Nobody’s girl and everybody’s questions

When I saw that the late Virginia Giuffre was publishing a memoir called Nobody’s Girl, I downloaded a copy out of professional curiosity, even though I have no experience as a pimp on my resume.

Once upon a time Charlie worked for a couple of years at a Florida facility for delinquent girls. Most were from poor families, many were abused, and almost all had stories nobody wanted to hear, because everything was complicated enough already.

Sometimes the girls would share with me fragments of their lives in the way people test water with one toe. I learned to listen for what was missing as much as for what was said and didn’t ask too many questions, not wanting to fall into the legal swamp and drown.

Giuffre’s book arrives as a global bestseller, even before publication.

She was, after all, the American-Australian woman who sued Prince Andrew of England for millions and helped expose Jeffrey Epstein’s empire of sexual exploitation. The headlines promised the familiar script: a trafficked teenager, powerful men, private jets, and a little island that sounds like something from a James Bond film.

Epstein could almost have been modeled on Ernst Stavro Blofeld, stroking his ego instead of a white cat, surrounded by silence and secrecy rather than sharks.

Ghislaine Maxwell might have stepped straight from the pages of Goldfinger, a kind of modern Pussy Galore. How Ian Fleming ever got away with that name still baffles me. Together they turned perversion into an enterprise and society into an accessory.

But once you open the book, that isn’t where it starts. It begins in a suburban Florida bathroom when she is nine years old and her father, she writes, takes over bath time and does all kinds of indescribable things including trading her for the day with a family friend who is a pedophile. The Daily Mail recently published direct excerpts from those scenes in advance of the book, and they must be among the most harrowing ever printed in a mainstream newspaper.

If the passages are true, they describe a child betrayed and abused by a parent in the worst possible way. If untrue, they demolish the author’s entire credibility and ruin the reputation of the father she accuses. Either way, the sadness is total.

What surprises me is how few reviewers mention those early chapters at all. They prefer to stick to listing the sins of  Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew, as though the domestic horror at the core of her story is too awful, or too legally awkward, to face.

I skimmed Nobody’s Girl with the habits of an old caseworker reading case notes.

The first test of veracity is geography. Epstein’s Lolita Express private jet could never have landed on Little St James, his private island. They must have landed in St Thomas, where everyone had to clear immigration before being ferried over to Epstein island by helicopter or boat. Those records would exist somewhere, yet none are quoted in the book.

Giuffre writes of “flying to the island,” which is plausible shorthand, but the lack of documentary backup or details is a pattern that repeats throughout the book. Just when you want some details that would confirm the story, the background seems to go out of focus.

Her description of Florida in the 1990s is a world I partly recognize and partly don’t. She paints it as a moral alligator swamp where almost every man is a predator, a rapist, or a fool. In my years working with runaway and abused girls, I did meet a few monsters, yes, but also weary mothers, indifferent bureaucrats, and some good people trying to stop the damage. Giuffre’s version of Florida seems like a pure nightmare. Maybe that’s how it looked from inside her life, or maybe trauma edits memory into sharper contrast than reality ever provides.

The book is emotionally convincing but forensically porous. Her employment by Epstein is beyond dispute. Photographs and flight logs confirm that she worked with him and traveled all over, yet it doesn’t explain how she obtained a passport as a minor, which would have required parental consent.

The wider claims, like being trafficked to scores of wealthy and powerful men, the presence at an orgy of eight “foreign” girls who spoke little English, a shadowy world of billionaire conspirators, politicians, and royals, remain uncorroborated. There must be flight manifests, hotel records, and immigration forms somewhere that could, in theory, prove or disprove much of it. No investigator or reporter really seems to have come to grips with all this yet.

After the James Frey scandal of twenty years ago, publishers promised they would vet traumatic memoirs more carefully.

Frey had written a best-seller called A Million Little Pieces, a supposed true story of addiction and redemption that Oprah Winfrey chose for her book club. It sold millions of copies and made him a star until journalists discovered that large parts were pure invention.

Oprah famously summoned him back onto her show for a public flogging, and publishers joked afterward that the book should have been called A Million Great Big Whoppers. What the industry really learned from that particular debacle was how to write legal disclaimers, not how to check the facts.

Nobody’s Girl bears the hallmarks of that new caution: there is legalistic phrasing, the expected denial from the father accused of rape and incest, and repeated invocations of “my truth” rather than THE truth. The result is legally safe for the publishers and their shareholders, but as journalism it is a bit shaky and it wouldn’t stand up in court without a lot of footnotes and citations.

As a piece of writing, it’s gripping and dreadful in equal measure, although I can’t help noting that  she had a ghostwriter and that her vocabulary in remembered conversations seems remarkably eloquent and erudite compared to the Florida girls I used to know,  making me wonder how many words have been put into her mouth, and perhaps the mouths of others.

As history, it’s unverified testimony awaiting either corroboration or collapse.

Reading it, I kept thinking of the girls I once knew in Florida whose stories never reached print. Some were surely less dramatic, others perhaps had even worse stories, like the 13-year-old who said she had had 750 sexual partners, but all were real, at least that is what I thought at the time. You don’t ask follow-up questions to revelations like that unless you are taking a legal deposition and you have a chaperone present and everything said is recorded on tape.

Giuffre’s memoir, whatever its omissions and gaps, has at least forced the world to take yet another look at what many still prefer not to see.

One detail still nags at me, though. Every visitor to the U.S. Virgin Islands has to pass through immigration, even billionaires. I keep wondering what those officers thought as Epstein’s motley crew disembarked from the Lolita Express and breezed in with its odd assortment of billionaires and teens in hot pants. Didn’t anyone ask any questions, or were they just waved through with the same jovial island welcome and perhaps a few nods and winks, that greased palms in pricey resorts in Florida?

Whether it’s fact, memory, or a blurred mixture of both, Nobody’s Girl leaves you unsettled. It definitely reflects trauma but not necessarily the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I closed it wondering which is the greater tragedy, that it might all be true or that it might not.