Virginia Giuffre, a former sufferer of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who mentioned she was “handed round like a platter of fruit” as a youngster to wealthy and highly effective predators, together with Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.
Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, in response to an announcement from the household. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram submit March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a college bus that she mentioned was touring at practically 70 m.p.h.
In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors within the Southern District of New York with intercourse trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage ladies to carry out massages that turned more and more sexual in nature.
Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after paperwork have been launched from Ms. Giuffre’s profitable defamation go well with in opposition to him, Mr. Epstein was discovered hanged in his cell within the Metropolitan Correctional Heart in Decrease Manhattan. His dying, at 66, was dominated a suicide.
In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, recognized then solely as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to hitch his intercourse trafficking ring when she was a minor beneath the guise of turning into an expert masseuse.
In 2015, she was the primary of Mr. Epstein’s victims to surrender her anonymity and go public, promoting her story to The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid.
“Mainly, I used to be coaching to be a prostitute for him and his mates who shared his curiosity in younger ladies,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s guide, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Intercourse Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein” (2022).
“Ghislaine instructed me that I’ve to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she mentioned.
Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a millionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have intercourse with Prince Andrew, often known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, however relinquished his royal duties in 2019.
In 2021 she sued the prince, who’s the youthful brother of King Charles II, for sexually assaulting her at Ms. Maxwell’s dwelling in London and at Mr. Epstein’s properties in Manhattan and Little St. James within the Virgin Islands.
A broadly revealed {photograph} confirmed Prince Andrew along with his hand round her waist; he mentioned he had no reminiscence of the event.
After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the go well with by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in an announcement for talking out and pledged to “exhibit his remorse” for his affiliation with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the struggle in opposition to the evils of intercourse trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”
The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now known as Converse Out, Act, Reclaim.
In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre mentioned she was recruited to the intercourse ring in 2000 whereas working as a locker room attendant in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Seaside, Fla. By her account she was studying a therapeutic massage remedy handbook when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and was invited to turn into Mr. Epstein’s touring masseuse. She mentioned that the pair then groomed her to carry out sexual providers for rich males.
She sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015; they settled on an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell’s trial and conviction in 2022 have been considered as a authorized reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system — and his victims — by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to twenty years in jail.
Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the household moved to Palm Seaside County, the place her father was a upkeep supervisor at Mar-a-Lago.
She mentioned she ran away from dwelling after having been molested by an in depth household buddy since she was 7. She was positioned in foster properties, boarded with an aunt in California, fled to the previous hippie haven of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, lived on the streets when she was 14 and spent six months with a 65-year-old intercourse trafficker who abused her.
In comparison with residing on the streets and incomes $9 an hour for her summer time job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s supply to make $200 a therapeutic massage — a number of occasions a day — was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one which “Virginia had decided for herself she couldn’t refuse.”
However her mandate went nicely past. She instructed the BBC in 2019 that she was “handed round like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s mates and ferried world wide on non-public jets.
In 2002, when she was 19, she enrolled within the Worldwide Coaching Therapeutic massage Faculty in Thailand to turn into an expert masseuse and was assigned to recruit a younger woman for the ring. There, she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts teacher, they usually married.
The couple had three kids and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado earlier than settling in Perth in 2020. They’ve since separated. A whole checklist of survivors was not instantly out there.
Ms. Giuffre instructed The Miami Herald in 2019 that the start of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to talk publicly about her victimization. She additionally defined why she had initially agreed to let Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groom her as a masseuse and to offer sexual providers.
“They appeared like good folks so I trusted them, and I instructed them I’d had a extremely laborious time in my life up till then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, bodily abused,” Ms. Giuffre mentioned. “That was the worst factor I might have instructed them as a result of now they knew how weak I used to be.”