‘If it helps one person’ – this is what Virginia Roberts Giuffre wanted her memoir to achieve

In October 2024, I sat in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s kitchen, a typewritten draft of her memoir in front of me. This was my second time visiting her in Australia over the nearly four years we’d been working together. Previously, we’d met in-person for the first time in Paris, in 2021, and then later in New York City, in between countless Zooms and Facetime calls. But now, I’d come to her ranch outside Perth to go over her manuscript one last time. Her publisher was hoping to release Nobody’s Girl in 2025, so we needed to make sure every word was right.

For two full days, we sat together – me at the kitchen table, her in a cosy recliner chair. She’d had surgery on her neck, and was still recovering, so we made her as comfortable as possible as I read to her aloud. Sometimes, when the material we were reviewing got too heavy, we took breaks to feed her chickens or watch wild kangaroos hop around the yard. Then, having taken a breath, we’d make instant coffee – it was just the two of us, as her husband and three kids were at the family home back in Perth – and get back to work. Finally, we reached the book’s ultimate paragraph, in which Giuffre described the world she hoped would someday exist – a fairer world in which victims of sexual abuse would be believed, not shamed, and could get help and hold their abusers to account whenever they were ready.

“If this book moves us even an inch closer to a reality like that, I will have achieved my goal,” I read, then looked up. Giuffre’s eyes were sparkling in a way that told me she had an idea.

Back in 2015, she said, when she and lawyer Sigrid McCawley first teamed up to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and the men who the monstrous duo had sexually trafficked Giuffre to, she’d told McCawley, “If we help one person – just one – we will have left the world in a better place.” Now, Giuffre wanted that idea to be stated explicitly in the book’s final sentence. So I rewrote it: “If this book moves us even an inch closer to a reality like that – if it helps just one person – I will have achieved my goal.”

Today, seven weeks since the publication of Nobody’s Girl and seven months after Giuffre’s tragic death by suicide, I’m still thinking about that edit she made. Because readers have told me she has achieved her goal; her book has helped not just one person, but many thousands, all over the world.

Consider this email I received the other day from a woman who called herself “Thankful from Australia”: “I was abused as a 3-4 year [old] child – not by close family, but by a neighbour’s son,” she wrote. “It has affected me, and only after reading Virginia’s book today, in one sitting, do I realise how. She has helped me, at 70 years of age, to finally understand.”

Still another abuse victim in the United States wrote that Giuffre’s story “inspired me to recently reprioritise my own peace and healing… I am so grateful for her.” A woman in Britain, meanwhile, sent a photo of a bracelet she’d made that spelled B-A-D-A-S-S in lettered beads – a replica of one that Giuffre describes wearing in her book. After praising Giuffre’s “astounding courage and humble nature,” she offered to make me a bracelet, too.

I heard from men, too. A “middle-aged” British man told me he was “a survivor of physical and psychological abuse as a child, so even as a man, I can relate to certain elements of the book,” he said. “Well done to Virginia and yourself for shining a light in this dark corner of our world.” A male survivor of sexual abuse in the US echoed those words. “Thank you for being not only Virginia’s voice,” the North Carolina resident wrote me, “but many of ours.”

This is an unusual experience for a ghostwriter. Usually, my role ends when collaboration on the manuscript is complete. At that point, whoever has hired me – the person whose name will appear on the book’s cover – steps forward alone to do the interviews required to launch their book into the world. But Giuffre’s death changed all that. Suddenly, I was trying to speak for her, and when I did so, I unwittingly opened a door. Many readers seemed to need someone to talk to, so they reached out to me.

One person I did not hear from, even though I specifically addressed him in countless television and radio interviews, is the former prince now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Andrew denies Giuffre’s allegations but when the royal family said they stood with victims of sexual abuse and stripped him of his titles, I publicly applauded it. When US congressmen called for Andrew to testify before them, as they continue to investigate Epstein and Maxwell’s heinous trafficking ring, I implored him to cooperate. Over and over, I looked into the lens on live TV and told Andrew, who Giuffre had accused of raping her on three separate occasions: “You’ve said you did nothing wrong. But you were on the island, in the mansions, on the jets. You saw things that could validate the experiences of so many girls and young women. You have two daughters. Step forward. Do the right thing.”

The closest I got to a reply was when emails from an account called The Duke (a person seeming to be Andrew) popped up in the latest tranche of communiques to and from Epstein, made public by US lawmakers. Those and other emails pulled back the curtain on the callous behaviours of what some are calling “the Epstein class” – mostly rich, powerful men. Also among them was a 2011 email from Epstein that appeared to confirm the authenticity of the famous photo of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre – a photo that the ex-prince has long claimed was a fake.

I dearly wish Giuffre were here to see all this – even the eerily disturbing parts of it, like the new photos of Epstein’s private island compound that were released last week. She’d described to me much of what those photos show, but it was still chilling to view them and imagine what horrors had gone on there (the dentist chair!). Not for the first time, I wished Giuffre and I could have talked through our feelings together. There is now reporting of conflict over Giuffre’s estate, with an interim administrator set to decide who will inherit her assets, including the settlement, worth a reported $12m (£9.2m) that she received from Andrew. But all that is beyond my purview and knowledge. Ours was a living relationship.

Giuffre’s and my partnership was incredibly close, so when another member of Team Virginia, as we in her close circle called ourselves, called in April to tell me Giuffre had died at the desperately young age of 41, it was like being punched in the stomach. But her passing doesn’t negate the fact that she was a hero. Brave, kind, and feisty, she risked her own safety to stand up to protect not just her own beloved children, but all of our children. I know how proud she’d be of the changes that her book, as well as the raised voices of so many other brave survivors of Epstein and Maxwell’s cruelty, have set in motion.

Last month, after reversing course more than once, President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which could force the kind of reckoning on our side of the pond that Andrew’s demotion signalled in the UK. By 19 December, we’ll see if Trump’s signature leads to their full release, as Giuffre dearly hoped for – or if, as many suspect, there will be more footdragging or obfuscation.

I wish I could say I was certain that real change is underway. I remember feeling optimistic about the #MeToo movement, only to see a subsequent backlash. Will Trump do the unthinkable and pardon Maxwell – an apex predator and convicted sex trafficker – as she has asked him to? That possibility still looms, and I shudder to think of what a travesty of justice that would be. But if Trump does so, it will be up to all of us – not just those who survived Epstein and Maxwell’s depravity – to stand up and speak out.

How heartening, then, to see some people already pledging their allegiance to Giuffre’s legacy. A few weeks back, Halley Vincent, age 16, made a Spotify playlist of every song Giuffre mentioned in Nobody’s Girl. By helping readers get through the book’s difficult parts, this Kansas teenager is surely doing her part. So is Samantha, the daughter of an abuse survivor in Australia, who sent me a tribute song she’d posted on YouTube that I haven’t been able to listen to without crying.

But the best idea yet may be the brainchild of one of the original writers for the TV sitcom Seinfeld – a comedian named Pat Hazell who lives in Texas. In a Facebook post, he proposed a campaign that I’d love to see somebody champion: a national book group to help all Americans absorb and understand Nobody’s Girl.

“It is time,” Hazell wrote, “that we put on our brave, big-people pants and face the music of this broken world that is protecting serial predators that maintain positions of power. Women and children’s lives and futures are being destroyed and compromised by our collective looking away from the victims’ stories.”

Reading Hazell’s words – he implored people to “take stake in the stories of those near you… our friends, and neighbours” – I thought: That’s exactly what’s required. To eliminate the twin-scourges of misogyny and the fetishisation of young girls, each of us must band together with others who we may not yet know, and say, “Enough.” Giuffre’s “survivor sisters” as she called others who’d endured Epstein and Maxwell’s abuses, have said as much by gathering recently on Capitol Hill in Washington to demand their due. To truly honour Giuffre, we all must do our damnedest, through advocacy and community, to insist that her hoped-for world becomes a reality.

Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre is published by Doubleday, available from The Observer Bookshop

Photograph by Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty