Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir exposes abuse by powerful m
A new book tells the story of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of many victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year. Her posthumous memoir explores her resilience while also revealing new details about the abuse she suffered at the hands of powerful figures. Amna Nawaz has that story. And a warning, this report includes accounts of sexual abuse and suicide.
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A new book out this week tells the story of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the many victims of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Giuffre took her own life earlier this year. Her posthumous memoir explores her resilience, while also revealing new details about the abuse she suffered at the hands of powerful figures, as well as newly surfaced allegations of mistreatment by her husband.
Amna Nawaz has that story.
And a warning:
This report includes accounts of sexual abuse and suicide.
Amna Nawaz:
Most of the world came to know Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2011, when she began speaking out about the abuse she endured at the hands of some of the world’s most powerful men. In court filings, Giuffre described being sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein when she was as young as 16 years old.
She accused Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, of luring her into that world from Mar-a-Lago, where she worked as a locker room attendant at the spa. Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2019, but died by suicide in his jail cell in August that same year while awaiting trial
I want to start by saying it’s not how Jeffrey died, but it’s how he lived. And we need to get to the bottom of everybody who was involved with that, starting with Ghislaine Maxwell and going along the lines there.
I was recruited at a very young age from Mar-a-Lago and entrapped in a world that I didn’t understand. And I have been fighting that very world to this day, and I won’t stop fighting. I will never be silenced until these people are brought to justice.
Amna Nawaz:
Giuffre led the way for many more women to come forward about their own abuse by Epstein and those around him. In April of this year, Giuffre died by suicide in Australia, where she lived for many years with her husband and three children. She was just 41 years old.
Giuffre’s story is told now in a new posthumous memoir titled “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice,” a collaboration with journalist Amy Wallace.
And she joins me now.
So you spent four years working closely with Virginia on this book. Why did she want to write it? What’s the message she wanted to send with this?
Amy Wallace, Co-Author, “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice”: Well, she was really clear about her main reason for writing it, which is that she wanted to help other survivors of sexual abuse, not just Epstein and Maxwell survivors, but anyone who’s been coerced into sex against their will.
And so she wanted to depict herself sort of warts and all, highs and lows.
Amna Nawaz:
It’s an absolutely unflinching and haunting account of what she lived through, especially her years as a child, I think detailing all of the sexual abuse she went through at the hands of her own father, which he denies, being trafficked to her father’s friend, which she details being raped by two teenagers later, by strangers after she runs away first from her own home and then from an abusive group home, all before she was even 16 years old.
What was it like for her to relive all of those moments and retell them to you?
