Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 40

As I was beginning work on this book, one of my sons invited a new friend over, and when his mother—a woman I’d never met before—dropped him off, I invited her inside. When she sat down at our kitchen island, I offered her a cold drink, which is right about the time that she recognized me. “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s you .” I smiled and nodded. This had happened to me before.

The woman was uncomfortable, I could see—her eyes were darting around, as if she was now unsure what to say. For a moment, the fact that I was a well-known survivor of sexual abuse hung awkwardly in the air between us. Then the woman kindly said, “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it. It’s probably embarrassing.”

I kept smiling, even though inside I felt an old twinge: Why should I be ashamed? I’d been a child when I was abused by adults. “No, it’s not embarrassing,” I replied. “And we should be talking about it. Because this is happening out there, and it’s going to continue to happen unless we talk about it.” Not wanting to sound as if I were lecturing her, I suggested we go out for a drink sometime, out of the earshot of our kids.

Sexual trafficking should not be a secret, only to be whispered about in hushed tones or not at all. It is a horrible trauma-inducing crime, and we must talk about it if we ever want it to end. That’s part of why I wrote this book, and I’ve tried, on every page, to be transparent. I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I’ve had moments I’m not proud of. But I haven’t let those human flaws keep me from telling my story. As my collaborator and I worked together to finish this book, she sent me a line by the writer Helen Rosner that rings true to me: “Memoir is the art of shining a light behind you, picking at the stitches of your life to see how it was made.” That’s what I’ve tried to do: to examine my life in the hope of destigmatizing victims’ experiences. Because only by speaking out can we move ourselves and others to act.

I’m sorry to say that for all that’s happened, more action is needed. Much more. Because some people still think Epstein was an anomaly, an outlier. And those people are wrong. While the sheer number of victims Epstein preyed upon may put him in a class by himself, he was no outlier. The way he viewed women and girls—as playthings to be used and discarded—is not uncommon among certain powerful men who believe they are above the law. And many of those men are still going about their daily lives, enjoying the benefits of their power.

Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing. Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls in ways you wouldn’t want a creepy old man touching your daughter. They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind. (Not to mention the fact that many prominent people were still associating with him years after his conviction.) Epstein offered many of the men in his circle sex with the females he and Maxwell trafficked—both girls and women. I know because I lived it. But even the men who didn’t partake of the favors Epstein offered could see the naked photos on his walls and the naked girls on his islands or by his swimming pools. Epstein not only didn’t hide what was happening, he took a certain glee in making people watch. Because he could. And people did watch—scientists, fundraisers from the Ivy League and other heralded institutions, titans of industry. They watched and they didn’t care.

Epstein is dead, but the attitude that allowed him to do what he did? It’s alive and well. Yes, #MeToo has led to certain prominent men losing their jobs. Other men have gone to prison.

But just because justice has been served in a handful of high-profile cases doesn’t mean we’ve solved the larger problem: a culture that tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men; a culture that tells men that young girls are the ideal—the younger, as Epstein said, the better. I’m not saying those cultural trends cause most men to become child molesters. But I do believe that because of those societal forces, when a molester shows his face, many people tend to look the other way.

Even as I’ve chronicled my history with Epstein and Maxwell, much has happened to keep the two of them in the news. The sale of Epstein’s properties, for example: his Palm Beach home was sold to a developer for $18.5 million. It has been torn down and is being redeveloped with a different address; in the future, there will be no number 358 on El Brillo Way. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse sold for $51 million. His two islands in the Caribbean sold for $60 million—roughly half what they were listed for a year earlier—to a developer who plans to build a twenty-five-room resort there. His New Mexico ranch, listed for $27.5 million in July 2021, sold to an anonymous buyer for an undisclosed sum in August 2023. And most recently, his Paris apartment sold to a Bulgarian investor for 8.2 million pounds. The money raised in these transactions has gone to Epstein’s estate, which has helped fund restitution for victims.

As expected, Maxwell—who resides in an all-female, low-security facility in Tallahassee—has appealed her conviction. (In August 2024, that appeal was denied.) She also gave an interview from prison in which she repeated the lie that the photo Epstein took of Prince Andrew with his arm around me is a fake. In response, Michael Thomas, the New Zealand photographer who visited me in Australia back in 2011 and took a photo of my original photo, front and back, came forward to say definitively, “It’s not fake, and it never has been.” Not all men are monsters.

In the wake of my settlement with Alan Dershowitz, various media outlets have suggested that Prince Andrew might try to overturn his and my settlement agreement. The Sun , in London, reported, for example, that the disgraced royal was consulting with US lawyers and hoping “to force a retraction or even an apology.” David Boies fired back in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Mail . “If they want to get out of the settlement,” he said, “all they have to do is call me and let me take Andrew’s deposition and go to trial.” To date, Boies has received no such call.

Prince Andrew, meanwhile, was allowed to attend King Charles III’s coronation in May 2023, but with no formal role and a third-row seat. In Trafalgar Square, hundreds of antimonarchy protesters stood among a throng of royal supporters, waiting for the coronation procession to pass, and I enjoyed looking at photos of the placards they held online. Many people held signs that read “Not My King,” and one protester lifted a huge hand-lettered banner that said simply “God Save Virginia Giuffre.”

Various Epstein-related lawsuits have continued to make their way through the courts. In March 2023, a judge ruled that two banks who had Epstein as a customer for several years—Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase—had to face lawsuits alleging that the banks profited from Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. Both banks soon reached tentative settlements, promising approximately $75 million and $290 million, respectively, to the plaintiffs—more than forty women who said the banks had facilitated Epstein’s abuse of them. (I was among the plaintiffs in the JPMorgan class action.) JPMorgan also eventually settled a lawsuit filed by the US Virgin Islands, agreeing to “significant commitments” to curtail human trafficking, and a $75 million payment. That suit alleged that Jes Staley, a former top executive at the bank, “may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.” Court papers in that case showed that Epstein shared photographs of young women with Staley, and that the two men emailed each other using what appeared to be code words based on Disney characters. “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,” Staley, then fifty-three, emailed Epstein in July 2010.

“What character would you like next?” Epstein—then fifty-seven—replied.

“Beauty and the Beast,” Staley responded, to which Epstein replied: “Well one side is available.”

It’s not hard to imagine what Epstein meant—he had “beauties” at the ready.

The other day, Ellie and I were in the car, heading to her volleyball practice, when she took control of the stereo and cued up a song called “Mad at Disney,” performed by Salem Ilese. “You have to listen to this, Mom,” she said, pushing play. “I’m mad at Disney, Disney / They tricked me, tricked me / Had me wishin’ on a shootin’ star,” Ellie sang at top volume over the music. She knew all the words. “My fairy grandma warned me / Cinderella’s story / Only ended in a bad divorce,” she sang. “The prince ain’t sleeping when he / Takes his sleeping beauty / To the motel on his snow-white horse.” Ellie shot me a glance. At thirteen, she knows more than she lets on. As I’ve said, I watched Cinderella on repeat when I was a child, and I internalized some of the messages it taught me about femininity and what happiness looks like for a girl. As a young mother, I went into a baby boutique before Ellie’s birth and said I wanted “everything princess.” But now, as the mother of teenagers, I appreciate that my daughter is more skeptical than I was about some of the pressures and stereotypes society puts on girls of all ages.

Pressure to be a “good girl” is everywhere, and the last thing I wanted to do in this book is to place more of that pressure on anyone, particularly on survivors of abuse. I’ve written a lot about bravery because I admire people who do what is right, even when that comes at a cost, but I want to be clear: while we need to be brave about naming our abusers, we also must protect ourselves. You may notice that while I’ve named some men in this book, I have not named all the men I was trafficked to. Partly that is because I still don’t know some of their names. Partly, too, that is because there are certain men who I fear naming. The man who brutally raped me toward the end of my time with Epstein and Maxwell, for example—the man whom I’ve called “the former Prime Minister” in court documents—I know his name, and he knows what he did to me, even though when others have sought comment from him about my allegations, he has denied them. I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here.

There are other men whom I was trafficked to who have threatened me in another way: by asserting that they will use litigation to bankrupt me. One of those men’s names has come up repeatedly in various court filings, and in response, he has told my lawyers that if I talk about him publicly, he will employ his vast resources to keep me in court for the rest of my life. While I have named him in sworn depositions and identified him to the FBI, I fear that if I do so again here, my family will bear the emotional and financial brunt of that decision. I have the same fears about another man whom I was forced to have sex with many times—a man whom I also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself. I would love to identify him here. But this man is very wealthy and very powerful, and I fear that he, too, might engage me in expensive, life-ruining litigation.

I do not make this decision to hold back lightly. Part of me wants to shout from the highest rooftop the names of every man who ever used me for sex. Some readers will question my reluctance to name many of my abusers. If I am, indeed, a fighter for justice, why have I not called them out? My answer is simple: Because while I have been a daughter, a prisoner, a survivor, and a warrior, my most important role is that of a mother. First and foremost, I am a parent, and I won’t put my family at risk if I can help it. Maybe in the future I will be ready to talk about these men. But not now.

In the meantime, there is important work to do. We need to make it easier to punish those who victimize others. Siggy and I want to eliminate laws that limit the period in which survivors can seek justice for their abusers. As I’ve said, New York State has made a lot of progress, first, by opening up a look-back window for child victims of sexual assault and then, in November 2022, by passing the Adult Survivors Act: a yearlong window in which people who were sexually assaulted as adults can file civil suits against their alleged abusers, no matter how long ago the assaults occurred. After the Child Victims Act opened its window, more than ten thousand lawsuits were filed—mine among them.

Other states have made changes as well. In 2020, my childhood home of Florida passed new legislation titled “Donna’s Law,” named after Orlando resident Donna Hedrick, who was allegedly abused by a former high school teacher in the early 1970s. This law removed the statute of limitations for prosecuting acts of sexual battery committed against children younger than eighteen years of age. However, the law only applied to crimes committed on or after July 1, 2020. There was no look-back window.

Federally, meanwhile, numerous updates have been made to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Eliminating Limits to Justice for Child Sex Abuse Victims Act, which struck from the books the statute of limitations for TVPA claims brought by minor victims of sexual abuse, human trafficking, forced labor, and child pornography. After Biden did so, more states eliminated statutes of limitations, and lawmakers in other states, such as California, proposed bills that would do the same. (Currently in California, if a person is sexually abused before the age of eighteen, they must file a civil claim before turning forty.)

Awareness is growing about the need for change. And now that my settlement from Prince Andrew has come through, I have begun the slow process of turning my fledgling foundation, SOAR, into a professionally run organization. My goal is for SOAR to combat human trafficking by supporting organizations that focus on prosecution, protection, and prevention. Eventually, I plan to make grants that make it easier for members of the public to detect trafficking when they see it and that support victims’ recovery. I look forward to disseminating some of the Crown’s money to do some good.

But frankly, I need a rest. While finishing this book, I’ve had many setbacks. I’ve had a second surgery on my broken neck, but it still causes me immense pain; doctors believe I may need a third. And my mental health has faltered at times, too—as it may continue to falter for the rest of my life. Lately my doctors have prescribed me a series of ketamine treatments that seem to be helping to untangle my PTSD. Still though, I’m learning to accept that sometimes I will simply not be okay. That is the price of serious trauma: it lays you low, and sometimes makes you your own worst enemy. My goal now is to prevent the emotional time bomb that lives inside me—my toxic memories and devastating visualizations of myself being hurt—from ever detonating again. But sometimes I have trouble holding to that goal. There have been silver linings to my recent struggles—my mother and I have been talking more frequently on FaceTime, for the first time, she’s told me she was sorry for what my father did to me when I was a child. “I should have been there for you,” she told me through tears. To finally hear—and see—her acknowledge my experience had more power than I’d ever realized it would. But nevertheless, I have found myself yearning for a lasting peace.

Recently, the second of the two televised dramas I told you were in the works about Prince Andrew’s interview with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis aired on Amazon Prime Video. The three-part miniseries, A Very Royal Scandal , which is based on a book by Maitlis, focuses mostly on the planning, execution, and aftermath of that BBC interview, and I learned a few things while watching it (though I’ll admit I grimaced when the miniseries’s producers chose to use actual footage of me talking, and to end the show with a close-up of my actual seventeen-year-old face). But there’s a particular scene in the show’s final episode that really affected me. In the wake of her sit-down with the prince, Maitlis has been heralded around the world for her brilliant interview. But now, she is sitting with her laptop in her darkened kitchen, playing back audio of herself being interviewed. The topic: a stalker whose relentless fixation with Maitlis upended her life before he received an eight-year prison sentence. When Maitlis’s husband enters the kitchen and hears what she’s listening to, he asks her why.

“Because,” she tells him, “I wanted to remember how it felt to be interviewed about something that wasn’t my fault. And what happened to Epstein’s victims wasn’t their fault. Yet they still had to be witness. They still had to, you know, parade their pain in the hope of even the slightest justice. I’m not saying that what happened to me was even, you know, remotely similar. Of course it wasn’t. But just the, you know, the parading—the endless bloody talking about it, to get anyone to take it seriously. Remember that?”

Her husband nods. He does remember.

“And that’s true of every woman who ever complained about any kind of harassment,” Maitlis, played by the actress Ruth Wilson, continues. “Always uphill. Always against the tide. Always a battle against the unspoken. You know, the look in their eyes that says, ‘ Really ? Did he really ?’…When I sat down with Prince Andrew, I was only ever hoping to ask the right questions. I didn’t know how he’d be or what he’d say. But it was the arrogance. The entitlement. He just couldn’t help himself. You know, the way that certain men, whatever their sickness, assume certain rights without ever giving it a second thought. Their want. Their need. Their impulse.”

To which I say: exactly. For fourteen years, since 2011, I’ve repeatedly revealed to the world what was done to me in the hope of preventing others’ suffering. Like Maitlis says: parading my pain—“the endless bloody talking about it.” I don’t regret it, but the constant telling and retelling has been extremely painful and exhausting. With this book, I seek to free myself from my past. From now on, anyone who wants to know about what happened can sit down with Nobody’s Girl and start reading.

Today, I’m turning my sights to the future. I like to think about a time when all my Survivor Sisters and I might gather together again. Right before the pandemic hit, I’d rented a house for all of us in Aspen and told those of us who couldn’t afford the airfare that I would buy their tickets if they wanted to come for the weekend. COVID-19 forced us to cancel that plan, but I still think about reviving it. The goal isn’t to reopen old wounds—we’ve all done enough of that. I just want to spend a few carefree days with these women, who understand me in ways no one else can.

But mostly what I need to do is to be here, fully, for my family. In recent months, Robbie and I have moved toward a healthier way of living, together. At my request, he took my pain pills, on which I’d developed an overreliance to soothe my physical and emotional pain, and locked them away in our safe, changing the combination. Day by day, it was as if I were stepping out of a dense fog into a clearing where I could see again. For months he’d been handling all our household chores, from grocery shopping to cooking to cleaning to all the drop-offs and pickups from school. Now I’ve begun getting up early again. Recently, when Robbie said he wanted to get more serious about his martial-arts practice, I told him he should spend a few mornings at the gym—I could make the kids’ lunches and ferry Ellie to where she needs to go. (Alex and Tyler both have their driver’s licenses now.) For the first time in a long time, my husband feels as if he can rely on me. That is the highest praise I could hope for: Robbie is seeing me, once again, not merely as someone to take care of but as his partner.

And my children? Alex, who is eighteen, has graduated from high school. I’ve teased him that I’ll never let him move out, but he is planning an independent life, probably running his own business. Tyler—now seventeen—is enrolled in the highest-level high school classes, which he is acing, and his Australian Tertiary Admission Rank scores (sort of like SATs in the United States) are off the charts, which means his dreams of attending university and becoming an architect may well come true. And my daughter? Ellie’s the most badass teenage girl ever, and she teaches me something every day. She has joined Australia’s Emergency Services Cadets program, which teaches young people the skills needed to respond to fires, floods, earthquakes. She’s planning to be a paramedic—to save people for a living—or maybe a paleontologist. Either way, she wants to learn to fly helicopters. Despite my own tomboy roots (or perhaps because of them), I’ll admit there was a time when I tried to push her toward ballet lessons or the cheerleading squad. Ellie told me, “No, I’d rather climb on someone’s roof or rescue their dog.” I am buoyed by the knowledge that my kids will leave any realm they enter better than they found it. What more could a mother ask?

Sometimes I fantasize that Ellie and I will eventually run a therapeutic horse farm together, doing for other people what Ruth Menor’s Vinceremos once did for me and so many others. And we may just pull that off. Not long ago, Robbie and I bought a forty-acre farm just outside of Perth. Already, we’ve got three sheep and three hives of bees, and Robbie has constructed the Taj Mahal of chicken coops. When I’m there, I wake up to the laughing sound of kookaburras and delight in watching kangaroos and emus making themselves at home right in our front yard. Robbie’s next project: building me a pond with a little island in the center. After that, we plan to convert an existing outbuilding that was once a quail hatchery into four horse stalls. I may never be able to ride again because of my neck, but still, I know being around horses will do me good.

If you’ve read this far, I hope my story has moved you—to seek ways to free yourself from a bad situation, say, to stand up for someone else in need, or to simply reframe how you judge victims of sexual abuse. Each one of us can make positive change. I truly believe that. I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else. I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do and where anyone who’s been trafficked can confront their abusers when they are ready, no matter how much time has passed. We don’t live in this world yet—I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s houses? And why haven’t they led to the prosecution of any more abusers?—but I believe we could someday. Imagining it is the first step. In my mind, I hold a picture of a girl reaching out for help and easily finding it. I picture a woman, too, who—having come to terms with her childhood pain—feels that it’s within her power to take action against those who hurt her. If this book moves us even an inch closer to a reality like that—if it helps just one person—I will have achieved my goal.