Book Review: Nobody’s Girl

Book review: Nobody's Girl, A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

It was the book I just HAD to read. So why, I ask myself, have I struggled to write this review?

Firstly, this feels personal. Ahead of Epstein’s non-trial, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and other campaigners like Maria Farmer were loud on what was Twitter before it became X, the cesspool it often seems today. We all campaigned shoulder to shoulder, perhaps not working together, but aware of each other, supporting each other. Amplifying those calls for change and for justice for the women and girls trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell. And other groomed and trafficked victims.

When Virginia died it felt like I’d lost a friend, a bigger, bolder campaigner than I’ll ever be, and I mourned her loss, because she deserved better. We all do.

So I had her book lined up to read on its day of issue. Pre-ordered. And I was going to do her justice and read and review it quickly.

But I’ve not been able to write it up and couldn’t work out why.

Here’s the thing. The new things I learned from the book were about her early abuse at the hands of her father and his friend. How that started a chain reaction that lead her straight to the lair. How as a teenage runaway Ronald Eppinger trafficked Virginia before she even got as far Epstein. (Eppinger is fearsomely difficult to find information about online.)

Part of me wants to laugh tauntingly in Epstein’s face. ‘Ha, ha, big boy – you’re not clever or unique, someone else got there first’. Part of me would love to confront Maxwell with the fact that she too was far from clever or unique. Those chances will never come, and in any case, it wouldn’t change things. It’s petty.

But the feeling is borne of frustration. These people are not touchable on most human levels, only their egos matter to them. The girl speaking through the woman that Virginia became, the woman who wrote this book, would still have had to endure what she did.

This is Virginia laid bare. She’s painfully honest. She did things she regrets. She developed her own code around recruiting girls herself for Epstein. About how this really was survival, protection for those she loved.

With every page there is fear. Regret. Pain. Longing. And a need to be seen and understood.

The book is her reckoning. Having read most of the victims’ depositions after the Epstein trial that never happened, not many names were news to me.  No much changes except, of course, that in its production facts were checked, statements worked and reworked, and Virginia’s brutal honesty, her side of the story in her own words, finally gets heard. I hoped she would be believed. There si so much to back her up.

If you have never read the testimonies of the Epstein victims, this book is a must read, not just because of the topicality, but because there are other people’s histories bound up in it.

The famous people who participated. The not so famous ones. The people who knew or suspected but did nothing, either through fear or self-doubt.

None of the names bandied came as any surprise. Which brings me to Prince Andrew (as he was then).

He was there. It wasn’t just Virginia he abused. He wasn’t the book’s central character, just the one the media have picked up on. The Royal Family can strip him of everything they want to save their own reputational hides, but only full co-operation with the FBI/justice system is going to hold any kind of value. By all accounts he’s an unpleasant man, but there are lots of those in the World.  At least others who were in Epstein’s  aura, like Bill Gates, have had the decency to express regret at that association. There has been no such apology from Andrew.

But it’s all a digression. Whilst the World points at him, Virginia’s story is the one of her trafficking, the trafficking of women and young girls who have been overlooked. It’s not about one obnoxious man.

I wanted a happy ending that knew she wasn’t going to get before ever picking up the book. But I am haunted by what’s not there. She told the World something was going to happen. That if she was found dead it wasn’t suicide. I am left with a blankness about those last few days of her life.

The books pages speak of a great love for her husband, yet swirling around in my mind are the stories that circulated in her final days of domestic abuse.

I want my heroes to have goodness stamped through them like a stick of rock. But Virginia’s account is open, raw, acknowledging of her very human struggles.

I feel frustrated as I listen to how hard it is for her to have been seen, to get justice. Yet even now people who haven’t even bothered to inform themselves, let alone read her book, are calling her out as money grabbing, a liar, a whore. They have no idea how hard it  is to speak up.

I slowly come to the realisation that I have heard this story before. A million times. Girl gets caught up by predator. Girl gets caught up again by a different predator. Girl becomes complicit in her own down fall, manipulated into doing things, but then complicit in her own fate. And then shamed and discredited. Denied justice. Rinse and repeat.

(The same happens to boys/men. It’s a non-exclusive club.)

Part of my inability to write up what I’ve read stemmed from frustration that things should never have ended this way.

Virginia and the other women who were groomed into Maxwell and Epstein’s orbit deserve to be heard. But the corridors of power are not confined to a building. Tentacles reach over this story, wrap it up, menace in the background, chew it up – even in death there were people Virginia could not name for fear of the reprisals.

So much of her story is compromise. Acceptance of a flawed system that allowed Epstein’s sweetheart deal with Acosta, acceptance of a situation that stopped her turning her life around. Acceptance that Andrew’s money through a civil suit was the only ‘justice’ she would see.

So much of her book is about living in fear.

The book itself? It’s today’s news until it’s yesterday’s news and those who count have moved on to the next new and shiny outrage. Those involved are pointing in other directions to distract attention. They are still out there. They are still too powerful for even 100 women’s voices to reach. It is hard to speak truth to power, and justice has not, and will not be done.

This woman laid her life bare to explain to you what happened to her. How it happened. Internationally. Why it could happen.  You owe it to yourself to pick up her book and read it.

Until you have, you have no place commenting on her, her life, or Andrew’s ‘innocence until proven guilty’  (or anyone else’s for that matter). 

So there it is. The reason I was finding it so hard to write this review. Because hidden in the pages of this book is a pattern I hate. That frustrates hell out of me. It’s there for you in black and white, but nothing has changed. The threats. The manipulation. The coercion. The disbelief. The discrediting. The lack of justice. The harm to relationships. And yes, the suicides. In this case the story is literally littered with bodies.

‘My Virginia’ is dead. This brave, gobby, flawed, human was eventually, like so many others who have dared, ultimately beaten by it all. Screaming loudly into an apathetic World that really doesn’t seem to care.

Prove me wrong, I dare you. Read the book. Join us to stop this. Please.

Nobody's Girl, A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre