Giuffre, who died in April, claimed to have been abused by Epstein and his associates. Credit: Getty
In the new, posthumously released memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre with ghostwriter Amy Wallace, the author makes a jarring admission: an earlier draft of the book — written in 2011 and pitched to publishers under the title The Billionaire’s Playboy Club — offered a “fictionalized narrative” of the roughly two years Giuffre purports to have spent being trafficked and abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
Nobody’s Girl is generating global headlines and is, at the time of this writing, the No. 4-ranked book across Amazon. The allegations in the book are being taken as fact, with profound consequences — particularly in Britain, owing to the claims involving Prince Andrew. This week, The New Statesman, Britain’s leading centre-left weekly, published a cover essay calling for the abolition of the monarchy in part over the allegations against the prince set forth in the book. Yet, oddly, the full-volume media coverage blaring across multiple countries has failed to examine the existence of the earlier memoir, or its relation to the new one.
Giuffre, who died in April, was by far Epstein’s most consequential accuser. While others had already accused him of illicit sexual activity, it was she who first introduced the notion that Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child-sex-trafficking operation. And the civil litigation she initiated would ultimately produce an extensive documentary record that prosecutors seized upon in their case against Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Her chronology shifted over time, but Giuffre generally claimed she was lured into Epstein’s employ in her teens — in about the year 2000, when she was 17 — with a promise of work as a massage therapist. She claimed she was subsequently forced into the sex trade. After finally escaping Epstein’s clutches, she’d go on to become an activist-crusader in the cause of empowering sex-trafficking victims.
To question Giuffre’s testimony is not to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein. But it is the responsibility of journalists to look forensically at the evidence, even if the findings may be unpopular.
Giuffre’s latest memoir is presented to the public as a work of non-fiction. She likewise originally presented the 2011 memoir as non-fictional — as confirmed by literary agents who were originally pitched the book. It was to be an exposé on the sordid crimes of some of the world’s most prominent politicians, academics, and business people, pitched as “a human interest story that could appeal to the Oprah/female set as well as the Wall Streeters who follow Epstein”. However, when the draft manuscript was eventually excavated over the course of litigation Giuffre had initiated against Maxwell, a multitude of claims it contained became untenable to defend.
Her lawyers were thus compelled to concede that the manuscript had represented a “fictionalized account” of her purported experiences. In court documents, the lawyers granted that “Ms. Giuffre began to draft a fictionalized account of what happened to her. It was against this backdrop of her trauma being unearthed, her steps to seek psychological counseling for it, that she drafted this manuscript. Doing so was an act of empowerment and a way of reframing and taking control over the narrative of her past abuse that haunts her.”
In the new memoir, Wallace makes brief mention of the earlier fictionalised draft, but explains that Giuffre chose to fictionalise in order to protect herself from retaliation by the powerful men she was accusing of sex crimes. Wallace has, however, copy-and-pasted entire passages from the earlier draft, with a few minor cosmetic adjustments.
For instance, in the 2011 memoir, Giuffre told of being dispatched to Epstein’s compound on the US Virgin Islands to accompany “a quirky little man with white hair”, whom she identified as a Harvard professor named Stephen, for an implied sexual liaison. In the 2025 memoir, this person becomes “a quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair”, and is a generic “psychology professor”. In the original memoir, Giuffre recounted that the man “asked if he could receive one of the delightful massages he has been hearing about from Jeffrey”. In the new memoir, this loose paraphrase morphs into a direct quote, with the unnamed professor purportedly asking Giuffre if he could have “one of your famous massages that Jeffrey has told me so much about”.
Giuffre has intercourse with the man in both memoirs. In the first rendering, though, she offers the man a second sexual opportunity, which he politely declines: “That night after dinner and my mixed cocktail of Xanax and red wine,” Giuffre wrote in 2011, “I asked if he’d like another massage before I went to bed. He just wanted to stay up watching movies in Jeffrey’s theatre room. As peculiar as that request was to me I didn’t argue [with] it, I just hoped I hadn’t disappointed him. I showed him how to use the remote and turn off the TV when he was finished before going to bed.”
In the new version, however, Giuffre’s description of herself as the initiator is removed — but much of the rest is simply reproduced from the old version: “We only had sex once, though,” writes Giuffre/Wallace. “The next night, the man told me he wanted to watch movies instead. I showed him how to use the remote control on Epstein’s largest TV and how to turn it off when he was done, and I went to bed. I was glad for the night off, but I remember feeling worried that I’d somehow disappointed the professor in a way that he’d share with Epstein.”
Nor is any mention made in the 2025 memoir of the fact that when Giuffre was later questioned about this encounter in a formal legal deposition, she explicitly retracted the whole story. Asked by a deposing lawyer, “Did you ever have sex with [this person]?,” Giuffre replied: “No.”
Revelations in the book relating to Prince Andrew have filled the British press in particular with wall-to-wall outcries of vitriolic censure; one esteemed royal biographer was even moved to proclaim that Andrew’s alleged trail of depravities, and likely criminal exposure, has saddled the monarchy with its most damaging crisis since the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936. Evidently, few see any issue with making such grand proclamations on the basis of this vaguely “fictionalized” material.
“He was adorning my young body, particularly my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches,” Giuffre wrote in Memoir One, of the time she says she was trafficked to Andrew in London. “That was definitely a first for me and I couldn’t help but laugh, I hoped he didn’t expect the same treatment back.” She now writes in Memoir Two: “He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches. That was a first for me, and it tickled. I was nervous he would want me to do the same to him.”
When ordinary people read such an account in a memoir, they assume that it took place. And it’s considered ethically defensible to reflexively ascribe truth to sexual assault claims (“believe the victim”). But while Andrew has approximately zero defenders on any continent, no hard evidence has been presented to substantiate that he ever had sexual contact with Giuffre. The main piece of evidence is a photo of disputed provenance, from March 2001, which shows him with his arm around the waist of a smiling Giuffre. Yet because the royal family chose to settle with Giuffre instead of fight her claims in court, and despite the fact that the settlement included no admission of culpability, Andrew is widely believed to be guilty of sex crimes.
Furthermore, the Daily Mail, which first reported an encounter between Giuffre and Prince Andrew, paid Giuffre $160,000 for the story in 2011, plus serialisation revenue. The journalist who produced that story also wrote for The Daily Telegraph in Australia that Giuffre “said there was never any sexual relationship between the Prince and herself”.
Representatives for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Giuffre’s publisher, provided me with a statement, claiming that “the book was fact-checked and legally vetted”. A spokesperson told me that, “the book is a memoir, and it is nonfiction”.
Another curiosity: anyone who has spent any length of time following the endless Epstein saga will be surprised that the name Alan Dershowitz makes only the most fleeting appearance in the book. For nearly a decade, Giuffre made sensational accusations against the Harvard law professor, claiming that he sexually abused her as a minor on at least six separate occasions, and describing each session in granular detail. However, in 2022, Giuffre’s lawyers drafted a statement confessing that she “may have made a mistake”.
Giuffre, for her part, claims that any memory-lapses or discrepancies in the public record are immaterial. “When you’re abused, you know your abuser. I might not have the dates or times right, and the places might not even be right, but I know their faces, and I know what they’ve done to me,” she writes.
Given the context of her repeated “mistakes”, other of Giuffre’s recollections may also warrant scepticism. In the early sections of the new memoir, she claims she was raped, enslaved, and trafficked by a large number of people — even before she met Jeffrey Epstein. First, she describes how she was raped by two teenage boys in the back of a car; charges against them were later dropped, owing to what police said was her “lack of credibility”. Court filings document another, separate claim that a different 17-year-old raped her; those charges were also dropped.
Later, she recounts how she was walking down the street one day when a white van pulled up beside her and the driver asked if she “needed a lift”. She got in, and was thereafter brutally raped, she says, with the muzzle of a gun stuck into her mouth. She was then repeatedly trafficked and raped by the owner of modelling agency in Miami; the owner of a horse farm in Ocala, Florida; and the owner of a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale. She also introduces for the first time that she was continuously raped by her father, as well as her father’s friend.
Once she met Epstein, she contends, she was raped and trafficked by so many men (and women) that the true total can hardly be quantified. This includes an unidentified “Prime Minister” whom she claims savagely raped and beat her. She does not name this person, or give any other identifying details because, she explains, she is afraid he will “hurt” her if she does so. This despite freely naming a huge assortment of other well-connected people over the years, implicating them in sex crimes.
Rounding out the list of men Giuffre claims she was abused by is her husband, Robert Giuffre, an Australian whom she lauds throughout the book as her “protector” and “savior”. But in early 2025, she began accusing her husband of abusing her as well, claiming he was jealous of her professional success as a trafficking-awareness activist. Robert countered that Virginia had become increasingly violent and unstable. Australian child-welfare authorities appear to have sided with him: they stripped custody of the couple’s children from Virginia.
No reasonable assessment of this combination of events could conclude that Giuffre is a reliable narrator, yet her claims have been mindlessly transmitted to a mass audience.
She was a self-confessed author of fiction, whose stories became ever-more elaborate as time went on — an evolution that earned her a great deal of money, not least through book advances. Since her death in April, Giuffre’s brother and half-brother have been engaged in a protracted court battle with her estranged husband over the lucrative estate. They insisted that her recent claims of abuse against the husband be added to the book in a foreword, according to The New York Times. Nowhere does the book disclose that these siblings are embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute with Robert Giuffre, with millions of dollars at stake.
The unwavering credulity with which this book has been received by journalists, editors, publishers and politicians is a testament to how the most basic standards of information-gathering and knowledge-production can be summarily discarded in service of a narrative that people want to believe. For those of us who prefer to remain anchored in some semblance of sanity and reality: Virginia Roberts Giuffre was undoubtedly a disturbed individual, who may well have suffered grave misfortunes. But that her tales could be unquestioningly broadcast throughout the international media — and be allowed to stoke unrelenting political turmoil, even with talk of a constitutional crisis — is irresponsible in the extreme.
Michael Tracey is a journalist in Jersey City, NJ. He can be found on Substack at Michael Tracey.
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