Virginia Giuffre

Virginia Giuffre (born August 9, 1983, Sacramento, California, U.S.—died April 25, 2025, Neergabby, Western Australia) was an advocate for victims of sex trafficking and one of the principal accusers of Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre said she worked as part of Epstein’s operation and was forced to sleep with him and other powerful men starting when she was 16. She later moved to Australia, sued Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and started an organization devoted to helping other victims. She died by suicide in April 2025.

Early life

Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) was born Virginia Roberts in Sacramento, California, in 1983; she often used the nickname Jenna. Her parents, Lynn Trude Cabell and Sky William Roberts, had each been married before, and Giuffre had two stepbrothers. Roberts worked as a maintenance man at apartment and condo buildings; Giuffre described him to the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown as a “jack of all trades.” When Giuffre was four, her family moved to Loxahatchee, Florida, where they lived on a 2-acre (1-hectare) property surrounded by open land. The family kept horses, chickens, and goats, and Giuffre often went horseback riding.

When Giuffre was seven, someone she described as a family friend started sexually abusing her. “It turned my entire life around,” she told Brown. “I went from being a very happy child to a completely different person.” She started running away from home, spending nights at friends’ houses. The rest of her childhood years were rough and sometimes violent. She lived with an aunt in California and then in foster homes back in Florida, where she attended a school for troubled teens. She also said her father beat her severely at least once. In 1998, when she was 14, she ran away to Miami, where she was recruited into a sex-trafficking operation run by a man named Ron Eppinger—but Eppinger was soon arrested by the FBI, and Giuffre went back to live with her parents.

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Mar-a-Lago, Maxwell, Epstein, and Prince Andrew

Giuffre’s father was working at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s resort, and in summer 2000 her father helped her get a job there as a spa attendant. Maxwell approached her one day outside a locker room and recruited her to come work for Epstein, ostensibly as a massage therapist. (In 2025 Trump said Epstein “stole” Giuffre from his resort, provoking outrage from her family.) Epstein offered her $200 a massage. However, the first time Maxwell instructed her on how to give Epstein massages, Giuffre said, Maxwell undressed her, and the three of them had sex (a story Maxwell has denied). It became clear to Giuffre that sex was a requirement of the job.

The Epstein files in photos: The people and places that define a scandal

According to Giuffre, in 2001, when she was 17, Maxwell and Epstein took her to London and made her have sex with Prince Andrew. She said Epstein paid her $15,000. She said she later had sex with Andrew twice more, at Epstein’s instruction, though the prince has denied all of her allegations. In 2025, King Charles stripped Andrew of his title of “prince” after Giuffre’s posthumous memoir was published. According to the book, the then-41-year-old prince told Giuffre on the night they met that his daughters were “just a little younger than you.”

Court filings allege that Epstein also forced Giuffre to sleep with many other powerful men, “including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” She described being “passed around like a platter of fruit” and said Epstein demanded that she tell him about these sexual encounters to give him material for blackmail.

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In 2002 Giuffre, then 19, enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand. While there she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor. They married 10 days later while they were still in Thailand. She quit working for Epstein and moved to Australia with Robert Giuffre, with whom she had three children: Christian, Noah, and Emily.

Speaking out

Virginia Giuffre said that the birth of her daughter in 2010 inspired her to speak publicly about her experiences. In 2011 she became the first of Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and describe her experiences. She sold her story (and a now-infamous picture of her with Andrew and Maxwell) to the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday for $160,000. In 2015 she started a nonprofit organization called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), to support victims of sex trafficking and bring an end to the crime.

Over the years, she received millions of dollars from lawsuits against Maxwell, Andrew, the Epstein estate, and the bank JPMorgan Chase (because of its handling of Epstein’s finances). Some of this money went to support SOAR. However, she also wrote in a diary entry (which later became public) that her husband was “gambling away” their money.

Giuffre and her husband reportedly separated in 2024. In April 2025 she told People that Robert Giuffre had been physically abusing her. Also that spring, she announced on Instagram that she had been in a car wreck and was suffering from kidney failure. She said doctors had given her four days to live, although she was discharged six days later.

Death

In April 2025 Virginia Giuffre died at her farm in Western Australia. Her brother said he found her unconscious at her house. A representative of Giuffre said that she had confided in her weeks before her death that she planned to commit suicide. “She was very clear that the pain was just too deep, she just couldn’t take it any more,” her representative told the British newspaper The Times. “It wasn’t a dramatic conversation, it was very matter of fact.” She was 41 years old.

Learn more

The Epstein files: A timeline

Ghislaine Maxwell, partner in crime

The rise and fall of Jeffrey Epstein

Where did Epstein get his money?