More Jeffrey Epstein claims may be on the way in the late Virginia Giuffre’s memoir
The truth has a funny way of getting out, and in the case of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it may well arrive in the most unexpected way.
The news that the memoir of Virginia Giuffre – the woman who claims that the late paedophile trafficked her to Prince Andrew when she was 17 – will be published posthumously is no doubt chilling for the White House and causing deep anxiety for the Duke of York.
The book, titled Nobody’s Girl, is due for release in October, ensuring that the Epstein scandal is going to remain in the headlines for at least the next two months.
Ms Giuffre, a mother of two who was living in Australia, committed suicide in April, aged 41. However, come October, she may get her final opportunity to reveal all, including about her association with Prince Andrew.
Ms Giuffre has claimed that Andrew had sex with her when she was under the legal age of consent, something he has denied. He paid what was reportedly millions to settle a civil sexual assault case with Giuffre in 2022, which accepted no liability of guilt.
But she could also give her unvarnished opinions about Donald Trump, who knew Epstein, who hanged himself while awaiting trial in 2019, for years and once called him a “terrific guy”.
The Epstein scandal roared back into the headlines in early July when the US Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a letter effectively shutting down the investigation into his associates.
It caused uproar among many of Trump’s supporters, who have been demanding the release of the so-called Epstein files for years – supported by Trump himself – and he has been scrambling to contain it ever since.
The most extraordinary move came last month, having the No 2 official in the DoJ interview Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in jail for recruiting underage girls for Epstein.
The transcript and audio of Maxwell’s interview was released last week. In those records, Maxwell said she was unaware of the existence of any files, denied ever seeing any criminal wrongdoing while she was around Epstein, and said Trump had been a “gentleman” at all times.
However, Maxwell’s credibility is questionable, having already been blasted by her sentencing judge for her “lack of candour”.
The embarrassing interview read more like a Reddit Ask Me Anything than a proper interrogation. Lest we forget, when Maxwell was properly questioned as part of a defamation case brought by Ms Giuffre in 2016, her statements led to prosecutors charging her with two counts of perjury.
Maxwell denied them and they were dropped after her conviction on the more serious charges.
The Trump administration’s actions reportedly include combing through 100,000 pages of documents and releasing a few dozen that were already in the public domain.
Among those who are being questioned by the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein investigation is Merrick Garland, who wasn’t even Attorney General when Epstein was arrested in 2019.
These “investigations” amount to little more than a distraction to make it look like Trump is doing something about the Epstein scandal.
Which brings us to Ms Giuffre.
Having covered the Epstein story for over a decade now, it is striking – and at this point, grimly appropriate – that a single victim’s voice is likely to give us more honesty than the work of the entire US government.
Since the beginning of the scandal, it has fallen to people like Ms Giuffre to speak up in the face of opposition from men – and Maxwell – who had far more resources and money than she did.
Her memoir promises fresh details about her claims against Prince Andrew, which will be excruciating for him and make it impossible for him to fully return to public life.
Ms Giuffre claims that she was recruited by Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, and any new details about that will be uncomfortable reading for Trump.
She was around Epstein regularly for more than a year circa 2000 and could give fresh insight into his relationship with Trump, who denies any wrongdoing.
To be fair, Ms Giuffre has suffered from her own credibility issues: in 2022 she dropped a defamation lawsuit against the US lawyer Alan Dershowitz and said she “may have made a mistake” in calling him one of her abusers.
But despite that, there’s going to be more truth in one page of her memoir than in all of Maxwell’s lies.
Dead men tell no tales, so the saying goes. In this case, one woman could have quite the story from beyond the grave.
