Robin Abcarian: Virginia Giuffre spent half her life fighting for justice against Epstein

If there’s one takeaway from Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, it’s that the unrepentant child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime, should never, ever be considered for the pardon or commutation that President Trump has hinted at.

This is not to downplay the importance of the moving story Giuffre tells in “Nobody’s Girl,” which was completed with her ghostwriter, journalist Amy Wallace, before Giuffre took her own life in April at 41.

But it’s one way the world can honor her memory and thank her for going public with her allegations of abuse at the hands of Maxwell and Epstein, who she said kept her essentially as a sex slave for two years. In the book, Giuffre alleges that the pair trafficked her to many powerful men, including a prince and a former prime minister who savaged her.

Giuffre liked to tell her three kids that her job was “fighting bad guys.” Indeed, as she put it, she spent the first half of her life being sexually abused and trafficked and the second half struggling to bring her abusers to justice. “I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first,” she wrote. Imagine the toll it took on her.

Starting when she was about 7 until she was 11, Giuffre writes, she was sexually abused by her father (who has denied it) and his friend, who later went to prison for sexually abusing a minor. Her parents sent her away to a residential school for troubled kids because she was — shocker — acting out, using drugs, etc. She ran away from that school and was picked up by a man who told her he ran a modeling agency.

That man, Ron Eppinger, convicted later of trafficking girls, “gave” her to an older man, she wrote, “as if I were a used bicycle or an unloved toy.” After an FBI raid, she was returned to her father, who took her back to the residential school, but not, she wrote, before calling her a “slut” and “whore.”

Then 16-year-old Giuffre found work at the Mar-a-Lago spa as a locker room attendant. Her father, a groundskeeper, helped her get the job. There, she met a woman with a posh English accent who offered to introduce her to a wealthy man who was looking to hire a masseuse to travel with him. No experience necessary.

Two years later, she writes, after what she describes as constant abuse, Maxwell and Epstein told Giuffre they wanted her to carry their baby. She would be well paid, of course, but would have to sign away her parental rights. At that point, desperate to escape their grip, she agreed on the condition they’d make good on their promise to pay for her to become a professional masseuse. They agreed, and sent her to Thailand for an eight-week course.

It was in Chiang Mai, at 19, that the second half of her life began.

She fell madly in love with an Australian named Robbie Giuffre, married him 10 days after they met and moved to Australia. According to the book, when she called Maxwell and Epstein to let them know she was never coming back, Epstein was brusque. “Have a great life,” he said, and hung up.

Giuffre would have no contact with Epstein again until five years later, through lawyers, after she filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2009. They settled confidentially later that year for $500,000, which she used to buy a home.

It was the birth of her daughter in 2010 that inspired Giuffre to go public with her story. She wanted to help other survivors feel less alone.

In 2011, she became the first alleged Epstein/Maxwell victim to abandon anonymity. In a bombshell interview with the Mail on Sunday, Giuffre described being trafficked to royalty. The story piqued the interest of the FBI. Maxwell claimed the allegations were “abhorrent and entirely untrue,” which became the basis for Giuffre’s successful defamation case against her.

You probably know the rest — how Epstein, who had received a legal slap on the wrist in an earlier case, was arrested and killed himself in jail, how Maxwell went into hiding and was arrested and convicted of sex trafficking, how so many accusers have stepped forward and how releasing the Epstein files has — rightfully — become a national obsession and political football.

The last years of Giuffre’s life were spent battling a number of ailments — she was treated with ketamine for PTSD, she remained in immense pain after breaking her neck in a fall and undergoing two surgeries, she contracted meningitis, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and she attempted suicide twice. She and her husband separated.

No one ever deserved to rest in peace more than Virginia Roberts Giuffre.