Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice comes out this month, and media outlets have just started publishing excerpts. I would assume Virginia’s brother is the one in charge of which outlet gets which excerpt. Virginia passed away earlier this year from suicide, and her mental health was reportedly extremely fragile because she was trying to extract herself from an abusive marriage. She completed her memoir last year, and so it’s being published posthumously. Vanity Fair published an excerpt about Virginia’s first months working at Mar-a-Lago when she was just 16 years old. Ghislaine Maxwell scouted her at MAL and convinced her to come to Jeffrey Epstein’s house. Virginia’s father even drove her to Epstein’s mansion the first time she visited. Here’s part of VF’s excerpt:

Meeting Ghislaine for the first time at MAL: Remembering my duties, I offer this mesmerizing woman a beverage, and she chooses hot tea. I go and fetch it, returning with a steaming cup. I expect that to be the end of it, but the woman keeps on talking. Maxwell says she knows a wealthy man—a longtime Mar-a-Lago member, she says—who is looking for a massage therapist to travel with him. “Do you do massage on the side?” she asks. “Oh, no,” I reply, worried I’ve given her the wrong impression. “I’m not trained, but I hope to learn someday.” My lack of experience doesn’t concern her a bit. “I’m sure you’d be terrific,” she insists, looking me up and down. “Will you come for an interview?”

Ghislaine’s sales pitch: I glance at my library book, with its illustrations of muscles and tendons. “I don’t think I know the body well enough yet,” I protest, but Maxwell shakes her head. What’s important, she says, is my desire to learn. If I impress her friend, she says, he’ll happily pay to get me trained. He’s a mathematician— a genius with a knack for making money. “He loves to help people,” she says, adding that the rich gentleman’s home is right here in Palm Beach, less than two miles from Mar-a-Lago. “Come meet him,” she says, her pretty face glowing. “Come tonight after work.”

First time at Epstein’s house: Eager to be punctual, I jumped out of the car before my dad could turn off the engine, walked to the big wooden front door, and rang the bell. Maxwell answered and came outside, the door still open behind her. She shook my father’s hand. “Thank you so very much for dropping her off,” she told Dad, all smiles, but in retrospect, she seemed impatient for him to leave. “We’ll get Jenna home safe,” she said, practically shooing him back into his truck. Then she turned and ushered me into an elegant foyer with a spiral staircase and a huge star-shaped chandelier.

First time meeting Epstein: Faced with Epstein’s bare backside, I looked to Maxwell for guidance. I had never gotten a massage before, let alone given one. 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.” I wanted to be a good student. Palm Beach was just sixteen miles from Loxahatchee, but the economic divide made it seem way farther. I needed to learn how rich people did things. Besides, while the man on the table was nude, it’s not like I was alone with him. The fact that a woman was with me made me breathe easier. “Fake it ’til you make it,” I thought, as I tried to project a can-do energy.

What happened to her was more than physical: Yes, I was sexually abused. My body was used in ways that did enormous damage to me. But 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. I was about to spend more than two years in Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit. My job: to do whatever they asked whenever they asked it. There were no bars on the windows or locks on the doors. But I was a prisoner trapped in an invisible cage.

[From Vanity Fair]

In VF’s excerpt, she also described meeting Donald Trump. Virginia’s father worked at MAL, doing air conditioning repairs and maintenance, and her dad knew Trump well enough to go into his office and introduce Virginia to Trump. Trump immediately offered her additional work as a babysitter to his wealthy friends and club members, and that was already Virginia’s second line of income at 16. She was just a towel girl at a ritzy spa and a babysitter on the side. And Ghislaine hunted her, groomed her, and was complicit in all of the abuse.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.