By Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Knopf, October 21, 2025

A very intense book, which I found easy to read. I couldn’t put it down. It moves fast and covers so many important topics from her life in the present day to the horrors of her past.

The book was written by Amy Wallace and publish after Virginia killed herself. The introduction covers why, which was helpful to me. Otherwise, it would have been a lingering question while reading the book.

Sexual abuse is horrid. I know people who have been abused. All of them struggle with it. One might think Virginia’s case is unusual, but I don’t think so. I think human trafficking and sexual abuse are all too common today. AI generated porn will probably only make it worse. Abusers can never get enough as was the case with Jeffrey Epstein who abused hundreds (thousands?) of women.

This book is a must-read. It may help people who have been abused to heal. And, it will keep present what Virginia went through.

[k93] I want to say explicitly why Virginia opted not to stay silent, which certainly would have been easier for her. From the beginning, she told me she believed that her story would help other people–not just survivors of Epstein’s cruelty, but any person, male or female, who’d ever been coerced into sex against his or her will.

[k162] Because despite the unspeakable cruelties she’d endured throughout her life, Virginia opted to keep her heart open and, whenever possible, to lead with love.

[k175] “Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared.” Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior FIXME

[k209] My breath catches, and the familiar thrum of a panic attack rolls over me. Even as a child, I never liked to cause a scene. I would rather envelop my pain, holding the turmoil in my chest, instead of risking more danger by screaming and letting it out. So I stay quiet, trying to soothe myself.

[k212] I look down at my pretty fingernails–freshly manicured and painted a glossy ivory. I read the bracelet on my left wrist, a gift from a dear friend, that spells out “B-A-D-A-S-S” in lettered beads. I take one careful step and then another. My stomach churns, but I keep going. “Please,” I beg without speaking. “Please don’t let me faint in this exquisite place.” I find a bench and sit, looking around for exit signs. “I can make it,” I tell myself–a mantra I’ve relied on so many times before. I know from experience that I should not yet try to run.

[k362] When you grow up female, danger is everywhere. I’ve known that for as long as I can remember.

[k784] Every night, as I lay in my bed, dreading the now-familiar creak of the door, I tried to remember a time when I’d been more than nothing. I longed to be worth something again.

[k950] I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. Imagine if a trauma reel like this played in your head all the time, as it does in mine, and not just on the pages of a book you can put down if you need to, just for a moment, to steady your nerves. But please don’t stop reading. I know exactly how to help you get through these tough parts, just as I help myself: by focusing on the present.

[k1279] 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.

[k1306] How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away? If you didn’t like feeling dirty, you could simply have never gone back. But that stance wrongly discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable to him.

[k1311] A master manipulator who excelled at divining the desires of others, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.

[k3999] Please don’t hear this as a plea for sympathy. No one ever promised me that challenging my abusers would be easy.

[k4402] For example, CHILD USA, a nonprofit focused on child-abuse prevention, conducted a study of thousands of abuse victims who had been Boy Scouts; only half of those came forward before they were fifty. More and more, the public was coming to understand that being sexually abused as a child could take decades to process. And it could take even longer than that for a victim to imagine speaking publicly about that experience and naming his or her abuser.

[k4696] In the email, renowned computer scientist Richard Stallman suggested that I had been a willing participant in my encounter with Minsky. Stallman questioned whether Minsky “applied force or violence” and seemed to be arguing that if he did not, I must have opted in. “The most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman wrote of me.

[k4704] Just as Stallman defended Minsky, many friends and colleagues of MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito defended him after it was revealed that he had cultivated a close (and lucrative) relationship with Epstein.

[k4715] “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” Melinda would tell King, adding that she herself met with Epstein “exactly one time” because she “wanted to see who this man was.” Her reaction: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.”

[k5224] “And that’s true of every woman who ever complained about any kind of harassment,” Maitlis, played by the actress Ruth Wilson, continues. “Always uphill. Always against the tide. Always a battle against the unspoken. You know, the look in their eyes that says, ‘Really? Did he really?’…When I sat down with Prince Andrew, I was only ever hoping to ask the right questions. I didn’t know how he’d be or what he’d say. But it was the arrogance. The entitlement. He just couldn’t help himself. You know, the way that certain men, whatever their sickness, assume certain rights without ever giving it a second thought. Their want. Their need. Their impulse.”

[k5260] you’ve read this far, I hope my story has moved you–to seek ways to free yourself from a bad situation, say, to stand up for someone else in need, or to simply reframe how you judge victims of sexual abuse. Each one of us can make positive change.