The New York Times reviewed Virginia Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir, Nobody’s Girl. They called it “devastating” and extremely sad. Virginia was sexually abused from the age of 7 years old by her father, and then her father “traded” her to a family friend. She was also sexually assaulted by other men before Ghislaine Maxwell even saw her at Mar-a-Lago when she (Virginia) was just 16 years old. The NY Times notes that the most difficult sections of the memoir are the parts where Virginia is being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Here’s the section of the review I wanted to talk about:
By now we’ve all heard of Little St. James Island, nicknamed Little St. Jeff’s, the 72-acre circle of hell in the Caribbean where so many girls were transported and coerced into servicing Epstein’s rich and powerful friends.
Rape, for her, came to seem routine: by older teens; by a construction worker after hitchhiking; by the ringleader of a high-priced escort service, who introduced her to hard drugs; and by an associate of his busted by the F.B.I., which returned her to … her father.
By then Sky Roberts was working in maintenance at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, and got her a job there as a towel attendant. Observing the masseuses in the plush spa, she thought this might be a career path.
The rest is horror story. (“Please don’t stop reading,” Giuffre writes at one point, acknowledging the cumulative effect of her “trauma reel.”) Sex with Marvin Minsky, an M.I.T. scientist 56 years her senior, his face “shriveled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples”; orgies staffed by the model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who — like Epstein — died by suicide in prison; choking, beating and bloodying from a former prime minister, whom she refused to name because “I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here.”
Having been ordered to tuck Epstein, her chief tormentor, into pink satin sheets at night, and shown his snapshots of underage nude girls as if they were etchings, Giuffre still summons the compassion to speculate that he, too, may have been abused as a child.
“Former prime minister” is all anyone has to go on – she didn’t specify which country, and this would have been 2000-01. In the UK, the “former prime ministers” still alive would have been John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Edward Heath… end of list. It could be a former Canadian prime minister. One person on Twitter had a theory that it could be Israel’s former PM Ehud Barak, who was reportedly close to Epstein. Barak is still alive, he’s in his 80s, so Virginia would have wanted to be especially careful not to name someone still alive, right? He was PM of Israel from 1999 through 2001. Is he the guy? Ugh. But as Giuffre’s memoir makes abundantly clear, Epstein’s circle at that time included so many powerful men, so many well-connected men.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
