Virginia Giuffre: The Woman With The Dragon Tattoo

Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, co-written with author Amy Wallace, was published posthumously in October 2025. Giuffre died by suicide in the summer of 2025. She was 41. The memoir makes for harrowing reading because every word reminds you that the woman who wrote it is no longer among the living. This is her voice speaking to us from the beyond, detailing the abuse she endured in the first half of her life and her dogged fight for justice in the second, despite being dismissed by many within the legal system itself.

Giuffre was one of the first women to speak out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of American sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. In 2016, Giuffre named, under oath, several men to whom Epstein had trafficked her when she was a teenager. The list included British royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (who has since been stripped of the title of ‘Prince’); MIT scientist Marvin Minsky; former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson; and three men—who Giuffre refers to as Billionaire One, Billionaire Two and Billionaire Three in her memoir—since she was scared they would harm her family if she revealed their names in print.

One of the things that will haunt you long after you finish reading Nobody’s Girl is the repeated instances of institutional failure in Giuffre’s life. First, her family. She writes about the trauma of being sexually abused by her father and also by a family friend when she was a child. Two grown men snatch away her bodily autonomy and her mother, the adult who should have stepped in, fails to protect her. Childhood abuse convinces her that she is “less than nothing”, a person who is not worthy of love or protection. As a troubled teenager, she finds solace in books because reading lets her “escape into other people’s stories”. She also writes about how her love for animals, especially horses, became a comfort.

The violence and neglect at home pushes her to self-harm and drugs. Her parents pack her off to a teen rehab centre where more terrors lurk. At 15, she runs away to Miami where she is raped by an armed stranger. Then, she is picked up from the streets by Ron Eppinger, 63, who tricks her into believing that he runs a modelling agency. Eppinger, who was later convicted of trafficking young girls from abroad to South Florida to work as call girls, rapes her. She is held at his house, along with many other girls, against her will. “I was a defeated, hopeless child,” she remembers. “I felt if I took action to save myself, I’d be caught and physically punished—or worse.”

Set free from Eppinger’s clutches after an FBI raid, she returns home and declares a fragile truce with her parents. She is a high-school dropout without a job or prospects at this point. In the summer of 2000, her father who is a maintenance man at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club at Palm Beach, gets her a job there as a locker-room assistant. Her salary: $9 an hour. The opulence of the spa dazzles her. The customers look very relaxed thanks to the professional massage therapists who attend to them. This makes her think that becoming a certified massage therapist would be a good idea. A “flicker of hope” about the future starts to build inside her. But then comes Ghislaine Maxwell, the “apex predator” who is sniffing around Mar-a-Lago in search of young girls for Epstein to abuse.

Giuffre describes in vivid detail how Maxwell lures her to Epstein’s mansion under the pretext of a job interview. Maxwell’s “polished facade” lulls the 16-year-old into a false sense of security. A few hours later, she gets her father to drop her off at the mansion, determined to do well at her interview. Epstein and Maxwell break down her defenses quickly. When she confides in them about being abused as a child, they prey on her vulnerability.

Epstein was 47 then—almost three times older than her. When the abuse starts, her body is trapped in the room but her mind can’t stand the thought of staying; this puts her on a kind of autopilot: “submissive and determined to survive.”

She sees girls come and go from Epstein’s house of horrors. “Many of us were poor or even homeless,” she notes. “Several of us had been raped or molested as children. We were girls no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care…And then, he did his worst...” Epstein and Maxwell regularly boast to her about their connections to the rich and the powerful. He also brags that since he “owns” the Palm Beach police department no one would believe Giuffre if she complains about him. She is raped by many of Epstein’s friends and acquaintances: academics from prestigious institutions; industrialists; a former US senator; the former Prince Andrew, who behaved as if having sex with her was “his birthright”, a former prime minister who was so physically abusive that she feared she would die. “Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what he was doing,” she warns. “Epstein not only didn’t hide what was happening, he took a certain glee in making people watch. And people did watch…They watched and they didn’t care.”

When she is 19, Epstein sends her to Thailand to enroll in a massage therapy course. She is heavily dependent on anti-anxiety drugs by then. While in Thailand, she falls in love with an Australian, gets married to him, and goes on to have three children. They move to Australia after she cuts off ties to Epstein. Motherhood brings her great joy. Raising her kids and watching her daughter grow brings her a measure of peace. In 2007, she gets a call from the FBI who informs her that Epstein is being investigated. Both Maxwell and Epstein call her as well, warning her that it would be a bad idea to cooperate with the investigators. The shadow of the duo still hangs over her and the nightmares about the physical and emotional abuse she suffered keep resurfacing, impacting her mental wellbeing, her married life and her physical health.

Giuffre tracks the slow progress of the wheels of justice that followed, detailing her many court appearances and depositions, the abuses flung at her in the tabloids, the public inquisition survivors of sexual violence are subjected to, the army of high-profile lawyers and privileged accusers who hounded her and the other women (her Survivor Sisters) who had come forward to report Epstein’s abuses. The quest for justice and closure almost breaks her, raising critical questions about how law enforcement agencies handle allegations of sexual assault and sex trafficking.

She ends her memoir on this note: “In my mind, I hold a picture of a girl reaching out for help and easily finding it. I picture a woman who feels that it’s within her power to take action against those who hurt her.” Her book, she says, was written in the hope of building a world where predators are punished, not protected; the powerful are held to account; and perpetrators face more shame than their victims.

Vineetha Mokkil is senior associate editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories.

This article appeared in Outlook's March 01 issue titled Horror Island which focuses on how the rich and powerful are a law unto themselves and whether we the public are desensitised to the suffering of women. It asks the question whether we are really seeking justice or feeding a system that turns suffering into spectacle?