Virginia Giuffre's book, Nobody's Girl: the most staggering revelations

0:02Hi, it's Rachel Abbott and welcome back to the Standard Podcast. For all the latest news, make sure you head over to standard.co.uk. Before we begin, a quick note. Our first story includes discussions of abuse, sexual violence and suicide, which some listeners may find distressing.

0:25Virginia Giffray's memoir, Nobody's Girl, a memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice, was released in the UK today, Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. Virginia's book gives an account of her two-year ordeal as a sexual victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Jelaine Maxwell. She also describes abuse in childhood. The Standard's writer-at-large, Melanie McDonagh, received a copy ahead of its publication and joins me now. Melanie, to start off, for listeners who may not know her story, who is Virginia Giuffre and what is her memoir Nobody's Girl about? Virginia Roberts Giuffre was a girl from a very ordinary sort of low-middle-class background.

1:10She's American and her story starts off bleak. She was put in a correctional institute and when she got out of there, she fell straight as prey into a chap who was purporting to be running a model agency, but in fact was himself grooming and raping his young victims and was later prosecuted and convicted for sex trafficking young women from the Czech Republic. And so her early life almost seemed to be putting her up for the role of being one of Geoffrey Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's victims, because what's apparent is that they were looking for vulnerable girls, and nobody was more vulnerable than poor Virginia.

1:59Her only real friendship as a young girl was with her horse, Alice, and she loved her younger brother. And other than that, her home life seems to have been bleak. She had very little formal education, and so she didn't really get proper qualifications. She would have liked to have been a veterinary nurse. And when her father got her a job at Mar-a-Lago's, Donald Trump owned, and nothing, I should say at this point, happened to her there. She saw this as a wonderful opportunity, perhaps to train as a monsieur, as a proper, respectable monsieur, somebody who could make people who are stressed feel better about themselves.

2:34And so that was the point at which Ghislaine Maxwell closed in on her, offering her what seemed to be an opportunity to train as a masseuse. And that was, in fact, the first encounter with Jeffrey Epstein. And on that first occasion, she was taken advantage of. And so is the memoir essentially a timeline of events? What she makes clear is that for people like Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, the ideal victim of somebody who can be just used to service them and their friends sexually, is somebody who is already vulnerable, who is looking for somebody who would seem to be a protector. And Virginia Dufresne, poor girl, fell straight into that category because she'd already come, in a sense, to normalise being used sexually by people who should have cared for her.

3:25And so when it came to encountering Maxwell and Epstein, she didn't have the same resources to see this as completely wrong as somebody with a normal upbringing might have had. And that terrible pattern did replicate itself later in her story because she says later in the book that she herself was sent out to recruit other girls for Epstein's stable. They needed to be white, non-smokers, but the crucial thing was in the first place, they should look very young, 12 to 17. And in the second place, they shall be vulnerable and who therefore clung to any prospect of security. And what Epstein did was promise girls who were hoping to better themselves and to find some route in life, the chance of, in Giffray's case, getting an education as a monsieur.

4:14And for other girls, they might want to do modelling or they might want to do filmmaking or whatever. He could say that he would open up all these contacts. But in fact, his primary objective was sexually to take advantage of them. And the most terrifying aspect of the abuse was that it wouldn't have been possible without Maxwell's participation. And that's something that Robert's statement, her deposition in Maxwell's subsequent trial made clear. She made a statement saying, without you, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did to me. And as we go further into the story, it gets more sinister still in that Ghislaine saw herself as a kind of mother figure to this terrible sort of stable of young girls who were there sexually to service Epstein and his friends.

4:57Epstein would also encourage Virginia at times to call him daddy. And there comes a point later in the story when Maxwell and Epstein say to Virginia that they want her to have their baby. but that's not entirely clear whether Virginia would have been the genetic mother. But they wanted to impregnate her with their child and then sign over all her legal rights to the child. The role that Ghislaine Maxwell in particular played is kind of a quasi-mother figure in all this, which makes the whole thing so completely heartbreaking because it is a betrayal not just of innocence but of vulnerability as well.

5:32How does the memoir differ from what we've previously heard about the Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell case? Does it add any new details or perspectives? I think that it substantiates everything that we'd heard previously about Maxwell and Epstein. And she says she saw them as two parts of a wicked whole. That is to say, she couldn't really distinguish between Project Epstein and Project Maxwell. What's clear in this memoir is the brutality to which she was subjected. So the indignity and the shame of being raped by dozens of men is obvious. But what's plain is that during the course of the two years that she spent in that particular household, it was that Epstein was becoming more interested in violent and sadomasochistic sex.

6:21And there was one point at which she described herself as being hogstrapped. There was some frightful contraption with a collar around her neck and her hands and feet tied behind her, where she felt physically threatened. She thought she might die as a sex slave. She was handed over to a man, a politician, she says. She doesn't go into very detail there, but a politician whose one ambition was violently to abuse her, not just to rape her, to subject her to a degree of violence in which she thought she might not survive. He choked her repeatedly, and she almost passed out. It was that degree of sadomasochistic violence, which I think is so startling in this memoir and which I don't think we quite realised from previous accounts of her ordeal.

7:07And what specific claims does Virginia make about her alleged encounters with Prince Andrew? She alleges that they had sex relations on three occasions, one in London after a visit to Trump's nightclub with Maxwell and Epstein, one, I think it was New York, and one on Jeffrey Epstein's island. There it was in company with other young girls who she says were young and most of whom couldn't really speak very good English, which Epstein said was a great advantage. There was no suggestion that Prince Andrew was given any information about her background to suggest that she was effectively the cat's paw of Epstein.

7:52He didn't know enough about her, I imagine, in this allegation. And it's important to assert that Prince Andrew has denied all of this. But even in the description here and the allegations here, there's no suggestion that he knew anything about what her background was and where she'd come from or what her circumstances were. The only thing that she alleges was that Prince Andrew was aware of her age because Maxwell started off the encounter by saying, let's guess Jenna's age. And she says that Prince Sandra guessed correctly that it was 17 because it was close in age to his own daughters. So these allegations aren't to do with violent behaviour, but the allegations are to do with sexual encounters that took place three times.

8:37And these, of course, Prince Sandra has denied. And finally, do we know why the book was released now? Well, it had been kind of some time in the writing. It had taken time because the co-writer, the ghostwriter Amy Wallace, spent a lot of time with her in Australia. And so it wasn't due to be published, I think, until this year. But the posthumous publication, I think, was because the book had been approved by the author before her suicide in April this year. And so I think because Virginia Roberts-Ruffet had been so insistent that she wanted to help other victims, She wanted, I think, to make amends for anything wrong that she had done, but also she wanted to encourage other young women to come forward with their allegations.

9:24And she wanted to bolster victims so that they would feel empowered to give testimony to themselves against their abusers, not just Epstein and Maxwell, but others who might have done so. So I think after her suicide, her ghostwriter felt it was important that the book should be published. It's not entirely clear to me how much has been redacted. Virginia says that she hasn't identified all the men who did have sexual intercourse with her because there were various factors. She was afraid of some of them. Some of them had threatened her with litigation. There was one man in particular who she said was very wealthy and very powerful, and she didn't name him because she was afraid.

10:05Now, this is obviously very unsatisfactory, but it does suggest that there's very many grounds for the investigators in the United States to take the investigations into Lisa Galeen Maxwell's involvement a great deal further, because there are so many people who colluded in the treatment of Epstein's girls that I think that there really is a very strong case for investigators actually to go for it and to try and find exactly what happened in order to bring some of them to justice.

10:43Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two. The aloe aloe is the£3.95 one, and that's just kind of pasta with a bit of chilli and olive oil and so on. All are below£10, even the sort of like fennel sausage one and so on. The Standard's Josh Barry on London's expanding pasta joint, Pustino. But with£3.95 pricing, will the quality be good enough? We'll see you back here in just a moment.

11:16Welcome back. Located on Tottenham Court Road, Italian restaurant Pistino has only been here a year and it's already expanding. Next month they'll open a new venue in Hoburn. Known for its cheap prices, it has an even newer eye-catching sale,£3.95 pasta dishes. But is it worth twirling your fork for? I'm joined by The Standard's food and drink journalist, Josh Barry. Josh, what do we know about Pistino? Who is it from? Pistino is from a new restaurateur who worked for Franco Manka for a long time. About 15 years, I think. So I guess he's kind of new on the scene. He's called Almas Wasif. He kind of worked in operations for Franco Manka and the Real Greek, which are two quite well-known chains owned by Fulham Shaw.

12:06So he's kind of going it alone. And he opened one in Tottenham Court Road last year, and he's about to launch a second. Yeah, and they have pasta dishes going for£3.95. Who are they marketing themselves to? Yeah, so relatively cheap, very much so in this day and age. It's clearly for like commuters and office workers or just kind of maybe families that need a quick bite to eat while out on a trip to a museum or something. The aloe olio is the£3.95 one and that's just kind of pasta with a bit of chilli and olive oil and so on. So that would suit most people. or there's a tomato pasta for£5 and all are below£10, even the sort of like fennel sausage one and so on.

12:50Do they have any competition? I mean, there have been a few of these before, haven't there? Yeah, there are a few. Affordable pasta is huge in London now. There's been a renaissance over the last kind of 20 years, kick-started by places like Padella. I went not so long ago and had a Pomodoro and it was tall, which is I think£9.50 and it's brilliant. It's still absolutely exceptional. The most obvious is Coco de Mama, which is similarly priced, but not quite as cheap, I don't think. The pasta is usually overcooked, and the sauces are sort of like passable. But for a quick sort of cheap lunch, it's kind of fine.

13:25There's Paseo from Stigy Vipal, you know, the guy behind town and motorino. He's got his solo pasta joint, which is a little bit pricier, but still quite cheap. And also Phil Howard, who had two Michelin stars. He's a kind of big name, really huge chef. He ran the square for 17 years, had two stars up until 2020. But he's still got kind of higher end places. But he's opened this place called Notto near Piccadilly, which is a sort of affordable pasta joint. It's a bit elevated, but he's about to open a sort of like more casual takeaway Notto in Liverpool Street. Takeaway pasta pots will cost from£12.50.

14:06So, you know, that's obviously a lot punchier than pastina or whatever, but it's actually like as far as kind of lunches go for city workers, let's say, I'm sure many of them can afford that. And finally, Josh, surely the cost affects the quality of the dish. Well, always. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be the best pasta in the world by any stretch. I mean, cocoa de mama, which I said earlier, is not very good. But if you want a pasta of three night five, like that's cheaper than a pret sandwich. I'm not sure whether the value is sort of like, you know, it's very much a convenience thing. That's what London's all about.

14:38It's certainly a better option, I'd say, than a wrap from a supermarket or whatever, which is just awful.

14:48And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head on over to standard.co.uk. And please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. This show returns tomorrow. We'll see you then.