Virginia Giuffre's family opposes the publication of her memoir, citing misrepresentation of her husband. Photo / Getty Images
Family members of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexually abusing and trafficking her when she was a teenager, say that she didn’t want her recently announced posthumous memoir to be published in its current form.
In an interview with the New York Times, Giuffre’s brothers, Sky Roberts and Danny Wilson, and her sisters-in-law, Amanda Roberts and Lanette Wilson, said that Giuffre would not have supported the memoir because it misrepresents her relationship with her husband, Robert Giuffre.
When Virginia Giuffre wrote the memoir, she depicted her husband in a positive light and didn’t include allegations that he physically abused her because she feared for her safety and that of her three children, according to her family.
Giuffre was hospitalised in March following a serious car accident in North Perth, Australia, and suffered kidney failure.
After the accident, she emailed her collaborator on the memoir, journalist Amy Wallace, and her publicist, Dini von Mueffling, writing that it was her “heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time”.
She added: “The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders”.
Less than a month later, she died by suicide at age 41. The book, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, will be released by Knopf on October 21, with an announced first printing of 250,000 copies.
But in the weeks before Giuffre died, she told multiple people – including her brothers, her sisters-in-law, her lawyer and her caregiver – that she wanted to revise the book to change its portrayal of her husband, who comes across as the person who rescued her from years of abuse by Epstein and members of his circle.
She was willing to buy back publication rights, if necessary, in order to rewrite the book, her family said.
“She did not want the book published in its current state,” Sky Roberts said.
Neither Robert Giuffre nor his lawyer immediately responded to a request for comment today.
He and Virginia Giuffre were locked in a divorce battle when she died, and he had accused her of violating a protective order this year. His lawyer has said in the past that neither he nor his client could comment because of ongoing court proceedings in Australia.
When the family asked Knopf to make revisions to the memoir, they were told that no significant changes could be introduced since it was based on the last version that Giuffre had approved in October 2024.
Todd Doughty, a deputy publisher at Knopf Doubleday, said that because of this, only legal or fact-checking changes would be made.
He also said Giuffre never approached Knopf about making revisions to the manuscript or buying back the rights.
Following her death, Knopf added a foreword, written by her collaborator.
In it, Wallace says that Giuffre informed her of an alleged incident of domestic abuse from 2015 but insisted that she did not want it in the book. Giuffre’s public statements about her marriage and her accusations against her husband are also included in the foreword, Doughty said.
After Knopf shared a version, Giuffre’s family told the publisher they felt it did not go far enough.
In an email, family members asked that the foreword be rewritten with additional material, including a statement from the family about Giuffre’s experience of domestic violence, as well as an account of how she had expressed her intention to revise the book.
They also shared their fears that publishing the memoir without further context about the abuse Giuffre suffered within her own marriage might undermine her credibility, and leave them in the uncomfortable position of having to dispute its accuracy.
“The overall impact of the book risks oversimplifying her struggles,” they wrote in an email to Jordan Pavlin, Knopf’s publisher and editor-in-chief.
“Such omissions might lead to misunderstandings that could tarnish her reputation and legacy.”
Giuffre’s brothers were involved in fact-checking the memoir and knew it was moving forward.
Still, the family was caught off guard this week when Knopf announced its publication in a news release that described Nobody’s Girl as “a raw and shocking record of the depravity she was subjected to within Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s orbit”.
The publisher hadn’t planned to unveil the book yesterday but did so when it believed the news was about to break in a British publication.
Shortly before the book was announced, Pavlin emailed a response to the family, in which she asked if they could set up a phone call to discuss further changes to the foreword, hoping to address the family’s concerns.
“I believe she has written a book that will have the power to change lives, and that it will have an impact on anyone struggling to survive sexual abuse,” Pavlin wrote of Giuffre.
Pavlin said Knopf had adjusted the foreword “several times to try to frame Virginia’s narrative as complexly as possible within the boundaries of what we, as her publisher, are able to do”.
“We have worked in good faith to take your concerns to heart and address them, and we are working to address them still.”
The family said that they have not seen the current version of the memoir because Knopf asked them to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to read it, but that they were familiar with the book’s contents from discussions with Giuffre and from reading portions of early drafts.
They were unwilling to sign the non-disclosure agreements because they feared doing so “could put the family at significant risk of being silenced, preventing us from advocating on Virginia’s behalf and for many other survivors”, they wrote in the letter to Knopf.
“It’s not that we’re not in support of the book, we’re not in support of certain parts of the book,” Sky Roberts said. “The full story needs to be told.”
Giuffre’s family said that parts of Nobody’s Girl are contradicted by Giuffre’s own statements about her marriage.
Shortly before she died, Giuffre went public with allegations of domestic abuse against her husband, with whom she had three children.
“After my husband’s latest physical assault,” she said in a statement to People magazine in April, “I can no longer stay silent”.
Giuffre’s sister-in-law Amanda Roberts said one of the family’s concerns was the message the book might send to survivors of domestic violence if it paints Giuffre as someone who stood up publicly against sex trafficking but glossed over the abuse she allegedly suffered at home.
“It was the fight in her own backyard that she felt she could not win,” she said.
Nobody’s Girl is likely to capture the public’s attention at a moment when the Epstein sex trafficking case has become a volatile political issue, as conspiracy theories circulate about what the Epstein case files include.
Doughty declined to provide details about Epstein associates included in the book, but he said that it included no allegations against US President Donald Trump.
Giuffre was one of the most prominent and outspoken victims of Epstein (who took his own life in jail in 2019) and Maxwell, his longtime associate, who is serving 20 years for sex trafficking.
In interviews and depositions, Giuffre said she was working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2000 when Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s sex ring.
In 2015, she was the first of Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and take her story public.
She sued Maxwell that year for defamation when she said Giuffre was lying. They settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017.
Giuffre’s siblings are not receiving any money from the publication of her memoir.
The royalties will go to her estate and her charity, which she founded to help survivors of sex trafficking.
All four of her relatives who spoke to the New York Times said they want her memoir to reach readers, since it is her own account in her own voice, but not without context about her marriage.
“As a family, we want the sensitive contents of that book, which is in her words, to fly,” Danny Wilson said.
“We’re not trying to curb-stomp this book,” he added. “I want to make sure that we do her a little bit of justice.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris
Photographs by: Jeenah Moon, Mark Kauzlarich and Emily Michot via Getty Images
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