Overview
Virginia Louise Giuffre (née Roberts; born August 9, 1983) is an American-Australian campaigner who offers support to victims of sex trafficking. She is an alleged victim of the sex trafficking ring of Jeffrey Epstein. Giuffre created Victims Refuse Silence, a non-profit based in the United States, in 2015, which was relaunched under the name Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) in November 2021. She has given a detailed account to many American and British reporters about her experiences of being trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Giuffre has pursued criminal and civil actions against Epstein and Maxwell, and has appealed directly to the public for justice and awareness. She sued Maxwell for defamation in 2015, and the case was settled in Giuffre's favor for an undisclosed sum in 2017. On July 2, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the unsealing of documents from the earlier civil suit by Giuffre against Maxwell. The first batch of documents from Giuffre's suit were released to the public on August 9, 2019, further implicating Epstein, Maxwell, and a number of their associates. The following day, August 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell.
In an October 2019 interview for BBC's Panorama, aired on December 2, Giuffre described her alleged experiences of being sex trafficked by Epstein for Britain's Prince Andrew, which helped shift public opinion against the prince. She subsequently sued the Prince in civil court in New York. The suit was settled in February 2022 with Prince Andrew paying an undisclosed amount to Giuffre and making a substantial donation to her charity.
Early life
Virginia Giuffre was born Virginia Louise Roberts in Sacramento, California, on August 9, 1983, to parents Sky and Lynn Roberts. The family relocated to Loxahatchee in Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was four years old. Giuffre has a younger brother. It was reported that she had come from a "troubled home" and, from the age of seven, was molested by a close family friend. "I was just so mentally scarred already at such a young age, and I ran away from that," she said on Panorama in 2019. Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she went from being in "an abusive situation, to being a runaway, to living in foster homes". She lived on the streets at age 14, where she says she found only, "hunger and pain and [more] abuse". Later she was abused by a 65-year-old sex trafficker, Ron Eppinger, in Miami.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).