Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

“As I’ve reflected on Virginia’s life since her passing—all she accomplished, and all the suffering she experienced—I haven’t stopped thinking about those last three hearts she sent us. They will stick with me forever. Because despite the unspeakable cruelties she’d endured throughout her life, Virginia opted to keep her heart open and, whenever possible, to lead with love.”

Wallace’s note offers insight into Giuffre as a person, working to humanize someone already known as a public figure. While she devoted her life to speaking out against sexual exploitation and injustice, she was also a daughter, mother, wife, and friend. Wallace suggests that the hearts included in one of Giuffre’s last emails encapsulate Giuffre’s warm, authentic nature.

“But I did not come to Paris to sightsee. I am here to do a job that never gets any easier. I’m here to stand up to those who have hurt me. I am here to reclaim my life.”

Giuffre uses an assertive tone and declarative voice to introduce her memoir. Just as she traveled to Paris to speak out against her abusers, she wrote her memoir with the same goal in mind. Doing so was her way of pursuing justice and of claiming control over her own story—a point the repetition of “I am” (an instance of anaphora) underscores.

“But I hope I have done some good. Seeking to silence me, my powerful enemies have threatened to bankrupt me and even to have me killed. I haven’t stopped talking. When I was a sex slave, I had no say. I have promised myself that I will never have ‘no say’ again.”

Giuffre’s introductory remarks reiterate the theme of the danger and power of survivors speaking out. Giuffre details all of the threats that she has faced throughout her activist work so that the reader understands the risks of her work and her devotion to it. In spite of these dangers, Giuffre found empowerment in claiming her story and spreading awareness for other victims like herself.

“Nobody experiences trauma and emerges unscathed. I certainly haven’t. Even before I met Epstein, I’d experienced awful things that made some observers label me his ‘perfect victim.’ But I was also resilient, or I wouldn’t be here now. […] I still have moments of feeling worthless. Perhaps I always will. But on many days—especially when I’ve been able to help another survivor—I thrive.”

Giuffre incorporates detailed depictions of her personal struggles to represent the theme of Confronting and Healing From Trauma authentically. She speaks about trauma in a candid manner. She does not exempt herself from its mental and emotional repercussions. Her vulnerable tone evokes a confessional mood, which humanizes her in a way geared to earn the reader’s trust.

“Part of me feels a familiar dread. Is it too late to get away? But another, bigger part remembers how life was in rehab and in foster care and, worst of all, on the run. Maybe this is the way all men behave? I am tired. I want to feel nothing. […] ‘Baby’ is now who I am.”

“Part of me feels a familiar dread. Is it too late to get away? But another, bigger part remembers how life was in rehab and in foster care and, worst of all, on the run. Maybe this is the way all men behave? I am tired. I want to feel nothing. […] ‘Baby’ is now who I am.”

“But even if I were all those things, I hadn’t always been. Once, I’d been a daughter, a sister, a beloved little girl. I hated to think about that. But thinking about it was crucial, I see now. Remembering a better time, a time when I had value, may have been the only thing that kept me from giving up.”

Giuffre’s retrospective reflections capture the dichotomous nature of her self-discovery journey. While Giuffre was taught to see herself as tainted and unworthy, she consistently held on to the truer, more beautiful and innocent parts of her nature. Her memoir, as an act of reclamation, mirrors these efforts, frequently centering Giuffre’s attempts to remember her self-worth.

“I felt she was willfully ignoring what was in front of her face. Her outgoing tomboy had become withdrawn. Her straight-A student had begun cutting class. Her Peter Pan wasn’t so confident anymore. That’s what happens when a girl is preyed upon.”

In reflecting on her childhood sexual abuse, Giuffre finds insight into the complications of confronting and healing from trauma. She can retrospectively acknowledge that her altered behaviors in childhood were symptoms of her trauma. In turn, she is better able to understand other victims’ experiences—a point her use of the third person to describe her personal experiences underscores.

“Later, she’d tell me that mirroring is just one superpower that horses have. Here’s another one: As alert as they are to potential danger, horses don’t carry fear with them all the time. Once a mountain lion leaves their pasture, for example, horses will return immediately to grazing peacefully. Even in the wake of trauma, most horses are able to quickly embrace calm.”

Horses played a major part in Giuffre’s work to confront and heal from her trauma. At this juncture of her adolescence, she was working with Ruth Menor at Vinceremos Therapeutic Riding Center. The woman and place helped her learn empathy and derive comfort from her equine companions. Her description of equine nature is a metaphor for her own character and foreshadows her work to confront her trauma.

“Again, I wish I could say that I saw through Maxwell’s polished facade—that, like a horse, I intuited the immense threat she posed to me. Instead, my first impression of Maxwell was the same one I formed when I greeted any well-heeled Mar-a-Lago guest. I’d be lucky, I thought, if I could grow up to be anything like her.”

Giuffre does not shy away from representing herself in an authentic manner. She uses a confessional tone when acknowledging that she did not intuit Ghislaine Maxwell’s true intentions when they first met; she even reveals that she wanted to be like Maxwell. This moment captures Giuffre’s innocence and naivety—both of which Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein would exploit.

“Yes, I was sexually abused. […] But the worst things Epstein and Maxwell did to me weren’t physical, but psychological. From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself.”

Giuffre uses a bold and assertive tone to explore the effects of the abuse that she experienced. She includes graphic details of her suffering on the page, but this moment reveals that this more overt exploitation was nothing in comparison to Epstein and Maxwell’s invisible impact on her psyche. The passage contributes to the memoir’s depiction of confronting and healing from trauma as a complex and protracted process.

“My perpetual need to fill our home with new, fresh things is driven by a feeling I can’t shake: Even after all this time, I remember how dirty I once felt. I will do anything to make my world feel clean.”

Giuffre incorporates present-tense anecdotes from her personal life to temper the graphic depictions of her abuse. While such narrative sequences offer a reprieve, they also convey Giuffre’s lifelong work to understand her own psyche. She recognizes that her habits and impulses as a grown woman are still entangled with the abuse she experienced in her childhood and adolescence.

“My approximately seventeen years on the planet had taught me that some grown men forced children to have sex with them and suffered no repercussions. So the idea of Epstein and Eppinger socializing made perfect sense. It was simply the way of things. I had no choice, I believed, but to accept that and make the best of it—for Skydy’s sake, if not my own.”

This reflective passage furthers the memoir’s theme of institutional complicity in abuse. Giuffre learned that men like Epstein and Eppinger actively enabled each other and silenced girls like herself, revealing a broader pattern of misogynistic injustices.

“I need a breather. I bet you do too. So I now interrupt our grim chronology to take you to a place that Robbie and the kids and I have gone many times when we needed a fun family outing: Fremantle Prison.”

Giuffre uses authorial intrusion and direct address to offer a reprieve from the “grim chronology” of her life. This enacts Giuffre’s difficult work of confronting and healing from trauma while encouraging readers to identify with her. At the same time, the reveal of what family “fun” entails—emphasized by the sentence structure—underscores the lasting impact trauma has had on Giuffre’s life. The reference to prison also creates an organic throughway back into her account of her time with Epstein and Maxwell, which she likens to imprisonment.

“I got up and danced because I could see Epstein wanted me to, and I didn’t want to invite his wrath by disobeying him. But inside, I was seething. Day and night, my every waking moment was circumscribed by his wants and needs. I was caught in the trap of familiar diminishment. But still, something about Epstein’s hold on me kept me docile and acquiescent.”

Giuffre’s internal monologue during this scene conveys the contradictory nature of her response to Epstein. She often found herself doing what Epstein wanted because she feared “his wrath”: She was “seething” on the inside but “docile” on the outside. The conflict between her demeanor and mood conveys how psychologically entrapped she felt while foreshadowing her subsequent decision to escape.

“But it wasn’t long before my need to hear Tony’s voice waned. […] For the first time in forever, I felt free to get to know interesting new people my own age, without being expected to drop everything if Epstein called (or, worse, to recruit for Epstein’s use whatever friends I managed to make). After living without autonomy for so long, being in charge of myself felt liberating.”

Giuffre’s trip to Thailand offered her a route to freedom. This passage has a more hopeful tone, as Giuffre is physically out of Epstein and Maxwell’s reach and discovering the world on her own for the first time. This moment conveys Giuffre’s longstanding desperation for autonomy and her willingness to risk her life to feel happy and free.

“At first glance, Robbie and I were complete opposites […] But we fit together. I felt like a different Jenna when I was with Robbie. I’d never met anyone like him. When we made love for the first time, he asked me something no other person had ever asked: what I did and didn’t like in bed.”

Giuffre characterizes her relationship with Robbie as transformative. She not only fell in love for the first time but also learned what it meant to be an equal, autonomous participant in an intimate relationship. Robbie treated her like she was a human and like she mattered—basic elements of a healthy relationship that Giuffre had never experienced before. Their connection afforded Giuffre a new way of seeing herself and a taste of a new life.

“I did feel loved, most of the time. But then my past would intervene. I didn’t want to think about the Billionaires, the Prime Minister, and all the others. But sometimes during sex, a contorted face would pop into my head, and I’d remember.”

Giuffre’s reflections on the early days of her marriage with Robbie reiterate the memoir’s theme of confronting and healing from trauma. While she felt loved by Robbie, her traumatic memories often overshadowed their life together. Giuffre includes vulnerable and intimate references to her marital sex life to convey how deep-seated her PTSD was. Abuse not only robbed her of her innocence but also complicated her ability to enjoy sex with her partner.

“We were also told that extracting money from him was the only way to punish him. […] But here’s the real reason I’m angry at those who judge victims who settle: all that legalese in our lawsuits about pain and suffering and mental anguish—those things are real. And getting treatment for them costs money.”

Giuffre addresses cultural stigmas around monetary settlements in sexual abuse cases. Where some contend that survivors should not accept payments from their abusers (or even cite such settlements as evidence that they are lying), Giuffre argues that this money is essential to reclaiming one’s autonomy, health, and life. She uses an assertive tone, which conveys her determination to debunk this disparaging notion about survivors.

“On the best days, I could picture myself standing shoulder to shoulder alongside these brave women. While I still had moments of weakness, more and more I was feeling strong. It was time to fight, and for the first time in my life, I felt ready.”

Giuffre’s reflections on her work with Sigrid McCawley and Judith Lightfoot reiterate the memoir’s exploration of the danger and power of survivors speaking out. For years, Giuffre shied away from publicizing her story and speaking out against her abusers. However, with the help of other women, she found the strength and courage to fight for justice and to reclaim control of her narrative and life.

“Please don’t hear this as a plea for sympathy. No one ever promised me that challenging my abusers would be easy. I had chosen to take these vile people on, and I’d always known that would mean an uphill fight.”

Giuffre again uses authorial intrusion and direct address to appeal to her reader. She asserts that she is not pleading “for sympathy” because she is aware of stigmas around survivors telling their stories of sexual abuse. The passage explicitly touches on the danger and power of survivors speaking out; from the start of her activist work, Giuffre knew that coming forward “would mean an uphill fight,” but she also recognized the benefits of doing so.

“More and more, I began to make myself available to reporters who reached out. Maybe if I spoke more about what all of us had been through, I thought, I could help increase awareness and prevent other young girls and women being abused.”

Giuffre’s reflective and honest tone enacts her authenticity and humanity: She is inviting the reader into her consciousness and sharing her internal monologue on the page. The moment reiterates how speaking out against misogyny can promote social reform and empower other women and survivors. This frames Giuffre’s account not as a sensationalistic tale of abuse, but rather as a work of social activism.

“‘When someone comes home from fighting a war, they heal, they get therapy, they put distance between what happened to them in combat and their present-day lives,’ he said. ‘But every time you relive what happened to you, it’s as if you were still on the battlefield. How are you supposed to get better if you never come home from the war?’”

This intimate scene of dialogue between Robbie and Giuffre reiterates the theme of the danger and power of survivors speaking out. While Giuffre’s work was essential to fighting injustice and promoting awareness around sexual abuse, it also compelled Giuffre to relive her trauma ad nauseam. In imploring her to take care of herself, Robbie challenged Giuffre to remember her self-worth and to balance activism with self-care.

“As I turned thirty-eight, I realized that I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first. I was nineteen when I met Robbie and set off to make a new life with him. I’d now lived almost precisely nineteen more years, and I was still fighting for justice. I’d come a long way, but I had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.”

Giuffre assumes a reflective stance and tone as she discusses her 38th birthday. As a moment of transition, her birthday compelled her to consider all that she had undergone and survived. The passage reiterates the challenges of confronting and healing from trauma. Giuffre acknowledges all of the work she had accomplished but reveals how defeated and frustrated she still felt. The passage gestures toward Giuffre’s lifelong struggle with depression, suggesting how her experiences impacted her mental health.