Review of Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre – A devastating expose of power, corruption and abuse | books

THere’s a thread running through “Nobody’s Girl” — a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April of this year — as the activist and Jeffrey Epstein survivor grapples with something far more insidious than abuse. “I know this is a lot to take in,” she wrote after an exhausting early paragraph detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she wrote: “I need a break. I bet you do too.”

Throughout the book, Geoffrey tricks, apologizes, and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an attempt to mitigate the revulsion she assumes her story will provoke. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sexual assault, and the way institutions sided with the perpetrator against his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, findings that largely enabled Giuffre’s testimony. But it’s also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet, here she is, having to charm us so we don’t turn to her in horror.

Of course, her assumptions are not wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died and who co-wrote her clever book with journalist Amy Wallace, knew that being a victim of sexual violence meant pity at best, damnation at worst. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein’s Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, Rather a Money-Hungry Kitten, Her Ex-Friends Say.”) I approached “Nobody’s Girl” with two questions. Firstly, does this give any insight into the so-called Epstein List, a list of prominent men to whom Giuffre and others were trafficked? The closest we come to a new allegation is Giuffre’s description of one of the dozens of men Epstein forced her to have sex with as a “politician” and a “former minister,” who choked and beat her nearly unconscious, but who, she wrote, were too powerful to mention. (When I told Epstein how violent the man was, he said coldly: “You’ll understand that sometimes.”)

Second, does the book make life more difficult for Ghislaine Maxwell, currently in a maximum-security prison in Texas and cajoling President Trump to commute her sentence? (Her most recent appeal was denied earlier this month.) In this regard, Geoffrey’s account must put the possibility of postponement out of their reach. It was Maxwell – or “G-Max” as she insisted the girls called her – who spotted Giuffre working as a 16-year-old dressing room assistant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, and brought her to Epstein’s house to “interview” her as a potential masseuse. Giuffre was forced to have sex with Epstein that day, and Maxwell participated in that and subsequent assaults. “Maxwell started attacking me during our threesomes,” Giuffre wrote. “If I complained, she would hurt me more.”

This leads me to a third question: Given its punitive nature, why would I read this book? I’ve heard more than one person say they “don’t have the balls” to do it – without the wording any victim needs to hear – but while the book is relentlessly difficult, and shockingly difficult, it is also a clear and necessary account of how sex offenders operate. Geoffrey’s greatest fear—that being raped and trafficked, leaving her beyond the reach of most people’s sympathy—is not actually what happens. Narrative does what sedimentation cannot by taking us into the room with her. The book brings Joffrey’s legal status as victim to life, showing us a girl like any girl we know, like us, and bringing to life the reality of those who are trafficked while being “free” to leave.

Giuffre, who had been abused since she was 6, wrote when she met Epstein: “I had been sexually exploited against my will, and I had managed to survive by submitting. I was pleasing others, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For 10 years, men had covered their abuse of me with a false cloak of ‘love.'” Epstein and Maxwell knew how to “Taking advantage of the same twisted vein.”

Meanwhile, Giuffre’s recollections of Prince Andrew, the man she was allegedly forced to have sex with three times – once in the context of an orgy on Epstein’s island – present him in a more ludicrous and bizarre light. “We undressed and got into the bathtub, but we didn’t stay in there long because the prince was keen to get to bed… In my memory, the whole thing took less than half an hour.” Prince Andrew denies Giuffre’s claims that he had sex with her, that Epstein passed it on to him or that he ever met her. But so much emphasis was placed on the prince that after reading this book, he was not the one I thought about most; They were the regular visitors to Epstein’s New York mansion, the flamboyant men and occasional women Giuffre says she met for dinner there.

Regarding these people, I would ask: Who do they think this 17-year-old sitting at the table was? What did they think she was doing there? Only Melinda Gates, who met Epstein once and cited him as a factor in the collapse of her marriage to Bill Gates, sensed what none of these people could put their finger on. Giuffre quotes a statement Gates made after her meeting with Epstein: “I regretted it the minute I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was the embodiment of evil.” It was an insight that apparently eluded geniuses like the MIT professors, whom Epstein continued to advise long after he was convicted of sex crimes.

Giuffre was rightfully proud of holding Epstein and Maxwell accountable. However, for any survivor of sexual violence, the cost of recovery – let alone confronting her attackers to the world – may be impossibly high. At the beginning of the book, Amy Wallace shares details of Giuffre’s fraught final months, including multiple health problems and alleged domestic violence at the hands of her Australian husband, Robert Giuffre. (Robert Giuffre’s attorney declined to comment on the allegations, citing ongoing court proceedings.) On 1 April, Joffrey wrote to Wallace: “It is my earnest wish that this work will be published, whatever my circumstances may be at the time.” Three weeks later, she was found dead on her remote Australian farm, leaving behind three children. In a lawsuit Giuffre filed against Epstein in 2009, her lawyers stated that the injuries she suffered as a result of his abuse included a “loss of the ability to enjoy life” and were of such a magnitude that they would be “permanent in nature.” The same can be said about this important and courageous book, published tragically after his death.

Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre is published by Doubleday. To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.