Warning: Distressing content
Heartbreaking.
That is the best way to describe Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, out today.
For days now, the British news has been dominated by one story – the snowballing, runaway train of sleaze that is the morally squalid Prince Andrew, no longer to be known as the Duke of York, after he was, title-wise, pushed out the window, KGB-style, by his nephew Prince William and hand-wringing brother King Charles.
The heat is only getting that much hotter under the reviled royal.
If Buckingham Palace had hoped the Andrew title two-step — nothing but cosmetic window dressing — would draw a line under this sordid chapter, then Ms Giuffre’s first-person detailing of the multiple instances during which she alleged she was sexually abused by Andrew would swiftly put paid to that.
Andrew has always strenuously denied Ms Giuffre’s claims.
The most shocking new revelation about the prince: Giuffre writes she “woke up in a pool of blood” after losing a pregnancy after taking part in “an orgy” with Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and “eight other young girls”.
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But it’s also the details that the late Ms Giuffre shares that get you: She wrote that called him “Andy”, like Epstein did; he did not, she suggests, use a condom. (She writes: “Epstein never wore a condom. Neither did the men he and Maxwell trafficked me to.”)
During the first time Ms Giuffre was forced to “take care” of Andrew, as Epstein and Maxwell framed it, she claimed the prince licked the soles of her feet and “caressed” her toes.
“He was friendly enough, but still entitled—as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright,” Ms Giuffre wrote.
“He seemed in a rush to have intercourse. Afterwards, he said thank you in his clipped British accent.”
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The second time she alleges Andrew sexually abused her was in New York “about a month later” however it is Ms Giuffre’s account of the alleged third time she was made to sleep with him that is most shocking.
“It was not just the two of us this time; it was an orgy,” she explained in her book.
“Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together. The other girls all seemed and appeared to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English.”
Also there was French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel who, “Epstein told me…supplied the other girls who took part.”
(Brunel allegedly procured more than 1000 women and girls for Epstein. In 2020 he was charged with the rape of minors and in 2022 suicided while in jail.)
After the orgy, when Ms Giuffre, Maxwell and Epstein returned to New York, the teenager “woke up in a pool of blood”.
“Sharp waves of pain racked my body as I crawled to the intercom, screaming that I needed help,” she wrote.
Epstein took her to the hospital where he lied that she was 18 years old. She had been pregnant and did not know it.
Ms Giuffre also makes claims about Andrew’s treatment of her in more recent years. In 2021, after she sued him in a civil New York court for alleged sexual abuse, he tried “to hire internet trolls to hassle me”, she alleges.
Then, after they reached an out-of-court settlement in February 2022, Andrew “gagged” her because he didn’t want the case to “tarnish” the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
But there’s more. Oh so much more and there have been so many developments in the Andrew story that it is actually hard to keep up.
On Sunday the Metropolitan Police announced it’s investigating Andrew after it was revealed he had sent his taxpayer-funded bodyguard Ms Giuffre’s personal details in an apparent attempt to smear her.
Also over the weekend, new emails detail how Epstein introduced Andrew to a second abuse and trafficking victim.
In messages sent in August 2010, by which time Epstein was a convicted sex offender, he wrote to tell the prince, “’I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with. Her name is XXXXX (redacted). She will be in London 20-24.”
He responded: “Of course… Will she be bringing a message from you? Please give her my contact details to get in touch.”
Is there more? You betcha.
Last week the Telegraph broke the news that Andrew had held at least three meetings with an alleged Chinese spy master; and it has since emerged that such were the concerns about Andrew’s ties to alleged Chinese spies he was deemed a potential national security risk in 2021.
The questions over Andrew’s finances are only growing too. The Telegraph is reporting that Andrew has not paid rent on his home Royal Lodge since 2003.
He is meant to pay a ‘national’ rent of $520,000 annually for the 31-room grand manor however lease details show this was waived if he committed to spending about $15 million refurbishing the property.
How can the unemployed prince, having been cut off by Charles, and roommate ex-wife Sarah Ferguson have been able to foot such a hefty bill?
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is now facing calls from MPs to legislate to officially remove Andrew’s dukedom.
(All that he has agreed to do is to no longer publicly call himself the Duke of York; legally he still very much is.)
The public and political appetite for Andrew to face even more repercussions for his ties to Epstein only feels like it has been whetted and things could get even worse for him yet.
This week, Ms Giuffre should be doing the publicity rounds, promoting her searing, terrible story. However she died by suicide in April this year aged 41.
Instead, that job has fallen to her Nobody’s Girl collaborator, writer Amy Wallace.
Ms Giuffre and Ms Wallace first met on Zoom in 2021, before spending the next four years working on the manuscript together.
In that time, they went to Paris together and New York and Ms Wallace spent a month living with Ms Giuffre and her family.
“I was eating every meal with them,” Ms Wallace told the Times.
“We went to her daughter’s volleyball game, we took walks. We were just kind of living. I was a fly on the wall. We went grocery shopping, we got our nails done with her daughter.”
Nobody’s Girl was finished earlier this year and is published posthumously. Only hours after it went on sale, it is already number one on the Amazon UK best-seller list.
This week as Ms Wallace has been doing interviews wearing a 50 cent ring that Ms Giuffre bought her from a thrift shop, telling the Times, “I want her with me.”
She writes at the end: “I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.”
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Read related topics:Prince Andrew
