Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accused the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein of trafficking her as a teenager, has died by suicide at the age of 41.
Giuffre died in Neergabby, Australia, where she had been living, confirmed NBC News. “It is with utterly broken hearts that we announce that Virginia passed away last night at her farm in Western Australia,” her family said in a statement to the outlet. “She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.”
Giuffre, born Virginia Roberts, had alleged that she was brought into Epstein’s circle by his now-convicted sex trafficker associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16, with the pair grooming her to provide sexual services to Epstein and those in his close orbit. At that point, she had already experienced the trauma of sexual assault, become a child runaway, and suffered abuse at the hands of Miami sex trafficker Ron Eppinger, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to smuggling women from Europe for prostitution.
In 2015, Giuffre founded Victims Refuse Silence, since rebranded as Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), a nonprofit advocacy group for survivors of sex trafficking. Following Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on federal charges of trafficking minors, she gave an interview to the BBC in which she claimed she had been trafficked to Prince Andrew and raped by the royal on three occasions, echoing allegations she had first made in a 2014 Florida court filing. She later sued the Duke of York for sexual assault, with Prince Andrew settling the case out of court in 2022, before he would have been forced to give a sworn deposition, for an amount that Giuffre’s attorney, David Boies, called “substantial.” Andrew also pledged a donation to Giuffre’s charity but did not admit to any of her claims, and the exact terms of the agreement are unknown.
“Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking,” her family’s statement read. “She was the light that lifted so many survivors.”
This is a developing story.
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