Nobody’s Girl

Madhuri reviews Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir

Nobody’s Girl: a Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Penguin Random House UK, 2025
367 pages

This book is so distressing and disturbing on so many fronts that it is hard to know where to begin. As we know, it was published posthumously; the author killed herself, at her ranch in Australia, before publication. The writing is good, the production thoroughly professional; leaving us to absorb, without distraction, the horrors of the story. The mind naturally, pretty much from the start of the book, goes to thoughts of, “How can this sort of thing be prevented?” I would say to that: more alertness, more education, more caring, more attention to laws that are already there. But the problem is so widespread… so almost-ubiquitous – that we have to ask ourselves, “What IS a human being? Particularly a male one? Is there any hope for something like civilisation? Or is it a hopeless quest?”

Jeffrey Epstein had been doing his thing for a long time before the teenage Virginia was yanked into his orbit. He’d been pimping for his friends and indulging his own heavy, maniacal, paedophilic sex addiction (had to be three times a day. Never less. Preceded by a ‘massage’ by an untrained, bewildered girl) for decades. It gave him joy and satisfaction to offer the gift of a session with a 14-year-old girl to powerful, rich, scientific, or academic acquaintances, and then film the encounters. He was amassing a blackmail trove. But nobody, apparently, ever turned down the blonde child. (He rejected tattoos and dark-skinned girls. A tattoo could thus be a very lucky thing for a Floridian teen, if she only knew.)

But the story starts with Virginia’s childhood, and that is where things get badly messed up; and then they continue in that vein until she meets her husband, at 19. By then it’s pretty much too late. The damage has been done.

The little girl loves her horse, she and her dad bond over riding, in the farmland and swamps of rural Florida. But when she’s 7 he begins to molest and then to rape her. He invites his friend Forrest to join him. The suffering child begins to rebel and act out, the mother declares she can’t cope with her, and kicks her out. There begins the litany of foster care and running away, foster care and running away. Trying to go home again… doesn’t work. The mother never asks why the child is rebellious. She just rejects her.

Obviously, those two people should not be parents. Has any government ever seriously considered a ‘parenting license’?

Then, there are the myriads of sleazeball shitweasels roaming around looking for girls just like that. They often have emissaries, male and female, who do the finding for them. This is not new, of course – Victorian England published many books with that in the plot. A crumpled, homeless, discouraged teenage girl – manna from heaven for the users. That’s how it works. So the child is taken from the street and into a house with a big fat boss who feeds and dresses her (inappropriately) and rapes her and controls her movements. He might at some point get bored and pass her to another one of his kind.

Epstein was another level of this sort of thing. Same story, but on speed. And with connections royal, political, etc. And he had a confederate, an upper-class Brit from a family with criminal leanings. A woman. Kind of.

Reading, I was of course reflecting on my own experiences as a wandering teen. I was remembering the look on the face of any older man who was eyeing me up with the thought that I might become useful to him. Blonde? Nope. Tits? Nope. Long legs? Not really. A sour, thwarted-mercenary look on the face as the man turns away. Thank god. But Virginia – or Jenna, as she was known – had those wanted features. And she was doomed.

Are we, as a species, that small, and that nasty? That we see a soul as an assemblage of mechanical components, to use or sell? Apparently some of us, many of us, are.

The poor girl just wanted to be a normal person who gets a job and finds independence. She kept trying to make things work with her parents. And every step along the way some heartless bastard would trip her up, then steal her back again to be used.

There is one harrowing scene where the friend of her dad’s – who’d also raped her – is sent to prison for molesting another child. In the clink he finds Jesus, so when he gets out he comes over and gets the little Jenna to kneel down in front of him and beg Jesus for forgiveness “for all those things you did with me and your dad.” The dad is also standing right there. Jenna understands then that there are no grownups and there is no help.

When I was a little girl, in the 50’s, nobody ever told me there were paedophiles. I was cautioned not to get in cars with strangers; but nobody said why. I was told to beware of boys my own age, once I was a teen; but nobody ever cautioned me against the professors, ministers, teachers, theatre directors, who were the ones I was really in danger from. It was as if the adults were afraid that if they themselves spoke the words, they’d be tarred with the brush of shame. So I was taken completely by surprise when those professional, middle-aged men pounced. Still, relatively, I would say my youth was not horribly damaging that way… which does not mean it wasn’t damaging. But nothing like the scale of Jenna’s. At least my mother loved me, at least she was there, at least, after a certain age, I could talk to her and she wouldn’t just go into a puritanical freak-out. At least my own dear dad, distant as he was, never harmed me. I do wish, though, that I’d been properly, explicitly warned. It might have really made a difference.

I cannot imagine what Jenna suffered. A blonde piece of candy, handed around to be chewed by whomsoever. Her real nature ignored and derided and tricked and kicked. Where could she turn? I’m guessing there might be societies, in Scandinavia, where there’s a place such a teen could turn for help. I hope so. America is the Wild West, all of it, and so she was out in the desert, though it was a swamp, and then a city, in muggy Florida.

When Jenna meets the young man who marries her, and flies to Australia to live with him, the whole book takes an enormous sigh of relief. She is now safe; her Sicilian parents-in-law care for her as nobody else has ever done. But then her demons have space to emerge… and the whole PTSD she’d been storing up comes flaming out with a vengeance.

Later, the Epstein goons start stalking her. Bright lights in the window at night. Other women are bringing court cases. Jenna is needed as a witness. She has kids by now, and it’s very stressful to be flying to other countries, to fight in court. But she wants to fight. She wants to bring the bastard down, and Maxwell, the female accomplice, she wants to bring her down too. For me, the best part of the book was the lawyer part – when dedicated lawyers are fighting Epstein. There’s a structure, a groundedness, a grownup feeling in this. Jenna has strong people by her side. She has a mission. She’d been denied schooling, denied a profession – but now she’s got one. She’s doing essential work.

She gets settlements out of court – enough to buy property for her family – but it doesn’t dispel the demons driven into her flesh by being used from age 7 as a waste-bottle for grown, stinky, hairy, sometimes elderly, men’s bodily fluids.

She keeps wanting to die – even though she loves her kids. She’s in pain, physically too. We don’t want her to go. But she goes. As I said before, I can’t imagine what it was like being her. I was raped as a teen, but not a thousand times. The meditation I have done on the subject showed me that rape is spirit-murder: it insists, You don’t matter. You’re not even here. I don’t have to listen to you. I do what I want with this body, even the most private inside of it. I’m the only one here. You don’t exist.

Jenna was shopped to elderly scientists, in their 70’s, whom it amused Epstein to flummox with a gift of golden youth. One wobbly old man patted her head afterwards: “You’re good girl.” That’s how much of a scientist he was. He didn’t know Shit from Shinola, as the saying goes. A teenage sex slave is a ‘good girl’? By whose measure? What choice did she have, to be good or bad; and by whose measure?

I’m so glad Jenna wrote this book. I’m so glad so many many people have written books about the abuse they suffered when young. Abusers never reckon that the kids might grow up and write a book. I hope everybody reads this book. We need voices, we small people, who live in a world where some people imagine that they are BIG and can do any hell thing they want; and that they can buy policemen and courts and politicians. And yes, they have bought them; but no matter how many BIG guys there are, worldwide, enjoying their mauling of innocents – and there seem to be a LOT of them – as if, once you get BIG you develop an appetite for children – weird! – there ARE all the rest of us too, with voices, and anger, and care, and eyes that can see, and fingers that can type, and phones that can film. We can make a lot of noise.

A few thoughts that came up while I was reading:

Imagine you had a rosebush in your front garden. It is a tall, healthy rosebush, and every late spring the buds come out on it, thick and tightly-rolled, but promising to bloom, later. Hundreds of buds! And there’s a guy in the neighbourhood who, in dark of night, creeps around, hops over the fence, and proceeds to tear open every bud on the bush, and leave them lying all over the ground before he makes his escape.

Not one of those buds will become a rose. It doesn’t work that way. If you have an unripe peach in your fruit bowl, and you cut it with your knife, realise it’s green, and leave it in the bowl – it will never ripen. It will go bad.

So why would somebody do that? Tear up rosebuds? Sacrifice all those beautiful flowers? That’s what Epstein was doing; wholesale. He didn’t like flowers. He only liked buds; and the destroying of them. I don’t know what his story was. But he’s not alone.

Whatever activity a middle-aged man gets up to on a teen or child, it isn’t a meeting. It’s an incursion. A child does not have the capacity to meet in that way; it is still a bud; and so the man is not participating in a meeting. He’s simply doing something to somebody. You can’t even call it sex. It’s masturbation with an objectified creature. Therefore we have to consider the possibility that he’s not capable of meeting; and from what I gathered in the book, many men think that that is what sex is. Meeting isn’t in it. What utter poverty, what blindness, what fear! This is narcissism writ large: I am here, I matter, I am big in the universe. I impose myself, and that is how I come alive and exist. Wow.

Meeting is something completely different. Mysterious, multi-levelled, subtle, equal, giving and receiving, expressive, communicative. Do such men fear that? I guess. But the dad in this book seems to think that sex is, and meeting is, and love is, just pornography. Like, “Everybody knows that.” No other possibility.

I was trying to look at the story from the other way around: suppose there were armies of women, in their 30’s-70’s, who habitually importuned 13-year-old boys, 14-year-old boys, and forced them to become emotion slaves. Since the second, emotional chakra is a positive electrical energy pole in the female, as the sex chakra is in the male; if men impose their 1st, sex, and 3rd, power, chakras on young girls, imagine it the other way around: women imposing emotions and heart on boys. These fat, hairy, smelly, moistly emoting, weeping, exploding, complaining, whingeing, dramatic, howling women grabbing barely-teen boys and holding onto them and wailing… telling them all their troubles. And the boys can’t escape. Grown-up troubles, full-on troubles, right out loud!

I’ll betcha that would be an utterly terrifying and traumatic thing for those boys! Just to put it in perspective… because I think male abusers tend not to realise that they’re doing something wrong. It’s just sex, right? How could it be bad? But look at it that other way… because emotionally the male is vulnerable, and an immature male, very vulnerable indeed. Traumatisable.

Another thing I noticed: the original culprit here is the dad. The mom didn’t help, and is culpable for neglect – but the hands-on criminal is the dad. Throughout her short life, Jenna kept trying to make a bridge with him; and he went on showing up as slimeball. It turned out, in fact, that when Epstein ‘hired’ Jenna, he gave the dad a payout. So, the bastard raped his daughter, invited his friend, and then he sold her. Yet never once in the book, when Jenna is going after Epstein and Maxwell, does she even mention the possibility of turning her dad into the police. Instead, she keeps trying to befriend him. What sad thing – or many things – does that tell us about humans?

My last observation: how utterly strange that a barefoot girl from rural Florida is eventually paid huge amounts of money by the Queen of England because the son of that queen has raped the girl. It is a very small world. Things overlap on other things. It’s all connected. And, I hope, that hiding such things as those rapes (apparently the Prince’s in-bed attitude was ‘like getting business done’) will become more and more difficult. Let’s open it all out. Everybody’s psychology. Everybody’s trauma and stories. And let’s let people know that there are very beautiful possibilities for meeting, that go beyond using someone else. There are… and they are worth the terror of exposure, the vulnerability of being Not Big, but just Here.