Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex-Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41

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U.S.|Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex-Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/virginia-giuffre-dead.html

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She accused Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, of recruiting her to join their predatory ring. She also sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault.

Virginia Giuffre, a woman with blond hair wearing a navy suit and light blue handbag, walks down a tree-lined street.
Virginia Giuffre in 2019, the year Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking and conspiracy.Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Sam Roberts

Published April 25, 2025Updated April 26, 2025, 9:05 a.m. ET

Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) died by suicide, according to a statement by the family. She wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in an automobile crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 miles per hour.

In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009, Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

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Ms. Giuffre in 2023 with a photo of herself as a teenager. She said that she was recruited to Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring as a minor and that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among his powerful friends.Credit...Emily Michot/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

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