The tragic life of Virginia Giuffre, victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

Choosing the saddest moment in Virginia Giuffre’s life is tough.

Was it the father who traded her prepubescent body to a friend?

The “prime minister” who raped her so violently he left her bleeding? Or the bitter end of the relationship with the only man who dedicated his life to fixing hers?

Virginia Giuffre, who died by her own hand six months ago, acknowledges the abuse catalogued in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, constitutes a “trauma reel.”

Published on Tuesday, the book is an insiders account of one of the great abuse-of-power scandals of the 21st century. As one of the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s central victims, Giuffre was presented as a gift to the rich and powerful.

The abuse continued after Giuffre escaped aged 19.

Prince Andrew, the most prominent man accused by Giuffre of using her for sex, asked a police bodyguard to investigate the young woman, who he told a senior palace official had a criminal record in the US, the Daily Mail reported overnight.

In Nobody’s Girl Giuffre describes how, as a teenager, she believed Epstein cared for the girls he shared around for sex.

She changed her mind when a man described as a “well-known prime minister” choked and beat her in a room on Epstein’s private Caribbean island. Afterwards, Giuffre begged Epstein for protection.

He coldly told her the abuse was part of her job.

Prince Andrew

That moment was the start of the end. Epstein and his friend, lover and business partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, asked Giuffre to act as a surrogate mother for them.

The payment for renting her womb would include money, accommodation and 24-hour professional childcare — but no legal rights to the child, who she feared would become another sexual victim.

Giuffre was a teenager, but smart enough to work out how to escape. On a trip to Thailand to study massage techniques for Epstein, she met Australian Robert Giuffre, and married him 10 days later.

After giving birth to a daughter in 2010, Giuffre decided she wanted to hold Epstein and his powerful circle of sex abusers to account, including Prince Andrew, whose famous photo with her and Maxwell made it harder for the royal to convince the world her allegations he abused her three times were untrue.

Prince Andrew has steadfastly insisted on his innocence. If King Charles believes him, the monarch isn’t providing much support.

On Friday, after consultations with the palace, the 65-year-old prince surrendered one of his most valuable assets: the title of Duke of York.

History of abuse

In her book, Giuffre responds to criticism she and other young women willingly participated in Epstein’s sex-ring.

After all, they were not held in chains. They could leave Mar-a-Lago and and his island, Little Saint James, at any time.

Giuffre explains that part of Epstein’s evil skill was identifying and manipulating vulnerable girls. Giuffre was already a rape veteran by the time she came under Giuffre and Maxwell’s control.

Her father sexually molested her, and allowed a family friend to do the same when she was between 7 and 11, Giuffre writes. Her co-writer, freelance journalist Amy Wallace, corroborated Giuffre’s account with six confidantes.

The father “strenuously” denied the abuse but the family friend spent 14 months in jail for abusing another child, according to The New York Times.

“How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away?” she writes.

“But that stance discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable.

“Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless. We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care. A master manipulator, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning. If they wanted to be dancers, he offered dance lessons. If they aspired to be actors, he said he’d help them get roles. And then, he did his worst to them.”

Consequences

Giuffre helped change the world. An era of sexual entitlement ended.

The powerful men and institutions shamed by their association with Epstein include Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Harvard University, former US President Bill Clinton, former Vice-President Al Gore, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, actor Kevin Spacey, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Donald Trump, an early friend of Epstein’s, is still managing the fall out. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence.

There was no happy ending. Unable to bear the weigh of her life, Giuffre took her life at the Western Australia property she bought with compensation from lawsuits against banks that helped Epstein’s business after he was accused of sexual abuse against children in 2006.

Written over four years, Nobody’s Girl’s original text portrayed Giuffre’s husband as her saviour. The couple’s marriage broke down in the months before her death, though, and Robert had taken out a legal order restricting her access to their three children.

Three weeks before her suicide, People magazine reported she was an alleged victim of domestic violence.

The magazine reported that her brother Sky Roberts and his wife Amanda were allegedly concerned she could die at the hands of her estranged partner, who denied the allegation

He was not charged, even though Giuffre made a police complaint at the time, according to People.

As the book neared publication, family members became concerned the manuscript presented the marriage too positively. They convinced publisher Knopf to include a foreword that referred to the bitter end of the relationship.

Powerless and pretty, the teenage Giuffre was exploited by men who had everything she didn’t.

As an adult, Giuffre was no longer a victim. The strength of her story made her far more powerful, morally, than anyone who abused her.