What appears to be an innocent snap from a celebrity birthday party actually reveals a stomach-turning truth that changed everything for Virginia Giuffre.
Warning: Distressing content
It is a spring night in St Tropez.
The champagne is flowing on board a private yacht and there are towering ice sculptures as royalty and the super rich mingle at supermodel Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday back in May 2001.
The party is being thrown on by her boyfriend, the 51-year-old Flavio Briatore, worth hundreds of millions.
And there in their black-clad midst is an uncomfortable looking, at least in hindsight, teenager.
Dressed in a pink top and shiny jeans, she is conspicuously younger than the black-clad society crowd.
She was Virginia Giuffre and this week her posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, hit number one in the US, UK and Australia, telling the real story of that night and her time in Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s world of presidents, powerbrokers, and the ultra-rich.
Of the photo, she wrote: “I’m caught in the foreground—clearly by accident… I am seventeen years old. And right next to me… is Maxwell.
“Later, a fellow survivor told me this photograph was the reason she broke her silence. The photo said something a thousand words couldn’t: Everyone knew—that was a child.”
Flavio Briatore and Naomi Campbell at her 31st birthday party in St Tropez. Virginia Roberts is in the foreground. Picture: Lafgue/Lenhof/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
In her book, Ms Giuffre alleges that she was ‘lent out’ to three billionaires, one who raped her while his pregnant wife was in the room next door, a savagely violent “former minister” who left her begging for her life and bleeding for days, a US governor, a former US senator and “academics from prestigious universities”.“I know about monsters”, she writes, revealing that she had been “choked, beaten, and bloodied.”
One man she feared might kill her was the “former minister” who “laughed when he hurt me and got more aroused when I begged him to stop” as he raped Ms Giuffre on Epstein’s private island.
The minister “wanted violence. He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took pleasure in seeing me in fear for my life.
“I emerged from the cabana bleeding from my mouth, vagina, and anus. For days, it hurt to breathe and to swallow.”
After the assault, Ms Giuffre “tearfully begged” Epstein on bended knees to not to have to ‘massage’ him again.
“I don’t know if Epstein feared the man or if he owed him a favour, but he wouldn’t make any promises, saying coldly of the politician’s brutality, ‘You’ll get that sometimes.’”
A copy of Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Picture: AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough
Ms Giuffre would meet the minister again. About eight weeks later she was forced to “service” “the man I feared more than any other” on board Epstein’s jet.
“‘Will he kill me this time?’” she recalls wondering.
She writes about “the greedy, cruel look on the minister’s face as he watched me beg for my life.”
Then there is the man Ms Giuffre only calls “Billionaire Number One” and his pregnant wife. Sent by Epstein to their luxury hotel in Florida for what he said was part of her “massage training”, “they promptly showed me to the master bedroom, where I would work on the woman first”.
“As the billionaire’s wife undressed, I realised I’d never seen a pregnant woman naked before … had no massage table with me, so we went to the bed, where I arranged a nest of pillows to bolster her as I rubbed her with the oils I’d brought. I knew nothing about prenatal massage”.
Ghislaine with Naomi Campbell, Flavio Briatore, and Virginia Roberts Giuffre at Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party. Picture: Instagram
After about 45 minutes, the woman wanted to go to sleep after which she said she ‘hoped against hope’ that all the billionaire was expecting was a massage.
“I found Billionaire Number One in a sitting-room area, taking off his clothes. There was a throw rug on the floor, and he lay down on it naked, facing up … Nearly four hours after I’d arrived at the apartment, I was still kneading the man’s muscles when he looked up, groaned, and asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable working in the nude?’”
After they had sex, he “tipped me a hundred dollars”, Ms Giuffre said.
Then in May 2001, after attending Campbell’s birthday, the 17-year-old met “Billionaire Two” who was “fifty-year-old stranger with thinning brown hair” who then flew with Ms Giuffre and Epstein to the famed, five-star hotel La Bastide de Saint-Tropez.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Picture: Handout/US District Court for the Southern District of New York/AFP
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“Epstein must have briefed him about what he could expect, because Billionaire Number Two ignored my instructions and began to undress me,” she writes. “‘You really can’t give a massage wearing this outfit, sweetie,” he said”.
Billionaire Two seems to have been brutally clear-eyed about the situation given that
afterwards, “the man offered to pay me triple what Epstein paid me if I’d come ‘work’ for him.”
The question I’ve had again and again, is of the scores of people who allegedly met the teenage Ms Giuffre in Epstein and Maxwell’s company, who did they think she was to them?
The teenager was at the table the night Bill Clinton came for dinner with Epstein, according to Nobody’s Girl, and then again with Al and Tipper Gore.
If we take Prince Andrew at his word that he did not have sex with Ms Giuffre, he still clearly met her, as evidenced by the famous photo of them. (Nor does the royal dispute knowing Ms Giuffre in the recently released email that showed he had lied about having stayed in touch with the convicted sex offender.)
If we take Prince Andrew at his word that he did not have sex with Ms Giuffre, he still clearly met her. Picture: Adrian Dennis/AFP
What did Andrew then think of his old mucker, the nearly 40-year-old Maxwell and the 48-year-old financier, travelling with a girl young enough to be their child?
What did the wife of “Billionaire Number One” think was going on when a clearly inexperienced teenager turned up to give her and her husband massages, not some matronly, muscled expert?
Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell posing for a photo. Picture: Handout/US District Court – Southern District of New York (SDNY)/AFP
Of that night in Tropez Ms Giuffre writes, the photos are a reminder of “how childlike the girls in Epstein’s world were required to look”.
“All evening, I felt like a stowaway,” she says. Campbell, “ignored” her while she notes that “white-haired” Briatore, “looked old enough to be my grandpa.”
“Conscious that I was one or two decades younger than everyone else, I lowered my eyes and tried to blend in.”
(In a 2019 interview Campbell said that the night of her party was the first time she had met Epstein and denied knowledge of his crimes. “He was always front and centre at Victoria’s Secret shows,” she said.)
“More than once”, according to Ms Giuffre’s account, she had been on Epstein’s island when he hosted billionaire Leslie Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. (“Epstein often told girls, falsely, that he was a Victoria’s Secret ‘scout’.” per Ms Giuffre.)
Virginia Giuffre’s story shocked the world. Picture: Supplied
In 2020, Ms Giuffre posted on what is now X: “You saw me at your parties. You saw me in Epstein’s homes. You saw me on the plane … You saw me on the streets. You watched me be abused. You saw me!”
As Tina Brown noted, in her Fresh Hell Substack, this week, that photo of Ms Giuffre at Campbell’s birthday is “the most telling record of collective callousness.
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“The title of Giuffre’s book is Nobody’s Girl, but perhaps a more fitting title would be Blind Eye”.
Ms Giuffre died by suicide in April this year. Nearly 25 years after that photo was taken in St Tropez, finally, the world is getting to ‘see’ her – and to see how many people were a part of Epstein’s sick, depraved world.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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