Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.
Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 m.p.h.
In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.
Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.
In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.
In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid.
“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein” (2022).
“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.
Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a millionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but relinquished his royal duties in 2019.
In 2021 she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles II, for sexually assaulting her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James in the Virgin Islands.
A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist; he said he had no memory of the occasion.
After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”
The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.
In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and was invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said that the pair then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.
She sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015; they settled on an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell’s trial and conviction in 2022 were viewed as a legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system — and his victims — by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.
She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes, boarded with an aunt in California, fled to the former hippie haven of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, lived on the streets when she was 14 and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker who abused her.
Compared to living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage — several times a day — was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”
But her mandate went well beyond. She told the BBC in 2019 that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.
In 2002, when she was 19, she enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse and was assigned to recruit a young girl for the ring. There, she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.
The couple had three children and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She also explained why she had originally agreed to let Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groom her as a masseuse and to provide sexual services.
“They seemed like nice people so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused,” Ms. Giuffre said. “That was the worst thing I could have told them because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”
Hank Sanders contributed reporting.
