2025-05-02T23:28:00Z

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Born August 9th, 1983 Died April 25th, 2025 Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein‘s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, has died at the age of 41. In 2019 Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature. READ MORE Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Epstein was found dead in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide. In 2009 Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, sued Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse. Virginia Roberts Giuffre speaking to reporters in New York in 2019. Photograph: Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times In 2015 she was the first of Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to the Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid. “Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2022 book, Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre alleged that Epstein, a multimillionaire financier, and Maxwell, a British socialite, forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but relinquished his royal duties in 2019. In 2021 she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles III of England, contending that he had sexually assaulted her at Maxwell’s home in London and at Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St James in the Virgin Islands. A widely published photograph showed Andrew with his hand around her waist. He said he had no memory of the occasion. Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Photograph: US Department of Justice/PA After Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.” The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim. In interviews and depositions, Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, US president Donald Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida. By her account, she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Maxwell and invited to become Epstein’s travelling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men. Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation in 2015 for calling her a liar; they settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex-trafficking and other counts. The verdict was viewed as the legal reckoning that Epstein had denied the judicial system, and his victims, by taking his life. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Virginia Louise Roberts was born August 9th, 1983, in Sacramento, California, to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was four, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago. She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was seven. She was placed in foster homes, boarded with an aunt in California, fled to the former hippie haven of the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco, lived on the streets when she was 14 and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker who abused her. Compared to living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage several times a day was, Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.” But her mandate went well beyond those duties. She told the BBC in 2019 that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets. In 2002, when she was 19, Giuffre enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married. The couple had three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth, Australia, in 2020. They have since separated. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement by her family. Giuffre wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a collision with a schoolbus that she said was travelling at nearly 70mph. Subsequent media reports said the crash was not serious. In the statement, her family called her “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.” Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She explained why she had originally agreed to work as a masseuse for Epstein and Maxwell and to provide sexual services. “They seemed like nice people,” she said, “so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused. That was the worst thing I could have told them, because now they knew how vulnerable I was.” – The New York Times If you’re affected by this article, contact The Samaritans for free on 116 123, jo@samaritans.ie, or visit samaritans.ie