Virginia Giuffre finished writing her memoir one year ago and told collaborator Amy Wallace that she wanted to be sure Nobody's Girl was released even if she wasn't alive to see it. Giuffre took her own life in April, and her book is due out next Tuesday. In advance of that, Vanity Fair shares an excerpt in which Giuffre recounts how Ghislaine Maxwell lured her into Jeffrey Epstein's orbit when she was 16 and working at Mar-a-Lago, mainly restocking tea and towels in the spa. It was the summer of 2000, and her dad was also an employee there. Giuffre says she found herself seized by the idea of one day becoming a massage therapist—so much so that she was reading an anatomy book when Maxwell approached her at the spa's reception desk.
Maxwell asked about her interest in massage and whether she did it "on the side." Giuffre says she explained she wasn't trained but said Maxwell seemed unconcerned; she knew a wealthy man who was a Mar-a-Lago member and needed a massage therapist to travel with him. Giuffre says she again cited her lack of training, and was reassured that she'd be "terrific" and that if Maxwell's friend was impressed with her he'd happily pay for her training. "Even today, more than twenty years later, I remember how excited I felt. Could my dreams of becoming a professional masseuse be on their way to coming true so quickly? Something about how this proper, well-spoken lady focused on me made that seem possible."
Giuffre says she got permission from her father to go to an interview at Epstein's home—her dad dropped her off—and says Maxwell led her upstairs and introduced her to Epstein, who was nude and lying on a massage table. "I had never gotten a massage before, let alone given one," Giuffre writes. "But still I thought, 'Isn't he supposed to be under a sheet?' Maxwell's blasé expression indicated that nudity was normal. 'Calm down,' I told myself. 'Don't blow this chance.'" Her account then skips to her arriving home, hurriedly answering her parents' questions about what she'd learned—"push the blood away from the heart; always be consistent with a firm, warm touch"—and then excusing herself to cry on the floor of her shower.
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"I don't enjoy repeating this story; it hurts to relive what I did and what was done to me," she writes. "The worst things Epstein and Maxwell did to me weren't physical, but psychological. From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive." (Read the full excerpt here.)
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