Virginia Giuffre

Virginia Giuffre, born Virginia Roberts on August 9, 1983, was an American-born sex-trafficking survivor and advocate who became one of the most prominent accusers of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She said that Maxwell recruited her around 2000, when she was a teenager working at Mar-a-Lago, and that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to Epstein and to others, an account she set out in court filings, interviews, and a posthumous memoir. She later settled with Epstein, sued Maxwell for defamation, and sued Prince Andrew. She died by suicide at her property in Western Australia on April 25, 2025, at age 41. Her allegations are documented as her testimony; the individuals she named have denied wrongdoing where they responded.¹²

Early Life

Giuffre was born Virginia Roberts on August 9, 1983, in Sacramento, California, to Sky and Lynn Roberts, and the family moved to Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was young, where her father later worked in a maintenance role at Mar-a-Lago. She described in interviews and in her memoir a childhood marked by sexual abuse beginning around age seven, repeated running away, periods living with relatives in California and in foster care, and time at a facility for troubled youth. She said that in the late 1990s, as a young teenager, she had been drawn into an earlier trafficking situation before returning to her family.¹³

In the summer of 2000 Giuffre took a job as a locker-room attendant at the Mar-a-Lago spa, an arrangement she said was facilitated through her father's employment there. She was 16 or 17 at the time of her recruitment, and accounts vary on the precise age and date; her filings generally placed her recruitment around 2000.¹³

Recruitment and Trafficking Allegations

Giuffre said that Ghislaine Maxwell approached her while she was working at the Mar-a-Lago spa, reading a book on massage therapy, and recruited her ostensibly to train as a masseuse for Epstein, taking her that evening to Epstein's nearby Palm Beach house. She said she was then drawn into sexual abuse by Epstein and trafficked to other men over a period of years, traveling among Epstein's residences in New York, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and abroad. She described Maxwell as central to Epstein's operation and said she was presented to Epstein's associates as available for sexual purposes.¹²

Among the men Giuffre said Epstein directed her to was Prince Andrew, whom she said she was made to have sex with on three occasions beginning in London in March 2001 when she was 17, around the time she was photographed with him at Maxwell's Belgravia home. Andrew has denied the allegations and settled her civil suit without admitting liability. Giuffre also named other men in her filings and interviews, including the financier Jean-Luc Brunel and the attorney Alan Dershowitz; those named denied her accounts. Her allegations against individuals other than Epstein and Maxwell were not adjudicated as criminal findings.¹²

The body of allegations rests on Giuffre's sworn testimony, depositions, and statements rather than on criminal convictions of the men she named. Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 on federal sex-trafficking charges arising from the broader Epstein scheme, though that prosecution did not turn on Giuffre as a charged victim. Epstein was indicted federally in July 2019 and died in custody the following month before trial, his death ruled a suicide.²⁴

Australia and Advocacy

Giuffre said she left Epstein's circle around 2002 after he sent her abroad, including to Thailand to train in massage, where she met the Australian Robert Giuffre, whom she married and with whom she settled in Australia and raised three children, adopting the surname Giuffre. She lived for years in Western Australia, latterly on a property at Neergabby north of Perth.¹

She became a public advocate for survivors of trafficking and sexual abuse, founding a nonprofit she initially called Victims Refuse Silence, later reorganized under the name Speak Out, Act, Reclaim, abbreviated SOAR. Her name and account featured in much of the reporting that drove renewed scrutiny of Epstein from the mid-2010s onward, including the work that culminated in his 2019 federal arrest.¹

Through her advocacy and litigation Giuffre pressed for the public release of records in the Epstein matter and lent her name to campaigns supporting trafficking survivors. She cooperated with journalists and investigators over more than a decade, sitting for depositions and providing the photograph and other materials that entered the court record, and her sworn statements became part of the documentary record in multiple cases.¹⁴

Litigation

Giuffre, then using the name Virginia Roberts, sued Epstein in 2009 in Florida as Jane Doe No. 102, alleging abuse; that matter was resolved by a confidential settlement of 500,000 dollars, which she signed in November 2009. The settlement, unsealed on January 3, 2022, released Epstein and his agents, attorneys, and employees (the "Second Parties") together with "any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant," and its release language later became a contested issue in the suit against Prince Andrew, where Judge Lewis Kaplan held in January 2022 that the language was too ambiguous to clearly bar the claim against Andrew.⁵⁶⁷

The 2009 Settlement

The Florida suit, Jane Doe No. 102 v. Jeffrey Epstein, No. 09-80656-CIV-Marra/Johnson, was filed in the Southern District of Florida on May 4, 2009 and assigned to Judge Kenneth A. Marra, who also presided over the Crime Victims' Rights Act petition in Doe v. United States and over the 2010 obstruction prosecution of Epstein's former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez. Giuffre was represented by Robert C. Josefsberg and Katherine W. Ezell of Podhurst Orseck in Miami; Epstein by Robert D. Critton Jr. of Burman, Critton, Luttier & Coleman and Jack Alan Goldberger of Atterbury, Goldberger & Weiss, both of West Palm Beach.⁶

In the Settlement Agreement and General Release, Epstein paid 500,000 dollars to "Virginia Roberts." Roberts released the Second Parties "and any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant ('Other Potential Defendants')" from all claims "from the beginning of the world to the day of this release." The parties stipulated that the agreement "is pursuant to and is in fulfillment of Jeffrey Epstein's obligations to Virginia Roberts" under "the Non-Prosecution Agreement, its Addendum, and its Affirmation," tying the civil payment to the federal non-prosecution agreement of 2007 with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. Epstein agreed "to continue to abide by Judge Marra's July 31, 2009 No Contact Order." The amount was to be "kept strictly confidential," with exceptions for immediate family, whose identities were given on an "Eyes Only" basis to a Special Master, Sidney Stubbs, for legal and tax purposes, and for "a validly issued subpoena from a governmental or regulatory agency," on five days' notice to the other side. Epstein's side agreed not to release Roberts' "identity, name, or physical depiction" without her written waiver.⁶

The agreement entered the public record as Exhibit A to a request for judicial notice filed by Prince Andrew's lawyers in October 2021 in support of his motion to dismiss her suit against him.⁶

In September 2015 Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation in the Southern District of New York after Maxwell, through a representative, publicly called her allegations lies. The case, Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-07433, produced a large body of depositions and exhibits, including testimony from Johanna Sjoberg and others, and it settled in 2017 on undisclosed terms. Tranches of documents from that case were unsealed beginning in 2019, with a major release of formerly sealed exhibits in January 2024; reporting on the January 2024 unsealing noted it largely concerned already-known figures and contained no new criminal accusation against previously unnamed people.⁴

The defamation case was filed on September 21, 2015 before Judge Robert W. Sweet. Giuffre was represented by Sigrid S. McCawley and other lawyers of Boies Schiller Flexner, Maxwell by Laura A. Menninger and Jeffrey S. Pagliuca of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman. The parties settled on May 24, 2017, but the sealed record produced under Sweet's March 2016 protective order kept the docket open for a further nine years. The Miami Herald and its reporter Julie K. Brown intervened in April 2018, and in Brown v. Maxwell (July 3, 2019) the Second Circuit ordered the summary judgment record unsealed. On July 23, 2025, three months after Giuffre's death, the Second Circuit, on appeals brought by her and by the Herald, vacated the district court's December 2019 and January 2020 unsealing orders "in their entirety" and remanded for "individualized review" of the remaining sealed material. On August 11, 2026, Judge Loretta Preska modified the protective order to let the government disclose, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, documents it had obtained from Boies Schiller Flexner in 2019 through a grand jury subpoena. On September 3, 2026 the case was recaptioned with Ian Torrington Blatchford, interim administrator of her estate, as plaintiff.⁸⁹¹⁰

On August 9, 2021, Giuffre sued Prince Andrew in the same court under New York's Child Victims Act, alleging he sexually abused her on three occasions when she was 17. After Kaplan denied Andrew's motion to dismiss in January 2022, the suit settled in February 2022, the joint filing stating that Andrew would make "a substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights" and acknowledging her as "an established victim of abuse," with no admission of liability and the sum undisclosed.⁷

In Giuffre v. Prince Andrew, No. 1:21-cv-06702, Kaplan denied Andrew's December 2021 request to depose Giuffre and take "limited jurisdictional discovery" before the motion to dismiss was decided (ECF No. 61, December 31, 2021), and admitted the 2009 settlement for purposes of the motion while declining judicial notice of Andrew's other proposed exhibits (ECF No. 57, December 16, 2021). His opinion denying dismissal, signed January 11, 2022 and filed the next day (ECF No. 64), stated that "nothing in this opinion or previously in these proceedings properly may be construed as indicating a view with respect to the truth of the charges or countercharges or as to the intention of the parties in entering into the 2009 Agreement." The settlement agreement with Andrew is dated February 12, 2022, three days before the parties' public notice, and the case was dismissed by stipulation on March 8, 2022 (ECF No. 83).¹¹

Dershowitz Allegations

Giuffre alleged in a 2014 court filing and subsequently that Epstein had trafficked her to the attorney Alan Dershowitz, who had been part of Epstein's legal defense team in Florida. Dershowitz denied the allegations from the outset, calling them fabricated and describing Giuffre at points as a liar, and the two sides litigated competing defamation claims. Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation in April 2019; Dershowitz countersued in November 2019.¹²

In November 2022 the parties, together with the attorney David Boies, reached a global settlement resolving the litigation. In her settlement statement Giuffre wrote: "I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations." She added that she "may have made a mistake" in identifying him. The agreement resolved all pending litigation without any payment from Dershowitz to Giuffre, and Dershowitz characterized the outcome as a vindication of his denials.¹²¹³

Death and Memoir

In late March 2025 Giuffre posted that she had been hospitalized in Western Australia after the vehicle she was in was struck by a school bus, writing in one social-media post that she had gone into renal failure and had been given "four days to live." Western Australia Police said no injuries were reported at the scene, and the bus driver and other parties disputed the severity she described; a source said she was not in a life-threatening condition. She left the hospital roughly a week later. Reporting on these contradictions circulated in early April 2025.¹⁴

Giuffre died by suicide on April 25, 2025, at her property in Neergabby, Western Australia, at age 41. Her family said in a statement that she "lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking" and that "the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia." Western Australia Police said her death was not being treated as suspicious. Her death came roughly a month after the bus incident and about six months before the scheduled publication of her memoir.²¹⁴

Her memoir Nobody's Girl, co-written with the author Amy Wallace, was published posthumously by Alfred A. Knopf on October 21, 2025, following her stated wish that it appear regardless of her circumstances. The book recounts her account of recruitment at Mar-a-Lago, the years of trafficking, and the litigation that followed, and it repeats her allegations against Epstein, Maxwell, Andrew, and others. Its publication coincided with the renewed pressure on Andrew that preceded the removal of his titles, and it reached the top of bestseller lists in the weeks after release.¹⁵ The book reproduces the March 2001 photograph of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre and Maxwell behind them, and identifies Epstein as the person who took it.¹⁶ On May 11, 2026 it was named Overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.¹⁷

Estate

Giuffre died without a valid will. In June 2025 two of her sons applied to the Supreme Court of Western Australia to be appointed administrators of the estate, which includes property in Western Australia, what remained of the settlement with Andrew (reported at 12 million pounds), and revenue from her memoir. Their application was opposed by her former carer, Cheryl Myers, and her former Perth lawyer, Karrie Louden, who sought appointment themselves; her estranged husband Robert Giuffre had agreed to the sons' writ, and the court registrar noted that he should be joined as a party.¹⁸

In late November 2025 the court appointed a Western Australian lawyer, Ian Torrington Blatchford, as interim administrator, at 400 Australian dollars an hour. The court's orders listed existing legal proceedings the administrator would conduct, among them the 2015 case against Maxwell and "an arbitration" involving Alan Dershowitz, three years after the 2022 settlement of their litigation. They also included a defamation suit for 10 million dollars filed in the Southern District of New York in October 2021 by Rina Oh, who alleged that Giuffre had portrayed her "as an accomplice to Epstein rather than a victim"; an appeals court had ruled that Oh's claim survived Giuffre's death.¹⁸¹⁹