London (AFP) – “Nobody’s Girl”, the memoir by Virginia Giuffre, sex convict Jeffrey Epstein’s lead accuser who died by suicide in April, topped Amazon’s bestseller lists on Wednesday, a day after going on sale. From Donald Trump offering her a babysitting job to intimate descriptions of her encounters with Britain’s disgraced Prince Andrew, here are five things to know about Giuffre’s life:
– **Prince Andrew** – Accounts in the memoir about the three times Giuffre was trafficked to have sex with Andrew — including twice when she was only 17 — prompted the prince to renounce his titles last week. The first time was allegedly on March 10, 2001. Giuffre recalls that when the prince correctly guessed her age as 17, he noted: “My daughters are just a little younger than you.” She also remembers picking out her outfit that night, a pink crop-top T-shirt and multicoloured jeans inspired by her “idols” Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. It was the outfit she was wearing when Epstein snapped the infamous photo of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre’s waist, that later played a part in the prince’s downfall. She writes that Epstein later paid her $15,000 for her night with the prince. Andrew has denied ever meeting Giuffre.
– **Trump** – Giuffre recalls being introduced to the real estate mogul, now US president, by her father, who got her a job as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in the summer of 2000, when she was 16 years old. She said Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier” in their only encounter mentioned in the memoir, and he offered her work as a babysitter for his friends. “Soon I was making extra money a few nights a week, minding the children of the elite,” wrote Giuffre. It was at Mar-a-Lago that she was noticed and then groomed by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
– **Mystery politician** – There is a discrepancy over the identity of a politician who Giuffre says “brutally raped” her, but whom she does not name for fear of retribution. In the UK version of the memoir, she describes fearing for her life and being choked until she lost consciousness by a “former minister.” But in the US version of the book, echoing previous court files, she describes her abuser as a “prime minister.” No reason has been given for the discrepancy, despite an AFP request to the US publishers Knopf.
– **Miscarriage** – In the summer of 2001, not long after participating in an orgy with Epstein, Andrew and eight other girls, Giuffre was admitted to an emergency room in New York. She was 17 but Epstein lied to the staff about her age. When she was discharged, he informed her she had suffered a miscarriage. In the passage, Giuffre noted that Epstein “never wore a condom,” and neither did the men he and Maxwell “trafficked me to.” “I had to come to terms with the fact that I had gotten pregnant and lost a fetus without even knowing it was happening,” she wrote. Giuffre describes her marriage in 2002 to Robert Giuffre, whom she met in Thailand when she trained to be a masseuse, as a turning point in her life. It was also a “new existence” which she struggled at times to come to terms with.
– **Life after Epstein** – Giuffre launched legal action against Epstein in 2009. Over the following years, she writes that she suffered harassment, including being intimidated by unknown people outside her Colorado home — and would go “to bed each night with a loaded revolver on the nightstand.” In 2015, she decided to leave the United States and move to Australia with her family, believing they were in danger. Despite the difficulties of going public about Epstein, Giuffre said she continued to raise her voice. She said she wanted to make it “easier to punish those who victimise others,” and planned to use the funds from her multi-million dollar settlement with Andrew to help her organisation aid sex-trafficking victims. “I look forward to disseminating some of the Crown’s money to do some good,” Giuffre said. She also wrote that the main reason she did not name some of the alleged abusers in the memoir was to protect her three children. “Maybe in the future I will be ready to talk about these men. But not now,” she wrote. Giuffre took her own life in April, aged 41.
© 2024 AFP
