However much we want to believe the world is a beautiful place with holiday destinations and fine dining, cut roses and candlelight dinners, we know in our heart of hearts that it is an illusion we pay good money for. Reality is very different; it is what gets swept under the carpet every day. The streets are full of violence, but so are the interiors of suburban homes dotting the landscape so innocuously, every window covered with flower-printed curtains. And very often when the paths of the rich and the poor collide, there is no benevolence or charity, only entitlement and exploitation.
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, a memoir by Virginia Giuffre, co-written with Amy Wallace, reads like an anti-fairytale. It begins with the monsters and domestic dragons. She is in bed as a child with all the wrong people in all the wrong ways. Unfortunately, there is no happy ending either. She died on April 25, 2025. Before Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell met an adolescent Virginia in the summer of 2000, she had been running away from a troubled childhood and dysfunctional family. She was broken and defeated, an easy target for wily men. “What would it be like, she wonders, to matter?”
The underbelly is neon-lit, the party is always in a posh place. And for those who confuse seedy with back alleys and illegal gambling dens, it could all at first look like a fancy, exclusive upper-class club. Epstein, whom Virginia calls Other-Man and a Very Important Man, could have befriended Maxwell for her position in high society. He had the money, she had the connections. On the outside were eight thousand-acre ranches, imported French limestone, a Manhattan townhouse, caramel-coloured tiles, and stone archways. Inside was only abuse.
Before the book, though, came a photograph. One that has been scrutinised in great detail and even said to be doctored, according to the man grinning next to her in it. This picture sent shock waves across the world; here was a teenage girl and a middle-aged British prince with their arms around each other. A photo that made her accusations sound believable, and led to an out-of-court settlement, and recently saw Prince Andrew stripped of his titles.
Epstein and Maxwell are the two prime players, with their varicose vein network of power and riches. The former died under suspicious circumstances in prison following an arrest that happened too late and only after the charges were backed with too much proof to ignore. And the latter awaits justice in a cell somewhere. “Over time,” says the author, “I would come to see Epstein and Maxwell less as boyfriend and girlfriend, and more as two halves of a wicked whole.”
Virginia was awed and afraid, and felt herself shrink into the tiniest speck in the universe. The glam front quickly fell away, and while she can’t always hazard a guess about his dealings with government bodies or high-profile people, she observed the bars of her cage carefully. Apparently, he was very disciplined about his diet, “subsisting on tofu, salmon, chickpeas, ginger…” He liked listening to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion songs while being massaged. A germaphobe, he was always washing his hands, but of course, he never used birth control. She was strictly working class, however opulent her surroundings, once massaging Epstein’s feet for two hours on a flight.
They were her family, he the patriarch and Maxwell the matriarch. While Virginia helped him get dressed, he’d say, “You’re going to be such a good mother someday”, but during sex, she had to call him ‘Daddy’. They taught her table manners and also how to please men. She was their little geisha girl, one they ‘loaned’ to friends.
Details of his orgies—once on his birthday, 12-year-old French triplets were flown in as a gift—mix with mentions of his photos with the Dalai Lama and the pope. The only leeway she gives her groomer is: “I think it’s also possible that in me, an abused child, he saw a bit of himself.” Not that Epstein admitted to her or later on oath that this ever happened.
Virginia’s story is not unique—the world has always been a predator-prey kind of place—it is the fact that she is telling it that is unique. Victims of abuse usually cower, their voice falling to a whisper. There is enough gaslighting for them to doubt themselves, happenings get hazy, and who can prove what so many years later?
Sometimes the details in Nobody’s Girl are fantastic, and the reader prays they are concocted, make-believe, because who wants to believe a small defenceless child faced such utter depravity and evil? But these are the words of a dead girl, and believe we must—she has paid with her life to tell us her truth.