Virginia Louise Giuffre  was an American-Australian accuser of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and a campaigner who offered support to survivors of sex trafficking. Giuffre created Victims Refuse Silence, a non-profit organisation in the United States, in 2015, which was relaunched under the name Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) in November 2021. She gave a detailed account to many American and British reporters about her experiences of being trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Giuffre pursued criminal and civil actions against Epstein and Maxwell, and appealed directly to the public for justice and awareness.

 She sued Maxwell for defamation in 2015, and the case was settled in Giuffre's favor for an undisclosed sum in 2017

 On July 2, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the unsealing of documents from the earlier civil suit by Giuffre against Maxwell.

 The first batch of documents from Giuffre's suit were released to the public on August 9, 2019, further implicating Epstein, Maxwell, and a number of their associates. The following day, Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell.

In an October 2019 interview for BBC's Panorama, aired on December 2, Giuffre described her experiences of being sex trafficked by Epstein to Britain's Prince Andrew, which helped shift public opinion against the prince.

 She subsequently sued the prince in civil court in New York. The suit was settled in February 2022 with Prince Andrew paying an undisclosed amount to Giuffre and making a substantial donation to her charity.

Early life

Virginia Giuffre was born Virginia Louise Roberts in Sacramento, California, on August 9, 1983, to parents Sky and Lynn Roberts.

 The family relocated to Loxahatchee in Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was four years old. Giuffre had a younger brother, Sky. It was reported that she had come from a "troubled home" and, from the age of seven, was molested by a close family friend. "I was just so mentally scarred already at such a young age, and I ran away from that", she said on Panorama in 2019.

 Giuffre told the Miami Herald 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". Later she was abused by a 65-year-old sex trafficker, Ron Eppinger, in Miami. Giuffre lived with Eppinger for approximately 6 months. Eppinger reportedly ran a front business for international sex trafficking known as the modeling agency "Perfect 10".

 He was raided by the FBI and later pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling for prostitution, interstate travel for prostitution, and money laundering.

At the age of 14, Giuffre reunited with her father and returned to live with him. Her father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property owned by Donald Trump, and also helped Giuffre obtain a job there.

Association with Epstein (2000–2002)

In mid-2000, Giuffre met Ghislaine Maxwell when working as a spa attendant at Donald Trump's private Mar-a-Lago club while reading a book about massage therapy. Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of the late 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 naked lying down 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 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 Herald's 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 round 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 claims Epstein and Maxwell instructed her to have sex with, including hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, attorney Alan Dershowitz, politician Bill Richardson, the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, lawyer George J. Mitchell, and MC2 modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. Many of 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 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 the two married quickly thereafter.

 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.

 For five years, Giuffre and her husband lived a quiet life in Australia with their young children.

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.

Giuffre relayed to the Miami Herald that she received a series of phone calls in rapid succession over three days in 2007. 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, 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. 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.

Photos, records and witnesses confirm large parts of Giuffre's statements about her time with Epstein.

On March 31, 2025, Giuffre claimed that her car collided with a bus traveling at 70 mph (110 km/h), resulting in her going into renal failure. In an Instagram post that day, Giuffre said she had been given four days to live.

 The Western Australia police later announced that they had records of a "minor crash" between a bus and a car on March 24, but that no injuries had been reported as a result. Her family later said in a statement that a police report had been filed following the accident, and Giuffre, who was "banged up and bruised", was subsequently taken to hospital as her condition deteriorated.

 At the same time, Giuffre was accused of breaching a family violence restraining order taken out by her estranged husband, with a court hearing set for April 9.

 She later denied violating any such order and added that she would defend herself "against his malicious claim".

According to her family, Giuffre died by suicide at her home in Neergabby, Western Australia, on April 25.

 A 2019 tweet of hers resurfaced upon her death, where she stated that she "in no way, shape or form [was] suicidal".

 As a result, some people questioned the fact she commited suicide and speculated that she had been killed due to the Epstein accusations