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Scaachi Koul
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Dec 22, 20256:01 PM
Virginia Roberts Giuffre holding a photo of herself at age 16.
Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Late last week, after urging from both political supporters and detractors and a congressional mandate, Donald Trump’s administration at long last published more of the Epstein files. The documents expand on what we already knew: Jeffrey Epstein, a financier of extravagant wealth with connections to some of the world’s most powerful entrepreneurs and politicians, was abusing untold numbers of teenage girls and young women. Yet Trump’s Department of Justice has heavily redacted the documents, purportedly to protect victims from having their faces published but notably also shielding many adult men named or photographed with underage girls. There are a few new pictures of Epstein with famous men, but none prove that any of them were or are abusers: There’s Bill Clinton in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein, and a faceless girl, or another of Michael Jackson and Diana Ross posing with blacked-out children who turned out to be Ross’ own kids. The pictures are curious but not clarifying.
The rush to understand more about Epstein’s criminal network—and the president’s possible involvement in or knowledge of it—has been breathless and breakneck. The latest documents are disappointing, and the DOJ seems unlikely to give the public a full, honest recounting of what’s in the files, at least not during this particular administration.
But a few weeks ago, a more compelling story of Epstein’s brutality was released. Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, came out seven months after she killed herself in her home in Australia. In the book, a collaboration with journalist Amy Wallace, Giuffre tracks her life, from being sexually and physically abused by her father and his friend, abandoned by her entire family throughout her teen years, and eventually trafficked by multiple men before landing a job at Mar-a-Lago and getting recruited by Maxwell herself. She’s now perhaps best known as the young woman standing in a photograph next to former Prince Andrew, who she said abused her when she was 17 years old. (Andrew has never admitted to abusing Giuffre but eventually, through a settlement, offered his “regrets” to her.)
If you’re seeking clarity of closure around Epstein, or at least a better understanding of what he did to all those girls, Nobody’s Girl is far better source material than anything the courts could offer. Details are sordid and devastating and nuanced: Epstein was proud and defiant about the way he abused girls, who were restricted from eating, forced to have unprotected sex, and eventually abandoned as they spiraled into addiction and self-harm.