Virginia Giuffre


Virginia Louise Giuffre was an American and Australian advocate for survivors of sex trafficking and one of the most prominent accusers of the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2015, Giuffre founded Victims Refuse Silence, a U.S. non-profit organization dedicated to supporting survivors. The organization was relaunched as Speak Out, Act, Reclaim in November 2021. She provided detailed accounts to numerous American and British reporters about being trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Giuffre pursued criminal and civil actions against Epstein and Maxwell while appealing directly to the public for justice and awareness. She sued Maxwell for defamation in 2015; the case was settled in Giuffre's favor in 2017 for an undisclosed sum. On July 2, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the unsealing of documents from Giuffre's civil suit against Maxwell. The first batch of documents was released on August 9, 2019, further implicating Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates. The following day, Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell.
In a December 2019 BBC Panorama interview, Giuffre described being trafficked by Epstein to the United Kingdom's then-Prince Andrew, which shifted public opinion against the former prince. She later sued Andrew in a New York civil court. The suit was settled in February 2022; Andrew paid Giuffre an undisclosed amount and made a substantial donation to her charity. Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025. Her memoir, Nobody's Girl, was published posthumously in October 2025.

Early life

Virginia Louise Roberts was born in Sacramento, California, on August 9, 1983, to Lynn Trude Cabell and Sky William Roberts. She had an elder half-brother, Daniel Scott Wilson, from her mother's previous marriage, and a younger brother, Sky Rocket Roberts. The family relocated to Loxahatchee, in Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was four years old. It was reported that she had come from a "troubled home" and, from the age of seven, was molested by a close family friend. In her memoir, Giuffre stated that she was abused by her father from as early as the age of seven and that he might have received payments from Jeffrey Epstein at some point, allegations which he denied. "I was just so mentally scarred already at such a young age, and I ran away from that", she said on Panorama in 2019. Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she went from being in "an abusive situation, to being a runaway, to living in foster homes". She lived on the streets at age 14, where she says she found only "hunger and pain and abuse". Later she was abused by a sex trafficker, Ron Eppinger, in Miami. Giuffre lived with Eppinger for approximately six months. Eppinger reportedly ran a front business for international sex trafficking known as the modeling agency "Perfect 10". He was raided by the FBI and later pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling for prostitution, interstate travel for prostitution, and money laundering.
At the age of 14, Giuffre reunited with her father and returned to live with him. Her father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property owned by Donald Trump, and helped Giuffre obtain a job there. She attended Royal Palm Beach High School.

Association with Jeffrey Epstein (2000–2002)

In mid-2000, Giuffre met Ghislaine Maxwell when working as a spa attendant at Donald Trump's private Mar-a-Lago club while reading a book about massage therapy. Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, approached Giuffre, noted the book that she was reading, inquired about her interest in massage, and offered her a potential job working for Epstein as a traveling masseuse with the assurance that no experience was necessary. When Giuffre arrived at Epstein's Palm Beach home, she says he was lying down, naked, and Maxwell told her how to massage him. "They seemed like nice people so I trusted them, and I told them I'd had a really hard time in my life up until then—I'd been a runaway, I'd been sexually abused, physically abused.... That was the worst thing I could have told them because now they knew how vulnerable I was", Giuffre stated. Giuffre stated that after Maxwell introduced her to Jeffrey Epstein, the two quickly began grooming her to provide sexual services, under the guise that she was to be trained as a professional massage therapist.
Between 2000 and 2002, Giuffre was closely associated with Epstein and Maxwell, traveling between Epstein's residences in Palm Beach and Manhattan, with additional trips to Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico and private island Little Saint James. In the Miami Heralds investigative journalism series "Perversion of Justice", Giuffre describes her experiences of being trafficked by Epstein to provide massages and sexual services for him and a number of his business associates, over a two-and-a-half-year period. In her interview with the BBC, Giuffre said she was "passed around like a platter of fruit" to Epstein's powerful associates, and taken around the world on private jets.
Of the instance in March 2001 that Giuffre was allegedly trafficked to Prince Andrew, she stated in an interview that it was a "wicked" and "really scary time" in her life, and that she "couldn't comprehend how in the highest level of the government powerful people were allowing this to happen. Not just allowing but participating in it". After visiting a nightclub, Giuffre says Maxwell told her that she "had to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey". In court documents from a civil suit that were released from seal in 2019, Giuffre named several others that she claims Epstein and Maxwell instructed her to have sex with, including hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, attorney Alan Dershowitz, politician Bill Richardson, MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, lawyer George J. Mitchell, and MC2 modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. The men denied Giuffre's allegations.
In September 2002, at the age of 19, Giuffre flew to Thailand and attended the International Training Massage School in Chiang Mai. Maxwell provided her with tickets to travel to Thailand, and instructed her to meet with a specific Thai girl, and to bring her back to the United States for Epstein. While at the massage school in Thailand in 2002, she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts trainer, and the two married quickly thereafter. She contacted Epstein and informed him that she would not be returning as planned. She and her husband started a life and family in Australia, and Giuffre broke off contact with Epstein and Maxwell. For five years, Giuffre and her husband lived a quiet life in Australia with their young children.

First contact by authorities

In March 2005, while Giuffre was still establishing her family in Australia, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein after a 14-year-old girl and her parents reported his behavior. The girl described being recruited by a female classmate from her high school to give Epstein a massage at his mansion in exchange for money, wherein he subsequently molested her. By October 2005, the police had a growing list of girls with similar claims of sexual abuse, statements from Epstein's butlers corroborating their claims, and a search warrant for his Palm Beach property.
Police detectives noted that the accusers all described a similar pattern, where Epstein would ask them to massage him and then sexually assault them during the massage. When police searched through Epstein's trash, they found notes with the telephone numbers of the girls on them. One of the girls was called by Epstein's assistant while being questioned by police.
Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she received a series of phone calls in rapid succession over three days in 2007. The first call was from Maxwell, then one day later came a call from Epstein, both of whom asked if she had spoken to authorities. These were followed by a third call from an FBI agent, who stated that Giuffre had been identified as a victim during the first criminal case against Epstein. She resisted speaking at length to the FBI until she was approached again about the matter in person, this time by the Australian Federal Police, six months after being contacted by phone.
Photos, records and witnesses confirm large parts of Giuffre's statements about her time with Epstein.

Legal proceedings

First criminal case against Epstein

In 2006, a year before Giuffre was first contacted by authorities, the Palm Beach Police Department had a growing body of evidence against Epstein, and signed a probable cause affidavit charging him with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. Epstein hired a team of powerful lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Ken Starr, and Jay Lefkowitz, to serve in his defense. As the case progressed, Police Chief Michael Reiter became alarmed at the handling of the case by state prosecutors and then state attorney, Barry Krischer. On May 1, 2006, Reiter asked Krischer to remove himself from the case; when Krischer declined, Police Chief Reiter turned his evidence over to the FBI for federal prosecution. While Reiter was initially hopeful that the FBI would thoroughly investigate and move the matter to a conclusion, in 2007, then South Florida U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta decided not to prosecute Epstein in federal court and referred the matter back to the local jurisdiction.
Lead police detective Joseph Recarey said that the state prosecutors were at first eager to pursue criminal action against Epstein, but that "everything took a turn" when lawyer Alan Dershowitz got involved. Krischer then decided to take the unusual action of turning Epstein's case over to a grand jury, and then presented testimony from only one girl. Epstein's legal team aggressively sought concessions and prolonged the process when negotiating a plea deal with Acosta. Acosta, who described the tactics of Epstein's lawyers as a "year-long assault on the prosecution and prosecutors", eventually agreed to sign a controversial non-prosecution agreement in 2008, which was done without informing the victims, later determined to be in violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act.
Reiter expressed that the state and federal prosecutors' handling of the Epstein case amounted to "the worst failure of the criminal justice system" in modern times.