Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous book has revealed her grief at not being allowed to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell because her narrative was seen as too complicated for the jury: “I’d named so many names.”
Nobody’s Girl, published Tuesday by Knopf, gives the most detailed account yet of Giuffre’s life, her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, her allegations against Prince Andrew and her battle for justice through the U.S. civil courts.
But she also describes her response to not being called as a witness in the sex trafficking trial that saw Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell jailed for her role in facilitating Epstein’s campaign of abuse.
Giuffre died in Australia in April after what her family described as a suicide. Knopf said she had made it clear she wanted the book to be released.
In it, she wrote: “Prosecuting a case is about creating a clear narrative that jurors find easy to follow. My narrative was complicated, if only because I’d named so many names.”
Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 and eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking offenses in a case mounted on the basis she had groomed girls for Epstein to abuse and helped normalize that abuse.
Giuffre had played a key role in exposing Epstein’s industrial scale exploition of young women and minors and acknowledged she “had been looking forward to doing my part to send Maxwell to prison.”
“The lead prosecutors, [Lara] Pomerantz and Maurene Comey, had broken the news to me that I would not be testifying because, essentially, I would be too big a distraction,” Giuffre wrote.
“If I were a witness, all the men that I had previously named as my abusers would likely be called by the defense as rebuttal witnesses, the prosecutors said. They feared such theatrics would dilute jurors’ focus, taking the spotlight off Maxwell.
“At its heart, prosecuting a case is about creating a clear narrative that jurors find easy to follow. My narrative was complicated, if only because I’d named so many names.”
However, that decision was a blow to Giuffre, not least because she felt it prompted an attack on her reputation from Prince Andrew’s team.
Giuffre had filed a lawsuit against Andrew in New York in which she accused him of rape and said she was trafficked to London, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands to have sex with him by Epstein and Maxwell in 2001.
“While Siggy [her lawyer Sigrid McCawley] tried to console me that I had done my part already, being excluded from this proceeding felt unfair to me. For one thing, I expected that many people would assume prosecutors shut me out because they didn’t believe me.
“(Indeed, just four days before the start of Maxwell’s trial, Prince Andrew’s camp planted a story in The Telegraph that ran under this headline: ‘Virginia Giuffre’s Absence from Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Shows She Is ‘Not a Credible Witness, Says Duke’s Team.’) But that couldn’t be helped.”
Ultimately, Andrew settled a civil lawsuit Giuffre brough against him in early 2022 for an undisclosed sum while denying liability.
He did, though, publicly acknowledge Giuffre was a victim of Epstein after negotiation with Giuffre’s legal team, a victory which brought Giuffre to tears.
“After casting doubt on my credibilitv for SO long—Prince Andrew’s team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me—the Duke of York owed me a meaningful apology as well,” Giuffre wrote. “We would never get a confession, of course. That’s what settlements are designed to avoid.
“But we were trying for the next best thing: a general acknowledgment of what I’d been through. After my lawyers hashed out the basic details on Zoom, I then participated in two days of mediation talks. Finally, at 2:30 a.m. Florida time, the prince’s lawyers agreed to the statement we’d been pushing for. Siggy called me immediately and read it to me through tears, both hers and mine.
“‘Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre’s character,’ the statement read in part, ‘and he accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks.’ Yes, indeed, including attacks from the prince’s own camp!”
Nobody’s Girl was published Tuesday by Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and tells Giuffre’s life story.
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