There is a line in Virginia Giuffre’s memoir that stopped me cold. It isn’t her account of the three times she had sex with Prince Andrew during the two years she spent as a sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as a teenager. (Andrew continues to deny ever meeting her.) It isn’t a description of the many men who raped her before she turned 20 years old: the trucker who shoved a gun into her mouth in a cheap motel when she was 15; the politician and associate of Epstein who asphyxiated her until she was unconscious and left her bleeding; her own father. It isn’t her tortured exploration of the battles with her mental health – eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation – that plagued her throughout and beyond the narrative of this memoir, published posthumously on 21 October, six months after she took her own life at the age of 41.
No, the line that floored me concerned the period midway through her time in Epstein’s orbit. Nearing 18, worried about ageing out of the bracket that most appealed to the multimillionaire paedophile yet still totally financially reliant on him, Giuffre is forced into procuring other, younger girls on his behalf, participating in a “pyramid-like recruitment scheme”. Her self-awareness is chilling: “When I targeted girls who were hungry or poor, I knew I was exploiting their vulnerabilities,” she writes. “That I targeted girls who said yes only proves how good I’d become at spotting those who were the neediest. The faces of girls I recruited will always haunt me. I know their pain, and I will never get over playing a role in causing it.”
In those short sentences, Giuffre shows more understanding, more empathy and more repentance than Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew – who in his 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis could not even bring himself to say he regretted his friendship with Epstein or offer sympathy for the victims – ever have. Giuffre’s humanity, her ability to feel remorse for what she has done even under extreme duress, stands in stark contrast to the denials and dismissals of those ultimately responsible for the abuse. But her admission is also a searing insight into how such abuse happens in the first place.
Her book, Nobody’s Girl, is all about power: obtaining it, exploiting it, trying to reclaim it. Finished shortly before Giuffre’s suicide, it is an eerie rallying call for survivors of sexual abuse to demand justice, issued from beyond the grave. The frenzy surrounding this book was inevitable given the royal connection that turned Giuffre from just one of many Epstein victims to a household name in the UK. The harrowing question of what that transformation may have cost her hangs over its 366 pages.
The Prince Andrew angle is what has always gripped the media about Giuffre’s story. Shortly after an extract of the book was published, in which Giuffre refers to him as “entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”, the Palace released a statement from Prince Andrew stating: “I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.” A debate is currently raging about whether parliament should step in to formally strip Andrew of both his land and the titles he has promised to voluntarily avoid using. Questions about the “peppercorn” rent he is paying (or not) to live in a 30-room mansion on the Windsor Estate, and who is funding his annual £3m security bill, remain. The prince may have ceased to be a “working royal” after the Newsnight interview, but the layers of privilege that have cocooned him since birth remain.
It is sickening to wonder: without such a high-profile figure thrown into the mix, how invested would we be in Giuffre’s story? She is far from alone – as an Epstein victim, and as a trafficking victim full stop. We are paying attention because of who she says her abusers were, not because of the abuse itself. “We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care… he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning,” Giuffre writes at one point. When I read that, along with her confession of how she targeted teenagers whose poverty or past trauma made them vulnerable, I thought of the victims of the grooming gangs scandal: thousands of young girls with chaotic home lives and scarce resources lured into a nightmare by people they thought were offering them a lifeline. I thought of the men who raped them – not billionaires, but ordinary men with just enough power to turn susceptible girls into objects. And to convince the world it was those girls’ own fault. Abusers don’t always need lavish sex mansions and private jets to operate with impunity. They just need victims no one will care about.
As for the consequences, Epstein was found dead in a jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial for trafficking charges. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence in a low-security prison. Most of the men who abused Giuffre have never been named, let alone arrested. And to date the repercussions for Prince Andrew, who maintains his innocence, seem limited to no longer enjoying honours he did nothing to earn. Reading Giuffre’s unflinching account and knowing what her fate would be once she put down the pen, it is painfully evident that victims like her continue to pay the heaviest price. It’s clear who still has the power – and, tragically, who does not.
[Further reading: The wonderful world of Prince Andrew]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop