In her newly published memoir Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre speaks from beyond the grave. The 41-year-old activist, who became perhaps the most well-known survivor of abuse by the American financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, never lived to see its reception. Released six months after Giuffre’s death by suicide, the artefact of the book itself now feels like its own kind of tragedy, its title speaking to the wrenching loneliness of abuse and its aftermath. Its words feel heavier, imbued with hope, grief and foreboding.
Many of us may feel like we know all we need to know about Epstein. The shocking facts of his crimes have been probed in great detail over the past six years – including, but far from limited to, those surrounding the trafficking of then-16-year-old Giuffre into a ring of wealthy global figures who would go on to silence her. But it still feels like it would be a disservice to look away from Nobody’s Girl. Lines such as “please don’t stop reading” punctuate the book’s contents – descriptions of her trafficking and assault, detailed allegations against Prince Andrew, and accounts of the abuse she experienced as a child before these events unfurled in the early 2000s – read as an imperative.
Posthumously published writing is naturally mired in this kind of discomfort – not just for the reader, but for those at every stage of its production. There is often the question of whether the writer would have wanted their words shared after their death: an ethical debate that has long surrounded posthumous publications such as Virginia Woolf’s letters, Anne Frank’s diaries, or the late essayist Joan Didion’s private journals, in which she detailed her sessions with a psychiatrist. None of these intimate works were intended to be read widely, and editors have to be conscientious as they make hundreds of significant decisions about cuts, word choices and fact-checks in the absence of their authors.
This becomes all the more complicated when we consider that publishing, like all commercial industries, is motivated by profit – and the question of what will sell almost always outweighs the question of what is sensitive, or what is right. The morbid financial incentive of posthumous books often goes unnamed in surface-level debates about, for example, whether these publications are in the “public interest”. Anticipating ethical hesitations on the part of the reader, Amy Wallace, who describes herself as a collaborator in a foreword to Nobody’s Girl, very intentionally emphasises that Giuffre’s family, and Giuffre herself, had wanted her book to come out no matter what. “She wanted all her suffering to have accomplished something,” she writes, relaying a conversation in which Giuffre had insisted that the book go ahead during a period of poor health shortly before her death.
Given this context, Nobody’s Girl feels somewhat like a final reclamation of her voice, and a chance to testify both on the harrowing events that shaped her life and the struggles she faced before death. Writer Chanel Miller, whose 2019 survivor memoir Know My Name detailed her assault and subsequent court case against Stanford student Brock Turner, has also spoken of the power she felt in being able to narrativise her experience. According to Miller, writing gave her freedom to express anger, something she was prohibited from doing in court. She told 60 Minutes: “The writing was like feeling the shame dissolve… bringing all the light in.”
Giuffre’s story has, for years, had a life of its own in both the tabloid press and the courts, always restricting the way that she could speak and write. The activist entered the public spotlight in Britain in 2011, amid a civil lawsuit she had filed against the then-Duke of York, Prince Andrew. Pressure from the press and opposition lawyers was relentless; often, the framing of her experiences and allegations in print has felt salacious and cynical. Her terrible story was turned into headline fodder. With every detail under the public’s gaze, it’s no wonder that collaborator Wallace concluded that staying silent “certainly would have been easier”.
These restrictions make the laborious task of publishing a book-length survivor testimony a legal minefield, which Wallace acknowledges. “From the beginning, Virginia and I understood that this would have to be a meticulously written book – to ensure accuracy of course, but also to protect her from those who would have preferred she stayed silent,” she wrote. But the labour of handling a book like this also extends to us as readers. At times, we are all guilty of being passive and uncritical readers: such is the nature of contemporary news that myriad serious, complicated and consequential stories are parsed through a singular headline or campaign outcome. But a posthumous survivor memoir like Nobody’s Girl demands that we read with caution, discretion and sensitivity. There is too much complexity not to.
Acknowledging these complexities herself, and perhaps her own ambivalence, Giuffre writes in the book’s final chapter: “The constant telling and retelling has been extremely painful and exhausting. With this book, I seek to free myself from my past. From now on, anyone who wants to know about what happened can sit down with Nobody’s Girl and start reading.” We can only hope that this book – while tragic, and perhaps imperfect – helped alter Giuffre’s relationship to her past. That, in her final months, it provided her with some kind of freedom.
‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’ is out now, published by Doubleday