Last weekend, the world woke up to the news that Virginia Giuffre had died at the age of 41.
According to reports, she had taken her own life at her home in western Australia, where she’d been living with her family at the time.
In a statement, her family said that the “toll of abuse became unbearable”, adding that "Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking.”
With her death, the internet has been flooded with conspiracy theories and speculation. Prince Andrew’s ex-girlfriend, Lady Victoria Hervey, wrote on Instagram that “when lies catch up with you there’s no way out” – comments for which followers branded her “sick” and “despicable” online.
Karrie Louden, Giuffre’s lawyer, said that she had been “in a lot of pain” but looking forward to her future.
"She wanted to renovate this house and all sorts of things like that,” she told The Sun. “There were plans that she had for the future.”
It’s a tragic end to a life marked by struggle – and scarred by her close association with the notorious sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. With news still coming out about Giuffre’s death, here’s what we know about her life, and everything that led up to it.
Early life
Virginia Giuffre was born in Sacramento, California on August 9, 1984. Born as Virginia Louise Roberts, she was brought up with two stepbrothers – Sky and Daniel – in what she later described as a “troubled home.”
From the age of seven, she said, she was molested by a close family friend, which understandably left her traumatised. She later told Panorama that “I was just so mentally scarred already at such a young age, and I ran away from that”. By 12, she was smoking weed and skipping school.
From 13, she became what she described as a “runaway, living in foster homes” – where she told the Miami Herald that she experienced “hunger and pain and abuse.” After that, she met Ron Eppinger, a 65-year-old sex trafficker, in Miami, and lived with him for six months.
In the years after, Giuffre described how she was sexually abused by Eppinger, kept in an apartment and pimped out to paedophiles, before he was raided by the FBI in 2000.
At the age of 14, the young Giuffre moved back in with her father – who worked as a maintenance manager at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. She enrolled at Royal Palm Beach High School nearby and tried to rebuild her life.
Meeting Jeffrey Epstein
Giuffre’s association with Jeffrey Epstein got a summer job at Mar-a-Lago at the age of 16. In the locker rooms at the resort, she says, she first met Ghislaine Maxwell: the daughter of the British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell.
She was also the friend of the (now) notorious paedophile and sexual abuser, Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell spotted that Giuffre was reading a book about massage therapy, and offered Giuffre the chance to become one of Epstein’s masseuses.
Though Giuffre accepted, the pair soon began grooming her. When she arrived at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, she recounted seeing Epstein lying naked on a massage table, before Maxwell told her how to massage him.
"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,” she said. “That was the worst thing I could have told them because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”
Things quickly spiralled. “It started with one and it trickled into two and so on,” she later told the Miami Herald. “And before you know it, I’m being lent out to politicians and academics and royalty.” In an interview with the BBC, she described being “passed around like a platter of fruit.”
Documents show that she soon started travelling the world with Epstein and Maxwell, to his homes in New York, New Mexico and the US Virgin Islands. She was also ordered to find new girls for him, and was sent out to places teenagers liked to visit (for instance, shopping malls) to lure them to wherever he was staying.
“His appetite was insatiable,” she said. “He wanted new girls, fresh, young faces every single day — that was just the sickness that he had.”
In a court affidavit, she added that “Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him,’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’ and he would ‘have something on them. I understood him to mean that when someone was in his pocket, they owed him favors.”
One of those people was allegedly Prince Andrew, who she says she met at Tramp Nightclub in March 2001 – adding that Maxwell told her at the time that she had to “do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey.”
In a later interview, she described it as being a “really scary time” in her life, where she “couldn't comprehend how in the highest level of the government powerful people were allowing this to happen. Not just allowing but participating in it.”
The aftermath
Giuffre’s association with Epstein ended in 2003, when she turned 19 – she later said that Epstein lost interest in her because she was too old. She convinced him to let her train to become a professional masseuse, and he paid for her to take a class in Thailand.
This came with a condition: she had to bring back a Thai girl he had arranged to come over to the US. However, on the trip, she met Robert Giuffre, the man she eventually married.
Instead of returning to the States, they moved to Australia together and she went onto have three children with him.
However, the past didn’t stay buried, and in 2007 – while pregnant with her second child – Giuffre was called by both Maxwell and Epstein, who were worried that she’d told the police about them.
Though the FBI were investigating the pair, she said she hadn’t – and when they eventually did get in touch, she didn’t say much, because she was scared it was a trick.
“I was still scared to death,” Giuffre said later. “Jeffrey used to tell me that he owned the entire Palm Beach Police Department. I just didn’t want my family harmed.”
Nevertheless, in 2009, she filed an anonymous lawsuit against Epstein, in which she accused Maxwell of sexually trafficking her as a minor. This was settled for an undisclosed amount, and in 2011, she became the first of Epstein’s victims to waive her anonymity, via an interview with the Daily Mail.
In it, she claimed that she had had sex with Prince Andrew – one of Epstein’s friends – several times as a teenager, a claim that the Duke vehemently denies, including in the infamous Newsnight interview he gave about Epstein in 2019. In it, he asserted that he could not have met Giuffre on the date she alleged, as he was in a Pizza Express in Woking with his daughters.
Two years later, in 2021, Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against Andrew, alleging she was forced to have sexual encounters with him several times when she was 16 and 17.
Andrew denied her claims, and in 2022, they reached an out of court settlement – as part of which Andrew stated that it was "known that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years" and that he “regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Ms. Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others.”
Though the settlement figure has never been made public, estimates place the figure at around £12m.
Death
In recent years, Giuffre was living with her family in Ocean Reef in Perth. However, by early 2025 – and perhaps earlier, according to her brother and sister-in-law – she had split from Robert.
The split seems to have gone badly: in 2025, Giuffre alleged that her husband had physically abused her during their time together, and the pair were locked in a custody battle for their children.
“I was able to fight back against Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein who abused and trafficked me,” she said in a statement released to People magazine. “But I was unable to escape the domestic violence in my marriage until recently. After my husband’s latest physical assault, I can no longer stay silent. Again, I thank everyone for their support. I have faith that justice will prevail.”
Her husband also filed a family violence restraining order against Giuffre shortly beforehand, which she described as a “malicious claim”. A court date was set, but on March 31, Giuffre announced on Instagram that she had been involved in a high-speed traffic accident.
According to her, she wrote that her car crashed into a bus going at 70mph, and resulted in her going into renal failure – giving her four days to live.
“I’ve gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology,” she wrote in the post. “I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time, but you know what they say about wishes. Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life.”
This was later disputed by Australian police, who said it had been a “minor crash”; her father Sky later clarified that she would have died in four days had she not received treatment.
She also appeared to be struggling due to being separated from her children, writing online that “my beautiful babies have no clue how much I love them and they're being poisoned with lies. I miss them so very much. I have been through hell & back in my 41 years but this is incredibly hurting me worse than anything else. Hurt me, abuse me but don't take my babies. My heart is shattered and every day that passes my sadness only deepens."
It is unclear when she was discharged from hospital, but according to her family, Giuffre took her own life at her own home in Neergabby on April 25.
