Virginia Giuffre’s memoir is one of the saddest books I have ever read – and perhaps the saddest thing of all is that she didn’t live to see its incredible impact: JAN MOIR

Nobody’s Girl – A Memoir Of Surviving Abuse And Fighting For Justice by Virginia Giuffre was published posthumously two weeks ago. Giuffre’s tale of being used as a teenage sex worker by paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell is both sad and devastating; a modern horror story with no happy ever after for the author. Virginia was 41 when she took her own life at her remote Australian farmhouse in April this year.

It is no exaggeration to say that every man who slept with her, abused her, denied her, mistreated her or laid an unwanted hand on her body throughout her four short decades on this planet played a part in her death. And it is to his enduring shame that the former Prince Andrew has been accused of being one of them.

Virginia’s memoir is one of the saddest books I have ever read and perhaps the saddest thing about it is that she did not live to enjoy its success nor experience its incredible impact. Andrew has been stripped of his titles, his princedom and his home, banished into exile in Norfolk, hopefully never to be seen in a meaningful public role within the Royal Family ever again. And there is no doubt that Giuffre’s book and her campaign for justice for herself and for all of Epstein’s victims was a factor in his final humiliation.

Her younger brother Sky Roberts appeared on BBC2’s Newsnight on Thursday, wiping away tears as he said: ‘She has taken down a prince…we are so proud of her.’ The family also issued a statement claiming that ‘an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family, brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage’ and are now pushing for a police investigation into Andrew’s exploits.

It could be argued that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s downfall was the result of many things: decades of sleaze and greed, chronic pomposity and an unerring tendency towards stupidity that included making dodgy friends and forging links to Chinese spies.

Historian Andrew Lownie’s recent book Entitled was a forensic examination of the former Duke and Duchess of York’s scandalous dealings and poor judgment, and it blew a damning cannonball of truth through the York ramparts.

It was The Mail On Sunday who secured the first-ever interview on the record with Virginia in February 2011 and published the bombshell photograph of her with Prince Andrew’s arm around her waist. Incendiary emails from Andrew to Epstein recently published in the MoS and the Daily Mail also piled on the pressure.

However, there is no doubt that Giuffre’s book was the final nail in Andrew’s coffin. Even a prince of the realm could not survive her calm but grisly accounts of the three times they had sex together, when she was trafficked to him by Epstein and Maxwell.

On the first occasion in London, she claims the former prince correctly guessed her age as 17, observed that she was only slightly older than his two daughters, but went on to sleep with her anyway.

The second time she claims took place at Epstein’s home in New York and the third was on Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.

On this third occasion she writes of an orgy in which Andrew took part along with Epstein, Giuffre and ‘approximately eight other young girls’, few of whom spoke English.

There is little in the way of salacious detail in Giuffre’s book – and perhaps it is a mercy that she does not provide any truly graphic accounts of who did what to whom and how many times. Yet her specifics about Andrew are damning enough. He licked her feet. He was in a hurry. He was ‘entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright’.

Mr Mountbatten Windsor has always denied any accusations of wrongdoing – indeed, of ever meeting Virginia Giuffre. But his lies about cutting off contact with Epstein, plus his emails to Epstein suggesting that ‘we are in this together’ and ‘let’s play soon’ – not to mention the £12million

civil settlement he paid to Giuffre when she brought a sexual assault lawsuit against him in 2022 – tell their own story.

Yet as the author unspools the ‘trauma reel’ inside her head and onto the page, the going is unrelentingly grim. ‘Please don’t stop reading,’ she pleads at one point.

Later, she writes of having sex with Marvin Minsky, an eminent American scientist who Epstein was trying to impress. Minsky was on top of her, he was 56 years her senior, his face was ‘shrivelled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples’. Oh, the horror.

It is too late for poor, doomed Virginia to take comfort from the fact that her book has been lauded not just because she helped to seal Andrew’s fate, but because it also places his pal Ghislaine Maxwell firmly in the crosshairs, too.

For it is one thing to recruit young girls to service her priapic boyfriend Jeffrey in his billionaire’s teen harem, as Maxwell did many times. That is bad enough. That is actually horrendous, of course.

However, it is something else to be there alongside the girls in the bedrooms and massage rooms, to help them undress and to undress alongside them, to enthusiastically take part in the abuse as they serviced the revolting Epstein together. Maxwell was there primarily to reassure the new girls and to ‘teach’ them how to massage.

‘She used her gender to trick us into feeling safe,’ is how Virginia puts it. The author goes on to observe that Maxwell never wanted to have sex with any of the girls by herself, she only did it to please Epstein. Which almost makes it worse.

Virginia Roberts – as she was then – was only 16 years old when G-Max (as she liked to call herself) first spotted her when she worked as a spa attendant at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, close to Epstein’s mansion.

Maxwell saw Virginia walking through the grounds and must have noted that she was just Epstein’s type; small, slim-hipped, blonde, white, tattoo free. ‘Stop the car!’ she ordered her chauffeur. Soon Virginia became Epstein’s ‘Number One’ in a harem overlooked by Maxwell, the den mother from hell.

The girls were kept on diets, like pedigree racehorses. Ghislaine drilled them in the importance of being smiley and enthusiastic, no matter what they were asked to do, for Epstein demanded that his regular girls be cheerful and appear to genuinely desire him and his friends. ‘You did well. The prince had fun,’ Maxwell told her after they had pimped Virginia out to Prince Andrew on that fateful night in 2001.

In 2022, Maxwell was given a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and conspiracy to abuse. I had previously fondly imagined that she had been treated harshly by the American justice system, perhaps even made a useful British scapegoat for the evil deeds of bad but powerful men.

After reading Giuffre’s book I hope the unrepentant trafficker and abuser rots in hell. And the author can chalk up another posthumous victory; following the revelations in Nobody’s Girl it seems unlikely that Maxwell will now ever be granted the pardon or commutation that she has been lobbying for from President Trump.

Giuffre’s book also shines a light into the murky world of Epstein and in a broader sense helps us understand why young, vulnerable girls like her end up being groomed into and then repeatedly abused in these sick environments. Why don’t they run away? Why do they stay? How did they get there in the first place?

In her slightly detached manner – which surely stems from her habit of mentally removing herself from the physical reality of repeated intimacy with strangers – Virginia makes it clear that many of the girls had been sexually abused as youngsters. (She claims she was sexually abused by her father between the ages of seven and 11; he denies this.)

They were damaged before they even got there, before they climbed aboard the Lolita Express or lounged naked – as he ordered – by Epstein’s shimmering swimming pools.

They were runaways from the wrong side of the tracks, they were taking drugs, they were neglected, they were exhibiting the classic behaviours of the abused child.

The milieu might have been gilded, and the clientele rich and famous, but in essence Epstein’s degeneracy is just the same as the kind of grooming gangs who operate in the back streets of Rotherham and elsewhere in this country. Neglected, lost girls were made to feel cherished and important, paid money and given treats. They craved approval.

‘I was no expert on mothers, but in those early days, I sometimes imagined her as mine,’ Giuffre writes of Maxwell. And when they began to realise the trap they were in, it was too late. ‘We know where he goes to school,’ Epstein once told Giuffre, pushing a photograph of her beloved little brother Sky across his desk.

In her book Giuffre alleges that Maxwell and Epstein trafficked her to many powerful men, including ‘a former prime minister’ who left her bleeding from every orifice.

There were also governors, scientists and academics alongside men she calls Billionaires One, Two and Three. She has identified these men and given names to the FBI on several occasions, and the clamour from the American public to release the so-called Epstein Files is growing and becoming a national obsession. So Virginia Giuffre can take some credit for that, too.

The greatest sadness of all is that Virginia almost made it onto the sunlit uplands, she so very nearly did have a happy life in the end.

She managed to leave Epstein’s clutches when she was 19, get married and have three children. She has always said that the birth of her daughter in 2010 inspired her to go public with her story and – in the post-MeToo world – help other survivors feel less alone. She spent the first

half of her life being sexually abused and trafficked and the second half struggling to bring her abusers to justice.

We all know what happened next. Epstein was arrested and killed himself in jail, Maxwell went into hiding but was found and ended up in jail, while Prince Andrew ruined himself utterly by denying all knowledge of ever meeting her.

Perhaps that is a triumph of sorts, but that alone cannot wash away the sadness in this book. It seeps through every page just like it washed through Virginia Giuffre; bone deep, insurmountable, ever present.

‘My goal now,’ she wrote in her final chapter, ‘is to prevent the emotional time bomb that lives inside me – my toxic memories and devastating visualisations of myself being hurt – from ever detonating again.’

In the end, she did not succeed. Her once-happy marriage had run into difficulty in recent years and there have been allegations of spousal battery.

She tried to take her own life on two previous occasions and tragically it was third time unlucky for everyone who loved her. Virginia Giuffre lived in hope but died in despair and all those who abused and used her contributed to her lonely, terrible end.