FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
She handed her “little yellow Kodak camera” to her boss and he took that photograph. The one with Prince Andrew, Duke of York, smiling, his arm wrapped around her tiny, teenage waist. The one with society gal, Ghislaine Maxwell, tanned and relaxed, beaming in the background. The one with her, Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, at the centre of it all. And the Floridian teenage “sex slave” turned Australian mum has been smack-bang in the middle of one of the biggest sex-trafficking scandals to hit the globe ever since releasing that photograph 11 years ago.
Something beastly lurked behind those smiles, says Giuffre, now 38. Moments after the photo was taken in March 2001, the then 17-year-old did what her boss and Maxwell expected of her, what she had been trained to do. She escorted the third child of Queen Elizabeth into a bathroom, took her clothes off, then his, and after foreplay in the bath, had sex with him.
Prince Andrew, 61, denies that, claims to have no memory of meeting her and has suggested the photograph was faked. Last week, the Prince requested a jury trial in a civil claim brought by Giuffre, elevating the prospect of the world seeing the royal in a US court. She alleges he “committed sexual assault and battery” against her and is seeking punitive damages for the “physical and psychological injuries” caused after three alleged liaisons with him. It’s alleged he knew she was trafficked.
Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, is behind bars. On December 29 last year, the daughter of onetime media mogul, the late Robert Maxwell, was convicted in the US federal court on five sextrafficking-related counts. She is set to receive her sentence in June but has requested a retrial.
The man behind the camera? That was Jeffrey Epstein, the former hedge fund manager and billionaire who, after already striking a controversial sentencing deal in 2008 after pleading guilty to procuring a child for prostitution, was arrested on July 6, 2019, on sex-trafficking charges. A month later, the 66-year-old was found dead in his cell, the cause of death recorded as suicide.
As the years of lies and manipulation caught up with Epstein and Maxwell in the US, as Prince Andrew limps along in the UK as a royal in disgrace, Virginia Giuffre has been living, for the most part, in Australia; first Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, then Cairns, and now Perth. Her two years of being passed around by Epstein and Maxwell to their high-society friends like a trinket ended in late 2002, after a whirlwind romance in Thailand with Australian Robert Giuffre.
She followed him home and Australia, wrote
Giuffre in an unpublished, semi-fictionalised memoir titled The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, became her haven. She put her jetsetting, drug and orgy-filled life behind her and started again.
For more than eight years, while living in Sydney and then the NSW hamlet of Glenning Valley, she hid her past from all but Robert. She worked for about a year at recruitment firm ET Australia on the NSW Central Coast before becoming a mum to Christian in 2006, then another boy, then a daughter in 2010. Her old world was behind her.
But after Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008 and Giuffre being advised by the US Attorney’s Office that she’d been identified as a potential victim, she began legal action anonymously.
Then, after photographs of Epstein and Prince Andrew together in New York’s Central Park emerged in 2010, Giuffre spoke out about Epstein. Since March 2011, when Virginia Giuffre’s name and that photograph with Prince Andrew was printed, the one-time runaway has become the loudest voice among scores of women who have raised the lid on the murky, case of Epstein and the powerful and rich.
THE MEN I HAD ENCOUNTERED IN MY SHORT EXPERIENCE … CONVINCING ME THERE WAS NO RUNNING AWAY FROM THE SICK WORLD I LIVED IN
She called herself Jenna and she was a runaway.
It started when she was about 10, making a bolt from the Loxahatchee, Florida, home of her odd-jobbing cowboy father Sky Roberts and bank worker mother Lynn. She’d wander the
streets and shores of Palm Beach.
Her parents tried a new tack, sending 11-year-old Giuffre to Salinas, California, to live with Sky’s sister, Carol Roberts Kess, a devout Mormon. She ran away from there, too, and was returned home a year later. The escapes continued, and she started smoking marijuana. Her parents sent her to Growing Together, a drug rehabilitation centre that housed wayward kids in foster care at night. It only deepened Giuffre’s distrust of her “messed up” parents.
What they didn’t know, what Giuffre didn’t tell them, was the reason behind her rebellion. Giuffre says she was sexually abused by a close family friend at a very young age.
“He touched me places I shouldn’t be touched,” she told lawyers in a Maxwell-related legal proceeding. “He sexually abused me.” She didn’t tell her parents until years later. “It took me a long time to forgive my parents for sending me away. I didn’t feel like anybody understood me.”
Growing Together couldn’t hold her, either. Giuffre’s life spiralled way out of control when a 65-year-old man approached the young waif on the streets of Miami. He was Ron Eppinger, the owner of a modelling agency called Perfect 10. He offered to look after her.
In her memoir, Giuffre says he acted fatherly, took her shopping, then to his apartment overlooking the island of Key Biscayne. It was stunning and filled with beautiful girls who welcomed her with girly excitement. It made her feel like part of a sorority, “like I actually belonged somewhere for once”.
Later that night, Eppinger handed her a couple of pills and sexually assaulted her. She was about 14.
She stayed. “If all these girls seem happy enough, why couldn’t I try to be, it was this or the streets for me,” she wrote. The pills kept coming, including the “hillbilly heroin” Oxycontin, and she became Eppinger’s plaything; he’d watch her and the girls in orgies before having sex with her.
Then he pimped her out to rich pedophiles until the FBI burst through the door one day.
Eppinger was convicted of running a sex trafficking ring of mostly Eastern European women. He died in jail.
Giuffre’s father came to pick her up from the Broward County police station.
But he didn’t take her home. Her mother didn’t want her back. Giuffre was returned to Growing Together, her younger brother Sky telling her he needed time to convince Lynn to let her come home. She escaped again and phoned her dad. “I said, ‘This is your final chance’. And they came and picked me up and they let me live there,” she told lawyers.
In April 2000, Giuffre’s father got a job as a maintenance worker at Mar-a-lago, the resort and spa for rich Floridians centred on a 126room, opulent mansion owned by Donald Trump, the yet-to-be US president. Roberts asked the spa manager if there was any work for his daughter. Giuffre, who had re-enrolled in school, started as a locker-room attendant that year and had dreams of becoming a masseuse.
On a break one day, Giuffre was sitting outside the spa in her uniform reading a book about massage.
Her reading was interrupted by an elegantlooking woman with a British accent who started chatting about massage. It was Ghislaine Maxwell. She told Giuffre she knew a rich man who was looking for a masseuse to tour the world with him. Giuffre told Maxwell she wasn’t trained but Maxwell said the man could organise that, suggesting Giuffre come to his place that afternoon for a trial. Maxwell gave her a number to call.
Excited, the 16-year-old Giuffre ran to find her father at the tennis courts. Could she go? He agreed, and Giuffre phoned Maxwell, who gave her the address: 358 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach. The pink mansion of Jeffrey Epstein.
Watching Giuffre now, in interviews and on
the steps of New York’s Federal Court, an almost matronly figure calmly and determinedly calling on Prince Andrew to come clean, it’s hard to see the rudderless girl she was. But that afternoon in 2000, she knocked on the door of Epstein’s mansion, followed Maxwell through the luxurious home, up a staircase and into another life.
Epstein was on a green massage table, lying face down, completely naked. The trap was set.
They chatted as Maxwell showed Giuffre how to massage Epstein, the power duo wanting to know about the girl they called Jenna. She babbled, telling them of her troubled life. It wasn’t long before Maxwell – Epstein’s occasional lover, employee and sexual “fixer” with a knack for sniffing out susceptible girls – removed Giuffre’s top. The trio had sex. Giuffre, under Florida’s age of consent, was paid $200 and asked to return the next day.
Why did she?
There were promises of money, a life of luxury, of travel. Epstein had one of New York’s biggest residences in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a private island in the Caribbean, a ranch at Santa Fe. He had a private jet. He could be charming. And he promised to get her accredited as a masseuse.
Once in the web, her lawyers argue, the power imbalance between a vulnerable girl and an influential man in his late 40s kept her in “invisible chains”.
Over ensuing months, Giuffre encountered many young girls at the Florida mansion and his other properties, some of whom she was expected to have sex with as Epstein watched. His sexual appetite was insatiable and Maxwell groomed Giuffre to do as she did: approach young girls and lure them back for Epstein.
And Giuffre did. Some of them were her friends.
Giuffre was then “lent out” to other highpowered people. One of them, she alleges, was Prince Andrew. The first occasion, when the photograph was taken, is alleged to have been in mid-march 2001 at Maxwell’s townhouse in Belgravia, London. Giuffre, Epstein and Maxwell flew there in Epstein’s private jet, via Paris, Spain and Tangiers. Epstein organised Giuffre’s passport.
The next time was in April at Epstein’s New York mansion, where she alleges Prince Andrew used a puppet of himself from the satirical TV show Spitting Image to grope Giuffre’s breasts, while fondling another girl. That girl, Johanna Sjoberg, has given a similar account. Giuffre claims she and Prince Andrew later went to Epstein’s massage room for sex.
The last encounter was allegedly after flying on what was dubbed the “Lolita Express” to Epstein’s Caribbean island of Little St James which he called Little St Jeff’s. Others called it “Pedophile Island” and “Island of Sin”, a place widely known to hold orgies for rich men with under-age girls.
If she was not needed by Epstein, Giuffre had her own digs; first a flat with Austrich and then a Royal Palm Beach apartment, paid for by Epstein. That side of her life was chaotic, too. In early 2001, she dumped Austrich for Tony Figueroa, an old boyfriend and drug user on probation for drug possession.
Things got ugly when Austrich arrived at the flat he’d shared with Giuffre to collect some belongings and check on their pets – a dog, six cats, ferrets, rabbits, a gerbil and mice. Figueroa punched Austrich in the face.
She spied the handsome stranger
shadowboxing with a friend and “couldn’t take my eyes off him”. Ten days later, she was wearing a white halterneck dress and flowers in her hair as she married Robert Giuffre, an Australian of Sicilian descent, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They’d met at a Muay Thai tournament in the mountainous city in September 2002; he was there to compete and she was doing a Thai massage course. The eight-week course was a 19th birthday gift from Epstein to Giuffre, with flights and accommodation included. She had another job: to meet with a girl whose name Epstein gave her and check if she suited his tastes.
Giuffre dreaded her return, she says, because Epstein and Maxwell had put a chilling proposition to her before she left. Epstein wanted Giuffre to have his baby, which she could care for – but the child would be legally his. Robert Giuffre offered her an escape and from Thailand, she phoned Epstein. She’d fallen in love, she told him. She was not coming back. He said, “Have a good life”, and hung up.
Giuffre says that was the last contact she had with Epstein until 2008, when he was facing his first child sex charges. Miami police had begun investigations in 2005 after the parents of a 14-year-old Floridian girl made a complaint that Epstein had sexually abused her. The investigation, pushed along by a dogged local reporter, led to dozens more girls being identified.
Giuffre received phone calls from Epstein and Maxwell, asking what she knew about the case. Court documents say Giuffre was “terrified by (Epstein’s) demonstrated ability to track her down on her changed cell phone number halfway across the world”. She told him she’d stay quiet, which she did, until contacted as a potential victim by the US Attorney’s office and advised of her rights.
Giuffre says becoming a mother fuelled her resolve to stand up and fight against sex trafficking.
Giuffre told lawyers during a deposition that she had only told her parents that her life with Epstein was not that of a travelling masseuse after having children. “I get along with my parents now,” she said.
Giuffre’s long-term residency in Australia apart from a two-year period in the US was one of the legal points Prince Andrew’s lawyers used to try to get her civil case against him dismissed, arguing she was not a US citizen. That failed, as did others, and now the world waits to see the final chapter.
Prince Andrew is selling his $32m chalet in
the Swiss Alps to pay for the legal defence of the civil suit taken out by Giuffre. Or, an out-ofcourt settlement, which remains a possibility.
His lawyers last year famously argued Giuffre was seeking “another payday at his expense” by peddling false stories about him. Many believe that to be true.
Giuffre has received pay-outs. In 2009, she banked $US500,000 ($700,000) from Epstein, whose estate revealed last year it had paid more than $US121M to about 135 victims.
She received $US140,000 for the photograph with Prince Andrew in 2011, plus $US20,000 for the stories and $US4487 for photo syndication. And in 2017, there was an undisclosed pay-out from Ghislaine Maxwell in settlement of a defamation case.
For all those who doubt Giuffre and what drives her, she has thousands of supporters who regard her as a hero, a beacon for those who have been sex trafficked. In November last year, she launched SOAR – Speak Out, Act, Reclaim – a rebadging of her earlier advocacy group Victims Refuse Silence. Its charter is to raise awareness of the dark world of sex trafficking and to tackle policies and procedures that prevent survivors speaking out.
It took Giuffre a long time to find her voice. If not for the parents of that 14-year-old girl in Florida and the ensuing investigations, Giuffre might still be just another mum living in Australia. Prince Andrew might still have his titles and dignity. But Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the girl they called Jenna, is here, a survivor, on the world stage, and there is no going back.