At 16 She Was Trafficked to the Powerful- Then Spent Her Life Making Sure the World Knew Their Names

At seventeen, Virginia Roberts met a woman at Mar-a-Lago who promised her a better life. Instead, she became a witness to one of history's most notorious sex trafficking operations. In mid-2000, Virginia Roberts was working as a locker room attendant at the spa at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Her father, Sky Roberts, worked there as a maintenance supervisor. Virginia had already survived more trauma than most people twice her age—she'd been sexually abused by a family friend starting at age seven, had run away from home as a teenager, and was trying to rebuild her life one shift at a time. That's when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her. Maxwell, a British socialite with an elegant accent and impeccable clothes, told Virginia she knew someone who needed a traveling masseuse. The pay would be excellent. The work would be easy. It was an opportunity to see the world. Virginia was sixteen years old. The "someone" was Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier with homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. What Maxwell described as massage work was something else entirely. For the next two years, from 2000 to 2002, Virginia was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell to their powerful friends. She traveled between Epstein's residences and Little Saint James, his private island. She was told to have sex with men she'd never met, men whose names she recognized from newspapers and television. One of those men was Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and second son of Queen Elizabeth II. In March 2001, when Virginia was seventeen, she was flown to London. At Ghislaine Maxwell's townhouse in Belgravia, she was photographed standing next to Prince Andrew, his arm around her bare waist, Maxwell smiling in the background. The photo was developed three days later at a Walgreens near Virginia's home in Florida. Years later, that single image would become one of the most infamous photographs in the world. Virginia alleges she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times—once in London, once at Epstein's New York mansion, and once at an orgy on Little Saint James involving multiple underage girls from Eastern Europe. Andrew would later claim he had "no recollection" of meeting her and suggest the photograph might be fake. But the photographer who took it kept thirty-nine copies, and the timestamp on the back confirmed the date: March 13, 2001. In September 2002, Virginia escaped. She traveled to Thailand for massage training at Epstein's request, but there she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor. They married ten days later. Virginia never returned to Epstein's employment. She moved to Australia with her new husband and tried to leave her past behind. But trauma doesn't respect geography. For years, Virginia lived quietly in Glenning Valley, New South Wales, raising three children—Christian, Noah, and Emily. She told almost no one what had happened. Then, on January 7, 2010, her daughter was born, and something shifted. Looking at her newborn baby girl, Virginia made a decision: she would speak. In March 2011, Virginia contacted the British tabloid Mail on Sunday and sold her story for $160,000. The article included the photograph with Prince Andrew. Within days, FBI agents contacted her at the U.S. consulate in Sydney. The world now knew her name. And the world did not make it easy. Tabloids called her a "prostitute" and a "sex worker," ignoring that she'd been sixteen when Maxwell recruited her. Maxwell publicly called her a liar. Powerful men denied everything. Virginia received death threats. Her home was broken into. She lived with the fear that someone might try to silence her permanently. But she refused to be silent. In 2015, Virginia sued Ghislaine Maxwell for defamation after Maxwell called her accusations false. The case was settled in Virginia's favor in 2017 for an undisclosed sum. That same year, unsealed documents from the lawsuit began revealing the scope of Epstein's network—powerful politicians, academics, business leaders, all connected to the financier who'd sexually abused dozens of girls. Virginia founded Victims Refuse Silence in 2015, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping survivors of sex trafficking. She later relaunched it as Speak Out, Act, Reclaim—SOAR—in November 2021. She spoke at conferences. She gave interviews. She wrote a memoir. She became, as her family would later say, "a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking." On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on federal charges of sex trafficking minors. Prosecutors alleged he'd created a vast network to recruit and abuse girls as young as fourteen. Finally, it seemed, justice might be served. Then, on August 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. His death was ruled a suicide. The criminal case against him was closed.

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