She was the young girl in that infamous photograph with Prince Andrew, and the best-known survivor of Jeffrey Epstein. As Virginia’s explosive posthumous memoir continues to reverberate, her brother Sky Roberts and his wife, Amanda, talk about her final tragic months
ABritish prince was arrested at 8am and was stripped of his title; ambassadors, politicians and numerous other high-profile men lost their prestigious jobs; millions of files relating to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released and a US president remains under scrutiny. So much has happened since the death of Virginia Roberts Giuffre in April last year, and the posthumous publication of her memoirNobody’s Girlsix months later, detailing for the first time the full story of her abuse by Epstein and his associates. “This year has been extraordinary,” says Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s younger brother. “I just wish Virginia was here to see it.”
He is determined that there will be many more advances to come. Giuffre had become one of the most recognisable survivors of Epstein; in the midst of grief, Sky and his wife, Amanda, have become accidental advocates. “She paved the way, and we want to keep paving that road forward for other survivors out there,” says Sky.
They’re speaking from their home in Colorado, in a room filled with photographs and mementoes, such as the butterfly motif that Giuffre adopted for her cause. They haven’t done interviews from this room before. “I see her all around me,” says Sky, who apologises for getting “teary-eyed sometimes, so just bear with me”. They have got two children, and have a background in retail management and property investing, not politics. “We got thrust into it, within months [after Giuffre’s death], we were in advocacy work,” says Sky. “A lot of it was driven by a sense of purpose. Virginia used to say, ‘How do you turn pain into purpose?’ And I couldn’t allow her story to be narrated by people that didn’t either know her or really understand who she was.”
They are about to relaunch Giuffre’s organisationSoar(Speak Out, Act, Reclaim), and arecampaigning to get Virginia’s law passed in the US, which would remove the federal statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases, as well as maintain the pressure to release the rest of the Epstein documents and keep him and his associates in the public consciousness. All this against a government – and a president named numerous times in the files – that appears to be doing everything it can to make the whole thing go away. “We always had the expectation to support Virginia when she was ready to move forward with her nonprofit,” says Amanda. “We didn’t expect to do it without her. It became this idea of we couldn’t let her story end there.” Doing it without Giuffre, whodied by suicide, says Sky, “it’s a giant hole in your stomach and in your heart”.
In public consciousness, Giuffre is both the smiling girl in that infamous photograph, the then-Prince Andrew’s arm around her waist, and the formidable woman speaking up, often outside court houses, on behalf of survivors of sex trafficking. Her memoir revealed her to be someone resilient, who overcame unimaginable abuse going back to childhood. Her last months revealed her to be someone complex, who still struggled, and whose life had, once again, collapsed. At the time of her death at the age of 41, she was separated from her husband and had not been allowed to see her three children. Sky and Amanda don’t have contact with them, though Amanda says she hopes they can be a part of Giuffre’s work and legacy “when they’re ready”. There is an ongoing battle over her estate.
“It’s complicated,” says Sky, “and this is why you can never fit a survivor’s story into a neat box, it doesn’t exist that way.” When Giuffre told him she would be writing a book about her life, she warned it would be hard to read, because part of it is his story, too. “I remember Virginia saying to me, ‘If I’m going to tell my story, I have to tellallof it.’ That’s one of the hardest parts, because you grow up hoping or looking at your parents as heroes, and it was like this … ” He pauses, trying to find the words and failing, because there are none. “It was this painfully tragic sort of feeling.”
Several years ago, she had told Sky and their older brother, Danny, that their father had abused her – both had young daughters, and she couldn’t bear the thought of them not being armed with the information. Reading a fuller extent in her memoir, alongside all the other abuse she suffered, “I just wish that I could have told her … ” Sky breaks down. “I wish I could have told her how proud I was, because that takes so much courage, and I know it was hard for her. It’s necessary to understand how all the other things that play into it, because [our father] was the first person to abuse Virginia. She was so brave, because she said, ‘If I don’t tell my whole story, then I’m not showing the weaving of how this actually works’, and how you get groomed from a very young age all the way up until, really, the ending of her life.”
The family lived on a modest farm in Loxahatchee, Florida. Virginia was the middle of three; Danny, from her mother’s previous marriage;and Sky, born five years after her. “I was the legit annoying little brother, but she was just a one-of-a-kind person from a very young age,” Sky says. “She was really the one that always looked out for me; Virginia always had that motherly instinct. She was so fun to be around. She was just a joy. She could make you laugh in a heartbeat, but the reason I think she was such a strong advocate as well is because she was always a protector. It’s clear why, now, when you read Nobody’s Girl. You understand what she went through. I always remember her basically shielding me from any evil that could potentially touch me.”
Giuffre writes that her father started sexually abusing her from the age of around seven. She alleged that her father had threatened to kill Sky if she told anyone; years later, Epstein would do exactly the same, throwing down a photograph taken of her younger brother on his way to school.
Sky doesn’t have a relationship with his father, who has denied all the allegations, writing to Wallace to say: “Just to straighten this out, I never abused my daughter.” Sky is firm: “I always say I wholeheartedly believe my sister. Virginia has been proven to be a truth-teller time and time again.” It sickened him, Sky says, when their father came forward in the media to talk about Giuffre after her death and suggest she had not taken her own life. “That was another huge motivator for me,” he says, of the decision to step up and speak for his sister.
As a child, Giuffre had been a keen reader and a girl who loved climbing trees and exploring the Florida wilderness around their home; she loved animals and had wanted to be a vet. But by her early teens, she was truanting from school and emotionally unstable. The other horrors Giuffre was subjected to, all before she was 16, are almost too much to list – being raped by two boys while unconscious in the back of a car, followed by time ata treatment centre for teenagers that was later shut down for the mistreatment of the young people who were supposed to be in its care. When she ran away, she was picked up by a man who raped her at gunpoint; then, hours later, traumatised and bloodied by a kerbside, was picked up by another man, Ron Eppinger.
She was 15 and abused by Eppinger – who would later plead guilty to sex trafficking – for around six months. When she was back with her parents in Florida, her father, a maintenance worker at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, got her a job there. That was where she metGhislaine Maxwell– in Giuffre’s telling, Maxwell spies her from her limo like a shark stalking its prey – who introduced her to Epstein.
Amy Wallace, the journalist who co-wrote Giuffre’s book says, “You had to understand what had happened to her at seven, eight and onwards to understand why, when she meets Epstein at the age of 16, she doesn’t just run for the hills – she ends up staying in their orbit for more than two years.” Like Sky and Amanda, the ghostwriter has found herself an advocate for Giuffre. We speak while she is in the UK to discuss the paperback release of the book. It angers her when people suggest that Giuffre stayed with Epstein for the lifestyle – and, later, supposedly saw a financial opportunity when she took settlements – when in reality she had been a vulnerable and desperate child, repeatedly damaged by the adults around her. “When you’re seven and you’re given the message from somebody very close to you that your worth on this planet is to serve at the sexual pleasure of them, that erodes your self-worth, and it makes you think that’s the way the world works.” Wallace pauses briefly. “Which in her life it really did.”
Sky was about 11 when his sister became involved with Epstein and Maxwell – too young to be anything other than impressed that she was travelling, and meeting celebrities. “I remember her telling me certain people that she had met. I look at those people very different now.” He was also too young to know she was suffering, and, anyway, he says, “Virginia had a way of being able to put the veil up if she needed to.”
