Virginia Giuffre, who has died by suicide aged 41, spent four years as a teenager in the entourage of the financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein; she later helped to precipitate the Duke of York’s withdrawal from public life when she alleged that she had been forced to have sex with him at the age of 17, a claim that the Duke has always denied.
Virginia Roberts, as she then was, was groomed by Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 16 and “passed around like a platter of fruit” among their acquaintances. By her own account she met Prince Andrew in 2001 and they slept together on three occasions.
A decade later Virginia Giuffre, who had by then escaped Epstein’s clutches and married, outed herself as “Jane Doe 102”, one of dozens of former victims of Epstein pursuing civil proceedings against him.
The press had recently published a photograph of Prince Andrew strolling through Central Park with Epstein, taken in December 2010. Furious that Andrew was still in contact with Epstein, who had been convicted of procuring an underage girl in 2008 and had spent a year in prison, she chose to waive her anonymity, and in March 2011 granted an interview to the Mail on Sunday.
When the newspaper approached Buckingham Palace for comment before publication, Andrew vehemently denied any misconduct – “What? Who? What was the name again? Never heard of her”, he was reported to have spluttered – and initially the most serious allegation to make it to print was that he had fondled one of Virginia’s breasts, although later on she insisted that she had been coerced into sex.
She supported her allegations by supplying what was to become one of the most widely reproduced photographs of its era. Allegedly taken on the night she first met Andrew, it showed him grinning with his arm around Virginia and his hand on her hip, while Ghislaine Maxwell looked on. Both Prince Andrew and Ms Maxwell have always maintained that the photograph was a fake.
There was no shortage of opportunities for the press to reprint the picture as the saga rumbled on, encompassing such extraordinary twists as Epstein’s suicide in prison in 2019, Andrew’s self-immolation during an interview with Newsnight the same year, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s being charged with the sex trafficking of underage girls and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in 2021.
In the same year Virginia Giuffre took out a civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew. The Prince’s lawyers attempted to argue that, far from being an innocent victim, she was a practised manipulator who had herself been an enthusiastic procurer of young girls for Epstein. Among the testimonies they quoted was that of Virginia’s former boyfriend Philip Guderyon: “She was like the head bitch. She’d have like nine or 10 girls she used to bring to him. She never looked like she was being held captive.”
Nevertheless the case ended with Prince Andrew paying an out-of-court settlement reported to amount to £12 million – much of it funded by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in the last months of her life – and in a statement he commended “the bravery of Ms Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others”, although he offered no apology or admission of guilt.
Virginia Giuffre’s experiences continued to affect her profoundly in later life. “I dream about Epstein and Maxwell a lot. Sometimes they’re abusing me,” she told one interviewer. “I always wake up wishing I didn’t have to live so much in the past.”
Although she was delighted that justice was eventually served on Maxwell, whom she regarded as “more evil than Epstein”, she felt little sense of closure. “It’s definitely not over. There are so many more people involved with this. It doesn’t stop with Maxwell.”
The daughter of Sky Roberts and his wife Lynn, Virginia Louise Roberts was born in Sacramento, California, on August 9 1983, and lived for most of her childhood in Palm Beach County, Florida. At the age of seven she was sexually molested by a friend of the family; her parents, beset by guilt, split up.
Aged 11, Virginia ran away and lived on the streets for some years, sometimes sleeping with men in return for food: “I was a paedophile’s dream.” Eventually she was reconciled with her father, who by then was working as a locker room attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach; he helped her secure a summer job in the spa there.
One day she was approached at Mar-a-Lago by “this lady … with this prim and proper accent”: it was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late tycoon Robert Maxwell and a well-known socialite in Britain. She told Virginia that a wealthy friend of hers was looking to hire a personal masseuse.
Virginia agreed to accompany her to Jeffrey Epstein’s waterfront mansion and gave Epstein a massage that developed into a sexual encounter. She was then 16, two years below the age of consent in Florida.
She became one of several girls tasked with giving sexual favours to Epstein’s friends, usually at his “Zorro” ranch in New Mexico or on Little Saint James, his private island in the Caribbean. Among those she slept with, she claimed, were “a well-known businessman (whose pregnant wife was asleep in the next room), a world-renowned scientist, a respected liberal politician and a foreign head of state”.
“Cages and chains come in all different shapes and sizes,” she observed later. “I wasn’t tied to a radiator [but] my shackles were Epstein and Ghislaine’s wealth and the powerful people they knew. Epstein told me he owned the Palm Beach police department. It was all just really scary.”
In 2001 she accompanied Epstein and Ghislaine to London; she alleged that they met Prince Andrew at Tramp, the Mayfair nightclub, and she was told to dance with him. “He is the most hideous dancer I’ve ever seen in my life,” she later declared. “I mean it was horrible, this guy was sweating all over me.” Ghislaine Maxwell then told Virginia that “I had to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey”.
Some of the details of Virginia’s account of that night were called into question, in somewhat unexpected ways. Andrew, who admitted to no recollection of ever meeting her, famously vouchsafed on Newsnight that he suffered from a condition that made it impossible for him to sweat.
Meanwhile Ian Maxwell, Ghislaine’s brother, poured scorn on Virginia’s claim that she and Andrew had indulged in foreplay in a bath at Ghislaine’s house, providing a photo of the bath in question that showed it to be “too small for any sort of sex frolicking”.
Virginia claimed to have had sex with Andrew a second time in New York, and then to have participated with him in an orgy on Little Saint James, claims which Andrew denied. By then she was increasingly fearful of Epstein, who had suggested they have a child together.
In 2002 Epstein sent Virginia on a massage course in Thailand for her 19th birthday. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts trainer; after 10 days, they were married in a Buddhist ceremony. She rang Epstein with the good news: “He said, ‘Have a nice life,’ and hung up on me.”
They lived for some years in New South Wales, but Virginia was forced to revisit her past when the FBI tracked her down and told her they were building a case against Epstein. In 2009 she accepted a settlement of $500,000 from him.
Virginia Giuffre became a serial litigant, suing Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015 for making defamatory statements about her and receiving a reported settlement of millions of dollars. In 2019 she launched another defamation suit against the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, whom she had named as one of the men Epstein forced her to sleep with; he counter-sued and they eventually settled, with Virginia Giuffre stating: “I now recognise I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr Dershowitz.”
Away from the courts, she devoted much of her time to Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), an organisation she founded to support victims of trafficking. She campaigned doggedly for the removal of the statute of limitation on rape cases.
Latterly Virginia Giuffre lived in Australia, in a beachside mansion in a small town up the coast from Perth, where neighbours reported that she kept herself to herself. In March 2025 she announced on social media that she had been given four days to live by doctors after she was injured when the car she was travelling in collided with a school bus.
She was reported to be separated from her husband, with whom she had a daughter and two sons.
Virginia Giuffre, born August 9 1983, death reported April 25 2024
