Virginia Lee Roberts Giuffre ( ; ; 9 August 1983 – 25 April 2025) was an American and Australian advocate for survivors of sex trafficking and one of the most prominent accusers of Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre provided detailed allegations to media outlets about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She alleged that Epstein ran a trafficking ring, outsourcing girls for sexual services.
In March 2011, Giuffre first described meeting Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to the Daily Mail, which reported there was "no suggestion" of sexual contact. The same month, Giuffre was interviewed by the FBI, where she alleged that Epstein and Maxwell had trafficked her to men, including Mountbatten-Windsor.
The Guardian cites Giuffre's 2011 FBI interview report. She publicly claimed she was trafficked to Andrew on 3 different occasions in a 2019 BBC interview, shifting public opinion against the prince. Andrew denied the allegations. In 2021, she filed the civil suit Giuffre v. Prince Andrew. The lawsuit was settled in February 2022. Andrew paid Giuffre an undisclosed amount, made a donation to her charity, denied wrongdoing, and settled without admission of liability.
Giuffre pursued criminal and civil actions against Epstein and Maxwell. In 2015, she sued Maxwell for defamation. The case was settled in 2017 for an undisclosed sum. In 2015, Giuffre founded Victims Refuse Silence, a United States-based non-profit organization supporting survivors of abuse, which relaunched as Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) in 2021. In 2014, she claimed Alan Dershowitz had sexually abused her (which he denied). After multiple lawsuits for defamation were filed between Giuffre and Dershowitz, both parties dropped their claims in 2022 and Giuffre said she "may have made a mistake" in identifying Dershowitz.
According to documents released in 2026 as part of the Epstein files, FBI investigators were unable to substantiate Giuffre's allegation that Epstein "lent" girls out to other powerful men, and stated in a 2019 memo that she gave "shifting accounts", and made public statements described as "sensationalized" or "demonstrably inaccurate". Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025. Her memoir, Nobody's Girl, was published posthumously in October 2025.
Early life Virginia Lee Roberts was born in Sacramento, California, on 9 August 1983, to Lynn Trude Cabell and Sky William Roberts. She had an elder half-brother, Daniel Scott Wilson, from her mother's previous marriage, and a younger brother, Sky Rocket Roberts. The family relocated to Loxahatchee, in Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was in grade school. It was reported that she had come from a "troubled home", and from the age of seven was molested by a close family friend.
In her 2025 posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl, Giuffre wrote that, between the ages of 7–11, she was sexually molested by her father, and traded to a family friend who was later convicted of sexually abusing another minor. Her father has denied the claims. Giuffre also suggested that her father may have taken money from Epstein. Giuffre said that she went from being in "an abusive situation, to being a runaway, to living in foster homes". She lived on the streets at age 14, where she says she found only "hunger and pain and [more] abuse".
At some point between age 13 and age 15, Giuffre was abused by a sex trafficker, Ron Eppinger, in Miami. Giuffre lived with Eppinger for approximately six months. Eppinger reportedly ran a front business for international sex trafficking known as the modeling agency "Perfect 10" and was investigated by the FBI. He later pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling for prostitution, interstate travel for prostitution, and money laundering.
Giuffre was sent to Growing Together, a TTI (troubled teen industry) facility in Lake Worth, Florida that was later shut down after an investigation.
In 1998, Giuffre's mother heard from a social worker at her group home that a 14 year old Giuffre had sex with two older teenage males, prompting her to contact the police. Giuffre told police that two acquaintances, Josh (18) and Kevin (17), had sexually assaulted her in a car for 7 hours while she was intoxicated. Both males admitted to having sex with Giuffre, but argued it was consensual and that they were all intoxicated. Josh and Kevin were booked for probable charges of sexual assault. After a 3 month investigation, prosecutors decided not to bring charges, citing "the victim's lack of credibility and no substantial likelihood of success at trial".
She attended Royal Palm Beach High School. In her memoir, Giuffre said that at age 16 she had quit school after completing the ninth grade. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property owned by Donald Trump, and he helped Giuffre obtain a job there in 2000 when she was 16 years old.
Association with Jeffrey Epstein
In mid-2000, Giuffre met Ghislaine Maxwell when working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, while reading a book about massage therapy. Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, approached Giuffre, noted the book that she was reading, inquired about her interest in massage, and offered her a potential job working for Epstein as a traveling masseuse with the assurance that no experience was necessary. When Giuffre arrived at Epstein's Palm Beach home, she says he was lying down, naked, and Maxwell told her how to massage him. "They seemed like nice people 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", Giuffre stated. Giuffre stated that after Maxwell introduced her to Jeffrey Epstein, the two quickly began grooming her to provide sexual services, under the guise that she was to be trained as a professional massage therapist.Between 2000 and 2002, Giuffre was closely associated with Epstein and Maxwell, traveling between Epstein's residences in Palm Beach (at 358 El Brillo Way) and Manhattan (at the Herbert N. Straus House), with additional trips to Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico and private island Little Saint James. In the Miami Heralds investigative journalism series "Perversion of Justice", Giuffre describes her experiences of being trafficked by Epstein to provide massages and sexual services for him and a number of his business associates, over a two-and-a-half-year period. In her interview with the BBC, Giuffre said she was "passed around like a platter of fruit" to Epstein's powerful associates, and taken around the world on private jets.
Of the instance in March 2001 that Giuffre was allegedly trafficked to Prince Andrew, she stated in an interview that it was a "wicked" and "really scary time" in her life, and that she "couldn't comprehend how in the highest level of the government powerful people were allowing this to happen. Not just allowing but participating in it". After visiting a nightclub, Giuffre says Maxwell told her that she "had to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey". In court documents from a civil suit that were released from seal in 2019, Giuffre named several others that she claimed Epstein and Maxwell instructed her to have sex with, including hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, attorney Alan Dershowitz, politician Bill Richardson, MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, lawyer George J. Mitchell, and MC2 modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. The men denied Giuffre's allegations.
In September 2002, at the age of 19, Giuffre flew to Thailand and attended the International Training Massage School in Chiang Mai. Maxwell provided her with tickets to travel to Thailand, and instructed her to meet with a specific Thai girl, and to bring her back to the United States for Epstein. While at the massage school in Thailand in 2002, she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts trainer and married him 10 days later. She contacted Epstein and informed him that she would not be returning as planned. She and her husband started a life and family in Australia, and Giuffre broke off contact with Epstein and Maxwell.
First contact by authorities In March 2005, while Giuffre was still establishing her family in Australia, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein after a 14-year-old girl and her parents reported his behavior. The girl described being recruited by a female classmate from her high school to give Epstein a massage at his mansion in exchange for money, wherein he subsequently molested her. By October 2005, the police had a growing list of girls with similar claims of sexual abuse, statements from Epstein's butlers corroborating their claims, and a search warrant for his Palm Beach property. Police detectives noted that the accusers all described a similar pattern, where Epstein would ask them to massage him and then sexually assault them during the massage. When police searched through Epstein's trash, they found notes with the telephone numbers of the girls on them. One of the girls was called by Epstein's assistant while being questioned by police.
In 2019, Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she received a series of phone calls in rapid succession over three days in 2007. She said the first call was from Maxwell, then one day later came a call from Epstein, both of whom asked if she had spoken to authorities. These were followed by a third call from an FBI agent, who stated that Giuffre had been identified as a victim during the first criminal case against Epstein. Giuffre says she resisted speaking at length to the FBI until she was approached again about the matter in person, this time by the Australian Federal Police, six months after being contacted by phone.
Legal proceedings Jane Doe No. 102 v. Jeffrey Epstein (2009) In May 2009, Giuffre filed a lawsuit as Jane Doe 102 against Epstein and accused Maxwell of recruiting her to a life of being sexually trafficked while she was a minor. The 2009 suit stated that "In addition to being continually exploited to satisfy defendant's [Epstein] every sexual whim, [Ms Giuffre] was also required to be sexually exploited by defendant's adult male peers, including "royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen and or other professional and personal acquaintances." At the time, she named Epstein and Maxwell but did not identify any of the men. Dozens of Epstein's victims had filed civil lawsuits against him and by late 2009, all suits were settled. The settlement amount of the case, entitled Jane Doe No. 102 vs. Jeffrey Epstein, was $500,000 () and other unspecified "valuable consideration".
Decision to speak out publicly Giuffre credits the birth of her daughter on 7 January 2010, as the date she decided to speak out publicly. She also described being motivated to act after seeing a photograph showing Epstein and Andrew walking together in Central Park published in News of the World in late 2010. Vanity Fair stated that Giuffre's story was first publicized in March 2011 by the Mail on Sunday (Daily Mail), the coverage included the photo showing Mountbatten-Windsor with his arm around her at Maxwell's house in Belgravia, London. In 2011, FBI agents again made contact with Giuffre, this time at the US consulate in Sydney, soon after she went public with allegations against Epstein.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor allegations and settlement Giuffre first described meeting the former Prince Andrew to the Daily Mail in March 2011, in an interview for which she was paid $160,000. At the time, Sharon Churcher of the Daily Mail stated there was "no suggestion that there was any sexual contact between Virginia and Prince Andrew, or that Prince Andrew knew that Epstein paid her to have sex with his friends." Following the DailyMail article, Giuffre was interviewed by the FBI. She alleged that Epstein and Maxwell had trafficked her to men including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.