This month’s review is by Richard Bellikoff
Nobody’s Girl
A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
After the arrest of the Andrew formerly known as Prince, the brother of King Charles, on charges related to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the late Virginia Giuffre’s family issued a statement: “Today our broken hearts have lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.” Andrew is one of many unsavory characters in this posthumously published memoir. Known to her family and friends as Jenna, the author committed suicide in April 2025 at the age of 41.
Her idyllic childhood in South Florida ended at the age of seven, when her father, who she calls “the original betrayer,” began sexually molesting her. His friend continued the abuse. Later, as a young teenager, she was raped by a man making false promises of modeling work. When she was 16, her father, who was doing maintenance work at Mar-a-Lago, got her a job at the spa there. Observing the masseuses, she thought this might be a career path. She was at the front desk reading an anatomy book when a woman with a British accent asked, “Are you interested in massage?” A club member needed one, Ghislaine Maxwell said, and if he liked her, he’d pay for her training. The club member turned out to be Epstein, and after similar sessions, he began trafficking her to other men, including the late Marvin Minsky of MIT, the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel — who, like Epstein, died by suicide in prison — a former prime minister, who she refused to name because “I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here,” and Prince Andrew, who told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.” Amid all the graphic sexual descriptions, she wrote, “Please don’t stop reading,” acknowledging the cumulative effect of her “trauma reel.”
In 2002, after two years of sexual slavery at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell, they fulfilled their promise to pay for her training as a massage therapist, enrolling her at a massage school in Thailand. But she never returned to the USA. She married an Australian, Robbie Giuffre, who she had met at the school, and the couple moved to Sydney. Her escape was short-lived. She had PTSD flashbacks during sex with her husband, who had known nothing about her lurid past. One day, the phone rang and a familiar voice said “Jeffrey’s being investigated. Have you been contacted?” It was Maxwell. Then Epstein called, followed by the FBI. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone says “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
In 2017, Jenna learned that investigative journalist Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald had uncovered 80 Epstein victims and written a multipart series about them. Jenna found support in her growing group of “survivor sisters” to whom she dedicated this memoir. She wrote, “I realized that I had spent the second half of my life recovering from the first, and I was still fighting for justice. I’d come a long way, but I had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.”
In her final chapter, Jenna yearns 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. 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.” Today, Maxwell continues to serve a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. The passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act has resulted in the release of at least some of the Epstein files, implicating other men in the widening scandal. Some of Jenna’s survivor sisters were in the audience at Trump’s State of the Union speech.
While the Sierra Madre Library is temporarily closed, you can find this extraordinary memoir in other public libraries, including those in Pasadena, Los Angeles, Arcadia and Monrovia.
CALL # STATUS: STATUS: 362.76 GIUFFRE