’s not always gore and objectification. Sometimes, it is fancy destinations and adorned buildings. But even so, you can feel the tragic nature of Virginia’s last days as much as her first days. There is such a sense of saddness at the end on behalf, particularly, of her children. Those feelings resonated after the book ended. They are with me again now as I write this down.

She loved her husband. Maybe she wasn’t as transparent about their relationship as she was the rest of her life. Or, maybe she simply doesn’t recount that story because this book is more specifically about the impact of Epstein on her life. Her marital story was something different. Yet, the manner in which the events leading up to the divorce are not divolged at all lead to a sense that the loss of her marriage significantly contributed to the end of her life.

Even at that, it is impossible not to feel some sense of what he went through being part of her life. You meet a woman, you fall in love, you don’t expect the entire rest of your life to be consumed by the shadows of her past. Not her fault. Still, couldn’t have been easy. There are also hints that being her child wouldn’t have been easy, either. There are no insinuations that her children resented her pursuit of justice or the price the entire family paid for that cause, and it is very clear how much love there was between her and her babies. But… there are also moments. Like, when the children mention that she sleeps all the time. That’s exactly how a child would describe the depression of a parent.

Still, it appears Virginia was a remarkable woman. Despite the horror of her childhood, she continued trying to forgive and trying to rebuild relationship with both of her parents. The part of me that understands the human drive for parental nurture gets that. The part of me that hates everything that happened to her can’t imagine staying so sweet if I’d been in her shoes.

And finally, I walked away from this book with the unhappy feeling that Virginia’s entire life from the moment she met Jeffrey Epstein was about him. Was it a good thing that she was brave enough to confront him and be part of the case made against him? Yes. It was probably even therapeutic in a taking back your power kind of way. And of course, he was convicted in part because of her.

But, for this brief sliver of time in her life, she was free. She’d walked away and walked into something new and good. I can’t help but wish she’d never let the FBI and the lawyers interrupt that process and take her peace away. Or rather, I wish there’d never been any need for her to choose to walk the less-travelled path. I wish her life had been softer, kinder. And more than anything else, I wish it had been longer.

This post is being published on my Aging Audaciously Substack. Both posts are identical and will come out simultaneously.