Nobody's Girl: Virginia Giuffre's Reckoning for Epstein, Maxwell, & the Billionaire Elite

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Good night and good luck.

Hey folks, it's Rick Wilson. Welcome back to the Lincoln Project podcast. We're happy to have you with us as always. Although I will say in advance, this week is going to be a difficult conversation for many people. And as all of you know, the nation has been riveted by the story of Jeffrey Epstein and Gelain Maxwell and the horrific damage they caused to so many young women in the last decades. Epstein is no longer among us. Galain Maxwell is, is, is right now widely speculated to be up for a pardon. Um, which I think is the reason that I am so delighted today, um, to welcome Amy Wallace to the show. She's the co-author along with the family members of Virginia Jafrey, one of the, um, most horrifically abused victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell. Um, and her posthumous story of that life, uh, trapped in Maxwell's world, uh, is out now. It's Nobody's Girl. And, um, I read through it last night and I, I have to say, it is riveting. It is dark. It is tragic. And, and, and, and I, I'm, I'm thankful, Amy, that you're on the show today because I don't know I can do it justice in the way that you've lived this story. Um, so what I'd like to do is start with asking you to tell us the story of Nobody's Girl. Tell us the story of Virginia Jupy's life, which is, which is hard and, and tragic from the very start with abuse from her father. And it goes on to a sadly shortened life at the hands of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and other people who in various ways abused her. Um, and, and, and finally, I want you to tell us the story of how she had the courage to start telling the truth about what had happened to her. So, Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I'll let you take it from there.

Well, thank you so much for having me and, uh, for shining light on this important story. I wish Virginia was here to be speaking to you herself. Um, you know, as you note, she died in April at 41, way too young. Um, I think the best place to start, obviously, the book is 400 pages long, and we could talk for seven, seven hours about the chronology of her life, but the best place to start perhaps is, is the purpose, uh, the reason that she wrote the book. Um, her, her main reason was to try to help other victims of sexual abuse of, of any kind, not just Epstein and Maxwell, um, but, but any person that's been coerced into sex against their will, men or women. And she wanted to make those people feel less alone, which sounds like a, like a small thing, but it's a huge thing. She wanted to say, "You know, I, I see you. I, I am you. I understand the shame you feel. I understand the daily struggle of dealing with that kind of trauma. It never leaves you." And, and she says this in the book very eloquently, "If I can help one person feel less alone, then this book is a success." So that was the frame within which we wrote. Uh, that meant telling, as you say, the story of her early childhood, which was very happy. Um, and I think that's important because she got a lot of resilience, I think, out of those early years of feeling loved.

And then abuse within her home. Um, which her father has denied. Uh, we put that in the book. Um, but her, but her brothers and her mother believe that it happened, and we talked to all of them. Um, and then being abused by others before she even meets Gillen Maxwell at the Mara Lago Spa, where Virginia is working as a $9 an hour towel girl, 16 years old, you know, summer job like you would hope your teenagers would get. Um, she loved it there. It was beautiful. She felt honored to work there. Her father worked there. And yes, because her father worked there, her father introduced her directly to Donald Trump. So, she had personal interaction with Donald Trump. To be clear, the book does not implicate Donald Trump. Virginia was, was, was in the world of, of Epstein and Maxwell for a little over two years. And in that time, again, we can't attest to any other time that Epstein and Maxwell were abusing girls. But, but during that time, Virginia did not see our current president, uh, abusing anyone of any age. Um, but, but, but it was important. Then again, it's not just a catalog of horrors, this book. It is very tough to read at times, and we, we tried to use some, some devices within the book to help people get through that. Literally, Virginia turns to the reader at different times and says, "Look, yeah, like, hello, I know this is so much. Believe me, I live with it every day. Please keep going." And not just, "Please keep going," okay? So back to the horror reel. She's, "Please keep going, and let me show you where I am in my life now." You get a break. You get, you get breaks throughout the book. Um, in that early, that first half of the book, there is some really tough road, and readers are going to find it. Take, take great breaks yourself as you read. But then it, it is a portrait of a woman in full. It is a portrait of a person who was abused terribly in her young life, who then bravely and incredibly escapes from those, from that, that abuse, uh, which was hard to do, and we can talk about why that was hard to do. And then she becomes a, a mother, a wife, she has happiness in her life. That's one of her biggest triumphs is that she was able to, to keep an open heart after people betrayed her over and over again. And then she goes on to become an advocate for all of us. So, it's, it's the arc of that whole life. Um, and I, I, I hope readers feel that they really get to know her in, in all of her highs and lows as they read the book. So, and I do think that is something about this that is, is truly inspiring is that regardless of her untimely short end, she managed to move from a world that was incredibly dark and crazy and, and while it doesn't leave her in this story, she, she's able to segment it enough to go out and have a, a rich life.

I want to start with that story of the darkness a little bit because she meets Galain Maxwell at the Mara Lago spa, and at this point, we know from Galain Maxwell's trial that she was actively recruiting young girls around Palm Beach for Jeffrey Epstein and had other people in her circle recruiting young girls for Jeffrey Epstein. She sees Virginia, 16 years old. Talk to us about how she brought Jupy into, and Trump later says he stole her from him.

Yeah, he took people and because he took people, I said, "Don't do it anymore. You know, they work for me." And he took, uh, beyond that, he took some others. And once he did that, that was the end of him. I didn't like when they steal people. I don't like it.

Mr. President, Epstein has a certain reputation, obviously. Just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you? Were some of them young women?

Were some of them? Were some of them young women? Well, I don't want to say, but, uh, everyone knows the people that were taken. And, uh, it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But, uh, that story has been pretty well out there. And the answer is yes, they were.

Yes, they were. Yeah.

What do they do in the spa?

Jobs in the spa.

Yeah, people that work in the spa. I have a great spa. One of the best spas in the world at Mara Lago. And people were taken out of the spa. Hired by him. In other words, gone. And, uh, other people would come and complain, "This guy is taking people from the spa." I didn't know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, "Listen, we don't want you taking our people." Whether it was spa or not spa, I don't want them taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again, and I said, "Out of here."

Mr. President, did one of those stolen, um, you know, persons that include Virginia?

Uh, I don't know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he, he stole her.

That, that's Trump sort of treating her as property, but we'll leave that aside for now.

As an object. Yes.

As a, as a thing. Yes.

As a thing. Yes.

How was it? What was the story of Maxwell? What was Maxwell's pitch? How did she bring Virginia into Epstein's world? And what happened then?

Well, in some ways, the book reveals sort of the predator's playbook. And I'll, I'll show you what I mean by telling this, sort of, what, what I'm trying to get to. I didn't phrase it best, but I, I want to sort of like show people what that methodology they were using was.

Well, the, the, the sort of genesis story here in terms of how Ghislaine entrapped, uh, Virginia into Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell's world is, she and her driver, Ghislaine's driver, are driving through the driveway, I think, of, of Mara Lago Spa. Um, Epstein at that point, I believe, was a member. Um, they were frequenters of the, of the club. Um, and she spots Virginia walking along towards her work. She's, she's going to work. She's young. She's very, very pretty. Uh, she looks very young, as you'll see in pictures. There are pictures in the book that remind you that she was 16 and she looked perhaps younger.

She had a childlike affect in that, in those photographs.

She did.

So Virginia walks into work and gets settled, and it's a quiet moment. So she has just been working at the spa. I, we're not exactly sure of the timing. Mara Lago has not revealed the, the employment records, but she's been working there a couple weeks, and she's been very inspired by what she sees there because it's beautiful. It's gilded. It's, it smells good. It's, people come out of that place feeling good. And, and Virginia at 16, looking for what her life can be, even after so much abuse, she's already suffered, thinks, "Maybe I, maybe I could be a masseuse and work in a place like this. That would be amazing." So, she has taken out of the library a book about anatomy. She's trying to start learning, but she's never given or seen or received a massage in her life.

And Ghislaine walks in. Uh, she, she says to Ghislaine says to her driver, "Stop the car."

We know this from, from depositions.

Right?

And he stops the car, and Ghislaine comes striding in after. Okay. So, what does Ghislaine look like at that point? She's tall. She's posh, elegant, dark, elegant, amazing, you know, sophisticated accent, carrying a handbag that Virginia estimates worth is worth more than her father's truck. And she walks right up to the front desk and says to Virginia, "Oh my goodness, you, you're reading a book about anatomy. Are, are you a masseuse?" And Virginia very humbly says, "Oh, well, no, I'm, no, I've never, I don't know anything about it." "Well, would you like to learn? I know a very wealthy man, a brilliant man, who, it is, is looking for a new masseuse, and he would love to train you. Come today. Come. Come. Absolutely. This afternoon, once you got off work." Virginia asks her father for permission to go. Her father actually ends up driving her to Epstein's house behind the hedges, you know, behind the gate at, in Palm Springs. At that point, it was painted, painted pink, and we tell you the reason why. Epstein explains it. I don't know if your readers will be too offended for why, but—

They should. No, go ahead.

Pink is for—that's what he always said. Okay. So, it's painted a hot pink.

And she walks in. Ghislaine greets them and takes her right up the stairs to the massage room where there's a naked man lying there. It's Jeffrey Epstein. And right that very day, that first day when she meets Glenn Maxwell, Glenn Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse her and rape her. Boom.

Not the Ben's first day on the job.

No. And Virginia explains beautifully, eloquently, the heartbreak of that for her because she thinks she's going into this, you know, situation she doesn't know much about. She's going to do her best, but it's going to better her life. And instantly it says to her, "All anyone wants from you is sex, and that's your only worth."

And it was both of them.

In her testimony, it was not always both of them. I, I misspoke. But, but there has become this narrative about Glenn Maxwell. I don't know where it comes from, given that she's a convicted sex trafficker.

Correct.

Okay. She's convicted in a court of law. Four brave women got up and talked about what she did to them. Virginia was not one of them.

I know.

But she, she's convicted. And somehow, over the past several months, it's become as if she was just this, this poor madam who, who just kept the date book and wrote things down. And yes, she procured, but she was just caught up in this nasty—

She was one more victim of Jeffrey Epstein.

One more victim. Oh, it's so terrible that the only person who's serving time is a woman. That's so unfair. Okay, this woman was a sexual predator herself.

Yes, she was a predator.

She procured girls. We all know that, which is evil. And then she, she sexually abused them herself. She said, "Come over here right now and sexually service me." She hurt them during sex. Virginia describes a particularly ghastly moment where Ghislaine is mad at her for something. So, she uses, you know, sex toys, hurt Virginia sexually, and damage that, later Virginia dealt with that physical damage for the rest of her life. So, this woman is evil, a monster.

And, and we haven't even, we haven't even talked about the fact that she used her gender to lure these girls in into the web. And none of these girls, no matter how desperate, would have followed a man in his 50s into his house because he said, "Would you give me a massage?"

Right. Never.

Would a posh, posh woman with beautiful RP pronunciation and a beautiful British accent and a, and, and all the signifiers of wealth and taste and style. Um, and you know—

Yes, they did. And, and, and you raise, I think, a very key point that underlies this entire story, which is class.

Sure.

You know, she comes in, she's posh. Posh is the British term for it. She's a wealthy woman, and Virginia is a poor girl, and most—

Virginia is a girl from the wrong side of 95.

That's right.

She's from the west side of 95.

So were many of the girls. They were, in fact, they were chosen expressly because of that, that they would be more desperate financially. Also, they had both Maxwell and Epstein, but particularly Maxwell, because she was the one out there standing in front of high schools trying to recruit. She had a nose for who had already been hurt because those people, those young girls were more susceptible to the manipulation, the psychological manipulation that we can talk about, that again, is part of the predator's playbook, that that makes them easier to dominate, for lack of a better word.

Ghislaine Maxwell approached me at the spa area. She was like this really bright Mary Poppins kind of a figure, and she said, "Oh, you're reading a book on massage therapy." And you know, we started talking. She goes, "Oh, you know what? I know this guy. There's an opportunity actually. If you want to become a real massage therapist, we can get you trained. You can come for the interview tonight. And if he likes you, then you'll be a real masseuse, and you'll get to see the world, and you'll get paid $200 per massage." And it, like, no alarm bells went off because it was this proper English lady who just looked so nice.

Epstein's victims have talked about how they weren't sure who this guy was, but because Ghislaine seemed so proper, surely it's got to be legit. Her posh upbringing and her accent gave this veneer of respectability coming from a woman. I think that was incredibly manipulative, and I think it was absolutely critical in Epstein's operation.

My dad brought me over, and he shakes hands with Ghislaine, who promises that she'll take good care of me and she will have someone drive me home. She led me up a staircase, and we made a right into Jeffrey's room, and Jeffrey laying naked on the massage table. Jeffrey lifts his head up, looks at Ghislaine. Ghislaine looks at him, and I call it the Cheshire cat grin because his face just went like this, and it was like a nod of approval. Ghislaine got me quickly into, like, "Here's the lotions. Here's the oils. We're going to each take half of his body so you can follow my instructions." It just looked like a legitimate massage. Then they also started asking me questions about my life. I really, really wanted this job. So, I opened up to them. I said, "Look, this is an opportunity of a lifetime for me. I've been on the streets. I've been abused." And, um, that's the worst thing that I could have done, 'cause I just let them know that I'm vulnerable, and, um, I'm their perfect type.

I, I think Virginia's story here, that, that the exemplar of what happened to her, really is something that I, I think it's a very valuable lesson in this book for other people to watch for that pattern of behavior from abusers, to watch for that pattern of behavior from these kind of predators, because she was, she was her unique self, but in many ways, she was a profile that they had in their heads on how to get to a girl like her, how to manipulate a girl like her. And, and Virginia was one of many, many girls in Palm Beach. I mean, the Julie the Julie Browns reporting on this, and that we're putting on the case, only four may have come out to testify, but there were dozens and dozens of young women who were, who were caught up in this Epstein Maxwell abuse trafficking.

I, I think there were probably thousands of women. Um, but in the Palm Beach investigation, that initial bungled, ridiculous investigation of Epstein where he's given a sweetheart deal where, remember, he is, he is incarcerated, and I'll put that in quotes, but he is allowed to leave during the day, go to an office, an office that he set up, um, and abuse, with a massage table.

Yes, with a massage table.

Um, that, that early investigation, the, the case files are public, and anyone can read them. It's girl after girl after girl. I think they had, they found 38 girls, some of whom, you know, teenagers, all of them, and many of them, uh, from, as you say, the wrong side of the tracks. Um, but, but, you know, the question that keeps coming up among reasonable people, and I've heard it a hundred times in the past week, you know, "Well, if it was so terrible, why didn't they just leave? Why did they go back? Why did these girls go back? Why, why didn't Virginia just walk out of the front door of the Manhattan townhouse and, and just wander into Manhattan and, and escape?" There are several answers to that, but I think they're important to understand. One, they were threatened by Epstein and Maxwell that if they spoke out, they would be hurt or worse. Um, Virginia specifically describes early on in knowing them that Epstein calls her into his office and he throws a picture on the table, a photograph, a grainy photograph of her younger brother Sky, who people will probably know who that is, because he and his wife Amanda have been out talking about Virginia's legacy and the book all for the past several weeks. They're, they're amazing people. So, he's in middle school, and V, he, and, and Epstein says, "We know where he goes to school. Here's a picture of him with his little backpack on. You ever turn on us, we hurt him." Okay. So, threat obvious.

Yeah.

But beyond that, there was this sickening, uh, psychic mental jujitsu again that predators use on their victims. And they say, yes, you know, they, while degrading them sexually, psychologically, physically, right, they are also saying, "We see something in you. You're special. You're, you're, we can help you have a better life." I'd been on the streets, and I thought, you know, "Well, maybe this is the lesser of two evils. I had the promise of an education, and maybe this is just how the world works. If abuse is so prevalent in my life, maybe that's just what it is. That's just life." For individuals who've been sexually abused as a child, this confirms that they don't have any meaning beyond giving pleasure to somebody else. Of course, you'd expect them to go back, especially if there is even a glimmer of hope that maybe something good will come out of this, because it's a really devastating feeling to be nothing. And again, the class issue comes in here. "We are wealthy, and our opinion of you thus has more value than your opinion of yourself. And we, we will help you with that. We'll help you." So, there's this weird, almost parental element, even though there's sex involved, which makes it even more sick and depraved.

Yeah. But it, but, but again, parents who are, who are hearing me now, I'm a parent, and you think, "Well, that, I mean, it happened to her, but it would never happen to my kids." Kids want affirmation. They need it. And predators are very good at this kind of thing, at telling them what they need to hear. Making them feel normal. Making them feel accepted. Making them feel pretty. Making them feel smart. Whatever it is that that particular kid, male or female, needs. And those people are out there, and they did not all die when Jeffrey Epstein died in his prison cell. So, this is a cultural issue. This isn't just a Maxwell-Epstein, these horrible monsters. This isn't Jeffrey Dahmer just died, and it was a one-off cannibal. These people are representative of something in the culture, and that's something that we all need to be looking at.

And I want to talk about one more thing, and then move on to, like, this place they fit in this sort of very twisted part of our culture. Um, at one point, and she's still, I guess, she's probably 17 or so at this point, they ask her to have a baby for them. Talk to us about that part of the story because I, I did not know that before, and I found that so deeply disturbing that it, it's really stuck with me.

Well, the New York Times has actually done some great, uh, reporting on this idea, not so much that that story, which I'll get to in a moment, but the idea that, that Jeffrey Epstein wanted to seed his DNA into the human race.

I, I had read that. I did not know about Virginia. So, how do you do that? You have, you have, you know, babies, but you don't want to raise any babies. You don't really like babies. You want to propagate another set of people that have your DNA. That was that was how high an opinion he had of himself. Never finished college. Remember, not that you have to go to college to be a valuable person, but this guy surrounded himself with rich and powerful people, talked a big game, had a huge ego.

So, I, my sense is from reading other reporting that Virginia was not the only one that he, they asked this of. Um, but Virginia had a particular experience of this. She's actually, I believe, she's either right at the end of being 18 or about to be 19. Uh, because it's right before, within weeks, they send her off to Thailand, which we can get to. But they, they say to her, they sit her down on the dock, you know, at, on the private island after a day at the beach, and they, Epstein is particularly fond, which he was not usually, and he, I think he puts his hand on her back and he says, "I've so appreciate how you have, you know, been there for us and, and helped all my friends think you're, you're wonderful." Meaning the people she'd been trafficked to. Um, they had told her all along, "We think you'd be a great mother." And part of the reason for that was this tucking in ritual where she would tuck Jeffrey in every night at his request. So, there had been this, this sort of backbeat of, "You would make a wonderful mother someday." And they, and they asked her, Ghislaine is there as well. "We would like you to have our baby." I'm not sure how, how Maxwell's DNA would be involved. I think it was going to be Virginia's DNA and Jeffrey's DNA. She would carry the baby, and Ghislaine's in the background explaining all the financial terms. You know, "We'll, we'll give you a monthly stipend. You can live wherever you want, but it'll be a lot of money, but you'll sign the rights to that child over to us."

So, it's, it's modern Handmaid's Tale. It's, it's, it's not fiction. It's this is happening in the world that we live in. And so that, in addition to a very savage rape that precedes that, that is described in the book.

Yes.

Um, those are the two final straws for Virginia. And, and as she writes, "Asking me to have a baby for them."

What if that baby was female?

Would they, would I raise that child up for them to abuse? Yeah.

And in a very classic way for Virginia, who was so warm-hearted and generous, more generous to others than to herself at times.

Mhm.

She had an easier time protecting that hypothetical baby than she did herself. And she then, at that point, realizes, "I have to get out of here somehow, or I'm gonna die here." And what she says to them is, she, she knows better than to say no to them, right? So she says, "Absolutely, but beforehand, remember how all along since that first day you procured me, you said you were going to train me actually to be a masseuse and have a profession. I would love to do that before I carry this child for you." And she thinks they're going to send her to, you know, a massage school in Florida or New York or one of the places. And they say, "Okay, we're going to send you to Thailand." Um, there's a massage school there. It's actually a, a well, has a very good reputation. I've looked into it. It's, it's a real massage school. Okay. But they also have a girl, they want her to procure in Thailand for them. That's why they're sending her to Thailand.

And she, and she gets to Thailand. She's alone, and she starts going to the school, and she meets, uh, the man she will ultimately marry. He's Australian. And she confides to him very early on in their relationship, what's happening, and how she's afraid. She thinks she's going to die in this, in this horrible system that she's been absorbed into. And he says, "You don't have to live like that. Come back to Australia with me." And that's how she gets out.

So she was trafficked repeatedly to a number of high-powered individuals. Um, raped repeatedly on the plane, on the island, in Palm Beach, in Santa, and in the, at the, at the, the—yes. So I want to ask this question. As this is happening to her, is she starting to understand that there is a global network of these people that Epstein is somehow either connected to or or empowering or in, or, or, or engaged with? Did, does, is she sophisticated enough to understand this is the prime minister of X? This is, I mean, she, she saying Prince Andrew is one thing, but the, a lot of these other people were very influential, very powerful folks. Um, did she start to, did that, did that combination of like awareness and fear rise as this was happening, and, and how does she talk, how does she talk herself through that, that risk that she must be feeling at that point?

Well, this is an interesting area. Um, there were some men who were in the houses all the time. So she knew who they were. She knew their names. Um, you know, not only was she trafficked to them within those houses, but then she was also sitting on couches near them, and, and they were often, the girls were sort of this adornment, this garnish that would be sitting on, you know, while the, the men gathered, you know, they would just be sitting there to, for their amusement, to look at them. Um, so there are men that she absolutely knew to speak to. She knew their names. But, but for her, and I, I know for others who were in that, trapped in that world, there were other situations where you were not politely introduced to the man that you were going to service by force. You were sent into a darkened massage room, and there's a naked man in there, and you're just supposed to service him, and you, you don't know who that is. So—

Is it—

How did her lawyers painstakingly figure out who she was trafficked to, other than the men she absolutely knew, right?

And, and that process is, is pretty meticulous and admirable on their part.

They created different buckets of photographs. Well-known men that you and I would just recognize as, "Oh, I know that guy." Um, well-known men who were in Epstein's orbit during the time that Virginia was there. People who were in Epstein's orbit when she was not there, after she was long gone. And so if she picked those people, she was clearly an error. There's no way she could have known them.

They put all these photographs down on the table. They mix them up.

They told me she never made a mistake. She never picked from the wrong bucket. Right.

So, and, and, and what she always said to me, you know, there's, there has been carping about her memory. And again, this is the classic playbook of people who try to denigrate accusers. You know, they're, they should remember the color of his shoes. Therefore, she's lying about everything. She's, she's a liar. She's trying to get paid. And, and how could she have remembered? And she acknowledges, you know, that sometimes she, she took Xanax to try to endure this. So, there's no way she could remember. She acknowledges all those things in the book. Um, but what she always said to me was, "I may not remember exact dates, times, days of the week, but when there is a man on top of you raping you, and his face is six inches from your own, you remember that face."

Yeah. So, uh, she goes to Thailand, she meets the man that she will eventually marry. Tell us about the separation from the Maxwell-Epstein axis that happened. How does she, how does she broach that with them? Tell us that story because I think it's, I think it's this is where she has to start showing a level of strength and overcome the intimidation of these people. Um, even if it's 5,000 miles away.

Yeah. Well, she, she meets the man she will marry. They actually get married in Thailand, although they, they have to get married again in Australia when they finally get there to make it official. Um, and, uh, they, they get married in Thailand, and, and her husband says, "I think it's important for us, but most importantly for you, that you call them and you tell them it's over." Right? For your psychic wellness.

Sure.

Um, so she calls and reaches Jeffrey.

Okay.

Um, and she says, "I've fallen in love. I've gotten married. I'm never coming back." And he says, "Have a nice life." And he hangs up. So then begins, and this is where, for readers who are like, "Oh gosh, can I get through this book?" This is where the book takes a sort of amazingly beautiful turn where she gets to Australia. She's still carrying all of the trauma, and that's going to haunt her for the rest of her life. And we, she writes about that, but she's absorbed into her husband's family. He's from an Italian family. They're very warm and like to eat, feed you, and they're full of love. Each of his parents, uh, parent her in different ways. They teach her how to load a dishwasher. They teach her how to make coffee. She doesn't, she doesn't know how to do anything, really.

Right.

She's been in a, in a dream world, basically, or a nightmare world.

Or a nightmare world.

Right. Um, and she, and she slowly starts to try to, heal. Um, and she's been told, this is explained in the book, that she will probably never be able to have kids in part because of some of the damage that was done to her sexually. Um, but she gets pregnant, and she, and they end up having two boys back to back. Um, and it's this unbelievably happy time for her. Um, and then finally, they have a third child, and that child is a daughter. And that is a key moment for her because she realizes, "Oh, I now have a, a girl, and that girl is going to grow up to be a teenager, and that girl is going to grow up to be a woman, and she's going to move out into this world of ours. And this world is screwed up towards women. It fetishizes teens or younger, as look at a fashion magazine. That's the body everybody's supposed to have. You know, it looks like a teenager." Um, but beyond that, sort of cultural overlay, there are evil people out there who could hurt my daughter, and I need to do something about it. I need to stand up.

So, she's had this idyllic several years where she has a different last name. She's in a, a, a far-off country. Epstein and Ghislaine are leaving her alone. She's hoping they don't even really know where she is, although they track her down later. But at that point, she's like trying to rebuild a life. She's still waking up in the middle of the night with night sweats, like with the images of these men raping her in her mind, but she has a, a like a cocoon of safety, and she's raising babies. And that makes her feel, um, you know, there's that thing where, where as a parent, when you, when you get to do the things for your kids that you never were done for you, it's like this sort of special healing for yourself. It's almost as if you're, you're doing it for, for yourself. And she's having those experiences. Um, but then with the birth of her daughter, uh, she talks to her husband about it. She said, "I need to stand up." And at that point, she goes public with her allegation. She's the first victim of Epstein and Maxwell to put their name on, on her complaint. And I'm not judging anyone else who didn't do that. It was an enormous risk for her. Um, people are allowed their privacy, but Virginia was the first person to go public.

Right. So they did track her down. And once she is, once she has put her name to this complaint, talk to us about what they tried to do at that point, and what, and, and where the story starts to take a, a darker turn for her, uh, mental health, I think, and, and her family life.

Well, they track her down actually before she's gone public. They track her down when the Palm Beach, uh, Florida investigators are doing an incredible job of finding, I think it was 38 young girls, um, who, who they just all told the same story, you know, like, "This is how I was procured. This is what happened in the room. This is what he did then. This is what she did then." They, I mean, the echoes, and you can read those files. They're easy to find. So, so they call her at this, this point because they know that she knows a lot, because she wasn't just a one or two visit person to the Palm Beach house, which many girls were. She lived with them. She traveled to Morocco. She traveled to Paris. She, she traveled alone with Epstein sometimes. She, tra, she went to the next conference in, in Carmel with him, there. You know, she, she was in a lot of places with them and saw who they hung out with. So, she's a particular danger to them. So, they, back to back, Ghislaine and, and Jeffrey call Virginia, track her down. She's sitting with a baby in her arms. She's pregnant with her second child, and say, "Well, we're just wondering, are you talking to the investigators?" And she's like, "No, no, no, no, no. I don't want anything to do with this. And please just leave me alone. Please, just let me have a life." At that point, she hasn't had her third child, her daughter. Okay? She's just, she's just like, but, but terrified. They know where she is, and they know that she's dangerous to them. Um, so, so yes, I mean, I guess the chapter that, that begins, she then moves into a full-on advocacy role with the birth of her daughter. Um, but then the next set of horrors arrives. This is not physical or sexual degradation. This is intimidation, death threats, right? Breaking people, breaking at her house, you know, being stalked by paparazzi, which people can argue is her own fault because she became, she came forward. But just imagine what it's like to live in that, in that existence with small children, with, with people who you love, and they're taking pictures of your kids as you walk them into their doctor's appointments. So, that was all happening. Um, men who she had named in public depositions that have now become public. There are many of them. I've read them all.

Right.

Names are there. And some of those people have been in touch, of course, and said, of course, to with her and said, in essence, "Take our names out of your mouth," right? "Or else." So—

And a couple of them who have backgrounds that are, where you could readily believe they would have the capacity to deliver on the, "or else."

Yes. In two ways. One, yes.

Murdering her.

Yes. Killing her.

Two, and, and, and that I'm not exaggerating.

No, I, I'm not either. I know one of the, I know who one of the people is, and, and that person could deliver very bad business.

Very bad business. And he'd do it in five minutes.

In a heartbeat.

So, there's that. And then there's also, "We will keep you in depositions and courtrooms for the rest of your life. We don't care if we have an actual case." They didn't say all this. This is me opining. But, we have the means to drag you through the worst things that happened to you.

Oh, yeah. A lifetime. And also that will involve, "We want your medical records. We want your, the, you know, you get into, you, you tangle with us. We will be asking you about everything that's ever happened to you in your life over and over and over and over again." And, and there's a scene in the book where her husband says to her, you know, how, you know, soldiers go off to war and they come back, and they are carrying PTSD, but at least they're done with the battle, and then they have to, they can hopefully try to begin to heal. But you never get off the battlefield. So, how are you supposed to ever heal? And, and I, I think that's, that's not just Virginia's experience. That's been the experience of every survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and, and Maxwell, and arguably a lot of other survivors of sexual abuse. He said, "This is how they are worn down and treated." And I, again, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, I guess, it's been a week ago, talking about this very thing. That's something we need to look at. Why are we putting so much emphasis on, and putting it always on the women or the young men, whoever it is, who are alleging? Yes, they should come forward. Yes, people are innocent till proven guilty, but why don't we ever aim our spotlight and our relentlessness at the people accused? And I think that really speaks to a lot of, of the, the scandal of this cover-up of the Epstein materials that the federal government has, because we are going to see a, a transition very soon now to a lot of the people that are defending this president. They're going to say, "Oh, these girls are all crazy. They're all grifters. They're all trying to make money off this. They're all, you know, they're all trying to, to, to cash in on this." And Virginia's story is richly told in this book, but there are so many other victims who are telling their own uniquely painful tales of this, of this abuse by these two monsters. Um, and I think it, I think it, I mean, I'm so glad that you guys have written this book because it is a very human story. It is a very real, personal story. Um, I, I want to—

It's not, it's, it's also not a rare story.

Sadly, sadly, it is not.

Sadly not. Sadly not. I—

I want to come to the next phase of this because this was a, a trauma Virginia carried until the end of her life. Talk to us about the sort of final phase. Um, you know, why the family had to leave Colorado or leave Australia, the, the incident in Colorado, and her eventual, uh, taking of her own life because that is the tragic coda to this entire, uh, story.

Okay, I'm going to launch into that, but first, I'm going to just say the Epstein files. Donald Trump campaigned—

Oh, yes.

On the plank that he was going to release them.

Mhm.

The list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.

Yeah. It's, it's very interesting, isn't it? Probably will be. By the way, probably.

So, if you're able to, you'll be—

Yeah, I'd certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy's interesting because it's so many years ago. You know, they do that for danger, too, because, you know, it endangers certain people, etc., etc. So Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing, but yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it.

So let's just keep that in mind. I don't know what the about-face has been about, but he campaigned on it. I was with Virginia in Australia in October, right before the presidential election, and she was validated by that because she and all the other brave victims had been trashed and called liars for, for 15, 20 years. And finally, this former president who's running for president again is saying, "Enough with that. Open the files up."

She, I mean, that was the right thing to do. Um, okay. So, let's move into the, I mean, I just, I just, we have to just put a—

It really is, it really is something that has been elided, I think, a bit in the press, is like how central that was to his campaign at one point, saying, "We're going to release it all," and his followers believed that very deeply. And, and beyond that, I mean, why did he say it? Arguably, in a political strategy sense, he said it because it mattered to his base. It mattered to MAGA, and believed it. They believed there was a—

A conspiracy.

In general about pedophilia.

And, you know what? From what I know, they may not be wrong. That said, this isn't a MAGA issue.

No.

This isn't a partisan issue. This is a human issue.

A monstrous human depravity that exists in our culture. Yes.

Rich people should not be allowed to rape poor children. Period.

Fundamental 101.

And they shouldn't be.

able to get away with it and they shouldn't play by a different set of rules. And I think it's not even about raping of children alone. It's about a whole broader part of our culture which is that rich people get to do certain things that poor people don't get to do or they don't get as hard a punishment or whatever else. So that's the like the big meta idea.

Life without consequence. A life without consequence. Entitlement. Treating other people like trash because they don't have the power, the money, the privilege that you have. So that's where the anger and the demand is coming from in my view. 100%. More than people caring about Virginia, who I loved. More than people caring about Epstein or Maxwell. It's this bigger idea.

So, to me, it's like that is the frame, everyone. Let's keep remembering that. And to a lot of MAGA folks that have been critical of people talking about the Epstein files, as I've said from the very beginning, I don't care who's in them. I don't care. If it's a Democrat, roll it out. If it's a Republican, roll it out. If it's a business leader, roll it out. If it's a member of the royal family, let it all come out. Absolutely. Because these people have gotten away with things that are truly monstrous for too long.

Amen. Amen to that. Um, okay. So, I'm going to try to take you through maybe the easiest way to do this is to talk chronologically in terms of my last eight months or year, I guess.

Okay. So, we'd been working on the book for more than three years. Last October, we had a finished manuscript. All right. But, you know, a lot of I'd been with Virginia in person several times. I lived with the family twice for about a month in total. Lived in their guest room. I'd been with her in different cities around the world whenever we could get together and then there was a lot of Zoom, you know, obviously we were reporting, we were talking, but we had a finished manuscript and I wanted to sit next to her and go over it one more time, one last time, word by word. This is going to be a big deal for her in amazing ways and in very hard ways for this book to be published and for her to stand up behind it. And I wanted to make sure that she felt comfortable and was ready and knew that I'd be by her side every step of the way.

So I went to Australia in October, as I've said, and we went over the entire book. And she, we fixed a couple of things. We added a scene or two that were new, but we basically I would go off and rewrite and then I'd come back and I'd read those parts to her. So, by the end of that visit in October, she had approved the manuscript. She'd approved the title. I brought a picture of the proposed cover. She approved that. Um, you know, we were in the home stretch and she approved it all.

Now, I will back up along the way in the reporting of the book and we did a lot of reporting around Virginia. But she had told me that in 2015, when she was living with her family in Colorado, that there had been an incident where her husband had physically hurt her. She and later he and I discussed it as well because I was in Australia and I got to know him fairly well. We discussed it and they both portrayed it as just a terrible time in their lives. They were being hounded and chased by paparazzi. There were a lot of tensions. There was litigation going on. They had three small children and they described it to me as, you know, a very difficult time and that they had worked hard to get past and that they had three children. And Virginia said to me, "I don't want it in the book." So, I'm a ghostwriter. I serve at the pleasure of the people that I work for and I respected her decision, particularly because it was for the good of her kids. So, it in October it was not in the book when we locked that book, the 2015 incident.

The holidays happen and in January, Virginia called me one night and she was hysterical and she said it was morning her time in Australia. It was my nighttime. She said that her husband had hurt her again very badly. We were on FaceTime. I could see her. She said, you know, she was afraid and that she was hurt and I made sure she was in a safe place. I offered to call her mom and her older brother Danny, which I did. And so at this point, I know things are not good in their household.

So, in the interim period between that and her death, she did a couple things. She sent, she was in a car wreck, which was terrible. After she was in a car wreck, she sent me and another member of our team an email saying, "In the case of my passing, I want this book published, not just for me, but for all survivors of sexual abuse. It's important." So, we had that email. Then, she made public in a statement to People magazine that she was a victim of domestic abuse. So at that point, her swearing me to secrecy on the 2015 incident was no longer holds because she's made it public, right? And then tragically, she killed herself in late April.

So, as we prepared to publish the book, we had all the things you typically need. We had a locked manuscript approved by the author. We had, you know, all the other title, cover, everything approved. But obviously the world knew that she was no longer with us, sadly. Right? And so I set out to write a preface that would help the reader understand basically what happened in those intervening months between when the book was finished and it being published, or and her death. And also talking about the process, a little bit about the process that we used to make this book as nuanced as accurate as careful, her best, best-selling, warts and all of her life, to giving the reader a little insight into how these things work. I think there's a lot of mystery around ghostwriting and how this works. It's not just speaking to my tape recorder, I'm going to clean it up and put it in a book. We had a lot of extra reporting around her and we wanted to give some sense of that. So that's the chronology.

Okay. Well, you know, Amy, I want to say I not only appreciate the work that you have done to tell this story for Virginia, but I appreciate posthumously her courage in telling the story because you can see in reading through this, this was not an easy thing for her to unwind and unpack. And the tragedies of her life, I hope, will be outlasted by the courage of this message because this is a problem that is a scale, basic scale problem. This is bigger in our society than we've decided we wanted to handle. And I think the Epstein matter being so front and center in American culture right now, and this book coming at this moment is a really vital part of that telling and vital part of how we address that as a country and as a culture. And it's not just an American problem, it's a global problem. But I want to thank you, Amy, so much for coming on the Lincoln Project podcast today and all the best to you and all the best of luck on the book and the best to Virginia's family because they should know she died a hero.

Yeah, she is. She's an American hero. She did this for all of us, not just for herself. She did. And I'm so grateful for you shining light on her book and on her. She was an American hero and she was in that way. This book, as tough as it is to read, it's inspirational because we all need to be brave. We all need to stand up. We all need to speak out when things are wrong. And she, courage is the highest virtue. She was a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. She was a high school dropout. And she had more courage than a lot of us do. Believe me, I know there's a lot of these corporate guys that are on that list who still think they're going to get away with it. Still think they're going to skate on it.

Well, that's why the Epstein files need to come out. And that's why it all needs to come out. Why this cover-up that's happening at the top of our government is the most shameful cover-up in American political history. So, thank you so much again. I'm deeply grateful for you coming on the show today and deeply grateful for the work you've done here. Nobody's Girl is the book, folks. Get it. Read it. If you have women in your life that you love and you're a dude, read it. It matters. All right, thanks, folks. We'll talk to you again next time.

So, I'm delighted today to be joined by Amanda and Sky Roberts. And this is coincident with the release of Nobody's Girl, the biography that written with Amy Wallace has told the story of Virginia Giuffre and told the story of her life surviving this horrifying moment with Jeffrey Epstein and this horrifying abuse by Epstein and Maxwell, and trying to live a life where she could become an example and somebody who would say to other victims, you can make it through. You can have a life. You can survive this. So, Amanda, Sky, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate you guys. Talk to us about what we don't know about Virginia. I want to make sure people understand more about her than just she was a victim. Talk to us about her life and her journey and about how you guys came to work on this book with Amy Wallace.

Well, Rick, thank you again for having us here. It means a lot to be able to kind of keep her voice alive. I think that has been the sole purpose of us, you know, coming forward. Losing her in the way that we lost her was so devastating and we needed to find a way through healing but keeping her alive at the same time. I think what people forget often times, especially when it comes to Virginia, she became so prominently known as this figure in the public, so strong and really the voice of all the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell. And so she became like this pillar of strength and resilience. And those things are so true. But they also forget that there is a human behind that who is flawed, who is still on the journey of recovery. It is a lifelong journey to recover from this type of trauma. Who is a mother and a sister who, in spite of everything that she's gone through, found a way to have joy in her life and laugh and love and still find the best in humanity after everything that she had gone through. And she was just she was an inspiration. And like Sky says this all the time when we come forward and we talk, it's not like we sat around the table and we talked about Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. She was my sister. We laughed, we joked, we talked about our kids. She was so quirky and funny and could make you laugh in the worst times. And so she was all of those things. And I think what the book does that is so important, it brings that back. It brings back the humanity. It lets you see what it looks like as a 16-year-old to go through these horrific things, right?

We always knew that she was writing the book. But it was most recently after she passed that we decided to kind of collaborate with Amy. Her brothers were there the last couple of weeks of her life and we felt it was so important to provide context to the reader as to what really unfolded. And that's where we came up with the preface. You know, there was another story that people didn't really get to know and it was so important that if we were going to have the story come out, that the whole story was there.

You know, I think that's I think that reading the preface of this book, reading the book in its entirety, it is she was, in the eyes of most people who know her name, she's the one who stood up. She's the one who said enough. She's the one who got away to some degree. I mean, yeah, I don't think you ever truly escape that kind of abuse in some ways. You can, as you said, it's a lifetime of recovery or something like that. But she was the one who somehow inside of her found that core of courage against somebody who was this terrifying figure. When did you first find, when did she first tell you about Jeffrey Epstein? What did you guys find out about what was happening with her and Jeffrey Epstein? Was it during or was it later? Talk to us a little bit about how that sort of how you became aware of Epstein and Maxwell and her life.

Yeah. Um, so I would say I knew from a very young age about Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. She, you know, I'm five years younger than she is, so it would have been, you know, some, I think I might have been around 11 years old, right in that ballpark, 10, 11 years old. Okay. Uh, I had come to find out because, you know, she had gotten a job at Mar-a-Lago as a locker room attendant. We all know that story at least through the pages. She, Maxwell preyed upon her at Mar-a-Lago and she became, you know, she was really inspired. She wanted to become a masseuse. I mean, that was, you know, it was kind of on her upbringing. She really wanted to become a masseuse and she was reading a lot of books into that. Um, and so, you know, when I found out that she had gotten this job where she was traveling and traveling the world, getting to meet, you know, famous people, I had looked at it as like, oh my god, like she's really doing it. You know, we didn't really come from a lot growing up. We were pretty simple. I mean, our house, we had horses and chickens and goats. She kind of replicated that later in her life as well because we just had that passion for it. But I was really young at that time when I first found out. She would come home on occasion and she'd bring like signatures and be like, "Oh, I met this famous person." And, you know, that's really what I looked at it as at least in my early years was like, oh my god, like she's doing this, you know?

Right. Um, come to find out, you know, obviously years later, I think when we were having our daughters is when she really started to come forward a lot more publicly. I remember having a conversation with her and her saying, "Hey, you're going to probably see things. You're going to probably see my face and I want you to know like, uh, it's just hard. It's hard to choose."

No, I get it. Take your time. Take your time. Um, she, she would say, you know, you're going to see me on these things, but I prefer you not to read them. Here's the general outline of what happened. Um, she wanted to protect us in a lot of ways from it. She, you know, in the book you'll read that Jeffrey Epstein had put a picture of me in front of her.

I heard. Yes, I read that. Could you always have this? Yeah, I'm sorry. She always had this like protection mode, right? It was always this protection mode of like, you're going to see things, but I don't want this evil to touch you.

Um, so we had found out when our daughter was born, right around that time in like 2014, 2013, and that's when she started to really come forward with the family, also in the public eye. We knew generally what was happening, but that's when she started to be a lot more transparent with us about.

I think that's when she really started to reveal detail. I think they knew early on when she had first come when she was Jane Doe in about 2006 or 2007. Okay. When when he was first arrested. So they knew that that was happening, but it wasn't until she moved to the States where we really had in-depth and detailed conversations about what really went on.

Right. So that story of Epstein showing her a picture of you, you know, I guess you were in middle school, I think, [snorts] I think is what the book said, but you were young. You were a kid. That reign of fear that Epstein imposed on her and from other accounts of other victims, they were afraid that his power was such that if they crossed him, they would die or their family members would be harmed. How did she articulate that fear to you? How did that fear sort of manifest in how she told you about the things that Epstein and Maxwell had done?

I mean, I would honestly say, like, again, Amanda said it best. It's not like we sat around the dinner table talking about Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. I think the easiest and the most simple way to put it is she didn't want the evil to touch her own family in this world. She would repeat that to me many, many times. Even through some of the details, but it's not like she would sit down and give me every single intricate detail. I think that's why reading this book was so raw even for us because there are things in there that are just kind of next level, something that you wouldn't really want to read about a family member, but it is important because it does give context not just to myself, but to the reader. This wasn't just like a fairy tale where you go on this island. It was heinous. These people did really disgusting things to these girls.

I remember too, there was when she was coming forward in 2014, 2015, and they were starting to build a case here in the States, when she lived in Florida, there became this really big sense of fear. I remember them. We had went out. We all had went out. They had either went out for lunch. They came back home and they called us like frantic because their house had been broken into and things had been turned up and nothing had been stolen. Like they called the cops and everything. Nothing had been stolen. The house had just been completely open and damaged, tossed. And so, and that was just again, that petrifying fear. And she felt like whoever she could protect, the least people that knew the details at that time was for the best because there were very real threats to her life previously and now these things had started to happen again when she was coming forward to build the case. So it wasn't just like a mind thing. There were real things happening at the time when she was building her case again.

Right. So, you know, as you know, her story as it unfolds in your lives, you know, and again, I I kind of love the fact that even after all this, you guys still have the normal family things, you know, you were just, you joke around, you talk about kids, you talk about pets, whatever it was. After she passed, you became the keepers of this quest for her to achieve justice for herself and for the other victims and in the work she was doing more broadly outside of the Epstein circle for victims of sexual abuse and child sexual abuse. How did that feel for both of you as you sort of realized you had to pick up the torch?

I would say for me, it's we felt this grief right from the beginning. I think we were shocked about how things had unfolded. We went to Australia to try to bring my sister back because she was going through so many health issues at the time. And so I think we were still in a lot of shock just from the beginning. But in some ways, I think we found healing through advocacy. I think something that was very important to us was to keep her voice alive in whatever capacity that we could. And my thought process behind it as well, just as her brother, was, you know, she fought for me growing up. She fought for so many people out there, daughters, sisters, mothers, other survivors. And I think it was our time to come forward and fight for her. And I think that we feel this sense of urgency because it does give us strength. It gives us a lot of strength to talk to other survivors out there because I see so much of my sister in them.

I think that's really important in this conversation. I do also, you know, I've started to see more of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell standing up. I think they're following in her example. I think they're following in the path she broke here. But right now, I want to ask what your feelings are on the fact that there is an effort from the very top of this government to keep the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's abuse of hundreds, and some argue thousands, of young girls and women behind closed doors, locked in a vault. This government is putting a tremendous amount of effort into covering up these matters, even though the victims are crying out for justice, crying out for the truth to be told. How does it, how are you guys, how do you look at this moment where you've got from the president, the Department of Justice, the FBI, everybody on down trying to cover up what Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did, not only to your sister, but to hundreds or thousands of other women?

What a betrayal. What a betrayal of our justice system. What a betrayal to the survivors. And what a betrayal to the American people. This administration specifically, and this is why this is the issue, and in some ways, they kicked the hornet's nest, and now they're shocked that the hornets are stinging them, right? They used their trauma and dangled it like a political toy for them to use because it doesn't matter the aisle that you stand on, left or right or in between, this is an issue that everyone can agree on. And there is no gray area here. So in that sense, it's infuriating. Virginia would be infuriated that this is happening. But what I also see here is it's so painfully obvious. It's so corrupt that the stones are being turned over and people are really seeing what's going on underneath. And this isn't just this administration, okay? This is decades and decades. When this case came forward, so many people knew from the very beginning what he was doing, or if they weren't implicated, if they were in his circle, it was very clear what was going on. And so it's all of this is coming to the surface now. And so in a way, I have hope that so much corruption is being exposed that we are finally saying enough is enough. We need to do the right thing here. Look how clear this corruption is happening and it's coming from the top and it's trickling all the way down. And it is our job to hold these people accountable because they are elected in these positions.

Yeah. I mean, it is it's a disjustice to the American people, to us, to survivors. I know my sister would be screaming from a mountain right now. You know, I think the survivors were very hopeful that this administration ran their campaign on the fact that they would release the documents and it feels like they've completely turned 180 degrees the other way and said, "Oh, you know what? Nothing to look, nothing to see over here." And I, I sort of describe it like sometimes it's like I'm like, "Did I take crazy pills?" Like, seriously, am I like?

Yeah. Did and did I not like, is this real?

It's the gaslighting that is beyond. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a continuation of the same gaslighting and abuse that you see. You know, it just makes, I'm sure for all the surviving victims, they look at this and go, I don't care. And frankly, speaking for myself, I don't care who's in it. If these powerful men are Republicans, Democrats, or Martians, I don't care. Roll it all out.

Yeah. Tell the story. The only way that these women are going to find any kind of closure in this world is if this story is exposed and people are held to account.

Yeah. No, 100%. And you know, like they have the documents, Rick. I mean, they have them. My sister gave the FBI a ton of documentation that she never received back. And so the fact is is that these survivors gave them the material. They already have it in their possession. And for, you know, you have to really ask yourself, why are they withholding that from the American people?

So, so, so she provided the FBI with documents directly regarding her time and the abuse she suffered while she was in the web of Maxwell and Epstein. I want I just want to, I mean, I know this and you know this if you read the book, but tell us, let's make sure those words are clear in this podcast for the American people that Virginia turned over a lot of very incriminating material to the FBI concerning the abuse of Maxwell and Epstein.

100%. She turned over journal entries, diaries. She turned over photos, documents that she had never received back. Um, she was also told because one of the things that she also talks about in the book and is still very traumatizing to her is that like her, a lot of these things were videotaped. He had surveillance all over that home and showed her the room, showed her the room saying like, "Yeah, this is why these people will never come against me." And the FBI told her that they seized those videotapes. And she says that she said it to the very end that they had that. And no, we're not asking you obviously to release the videotapes, but who's in those videotapes?

Right. It's the evidence that those tapes contain, not the, it's not the puritanical, like let's see the porn, you know, let's see the dirty acts. None of that. Nobody cares about that. I care that a corporate Wall Street banker is in there who's getting protected by our government now. I care that foreign officials are in there. I care that CEOs and political officials and God knows who else are in those are in those things. And I think that that is one of the things that has been sort of washed over here. Virginia's evidence is now that now the FBI and the DOJ and Pam Bondi and Cash Call like, "No, don't have anything. What are you talking about? No, we don't have anything like that here." That to me is one of the like final outrages in the story.

I mean, I feel the same way. I think again, Virginia would be mortified as to how this administration's handling this. I mean, again, they ran this campaign. Many survivors were supportive of the fact that they were going to release these documents. They felt sure that they were going to, like, if they're going to, he's going to do it. We're finally going to get some sort of justice. And now it just feels like a slap in the face because, you know, we're stuck here kind of in the whim. And they're like, "Oh, but we released 33,000 documents now to date, maybe a little over 40." And it's like, guys, this is 1% of the overall documentation that's out there. It's like, this is pure gaslighting of like, don't look over here. We gave you what you wanted. It's like, no, you gave us nothing of what we wanted. You gave us what we already knew.

When you look at the state prosecution, which I will argue to my grave was a weak inside deal, and you look at the federal case that was built on building on Epstein himself, and you look at the evidence that has been collected in both of those cases. We're not talking about a few pages of affidavit. We're not talking about a few vague memories. Virginia's evidence she turned over and gave them was names, dates, faces, places. And from testimony from other victims, their evidence was names, dates, faces, places. This is tens of thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. Anything that took, I'm going to get your feeling of this. When they put a thousand FBI agents on this to look through this material to identify whether the president was in it or not, that means that these people were seeing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and there are other names, there are other faces, there are other individuals, there are other crimes that they have been, that these FBI agents now know are out there. I mean, it must be a terrible moral burden on these people to think every day, yeah, I saw all these stories of child sexual abuse with all these powerful men. I'm going to sit on my hands now. I'm going to keep quiet. I'm not going to stand up and do the right thing. I mean, I don't know how I could do that if I had been one of those FBI agents assigned to this case to say, "Yeah, I'm just going to cover this up now."

Yeah. I think that's what it's going to take for the roof to cave in on this. I think whistleblower. It's going to take someone who has seen with their very, very eyes to have the courage. And what I would say to them is, have the courage that Virginia had. Have the courage that every single survivor who was brutally violated by these people in power. Where is the moral conscience? We got to find it. We got to find it. Have that courage because despite everything, and I mean very real threats to her life, to her family's life, she still stood against that adversity and said, the truth has to be exposed because this isn't just about one thing. This is about a system of abuse that has allowed this to go on over and over and over again. That's what I would say. And I do believe that that is what it's probably going to take.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know how I can even remotely come close to what Amanda just said. I mean, I completely agree with her in the sense that it does take someone with courage to come forward. I mean, it shouldn't be the survivor's burden to carry to release the names, to release the information. I mean, it's just such a heavy burden when it comes to safety. The fact that they could get sued into homelessness, it's a very dangerous position to be in. And so, you know, you have documentation there. You have support from the survivors, even though they claim, "Oh, it's only about 20 of them." I think what Mike Johnson said, I'm saying, "Mike, like, what is it going to take, Mike?" Like, for real. Like,

You have 20. One is enough, Mike.

One is one too many.

One is one too. Yes. Thank you, man. That's perfectly said.

It's just infuriating. I think. Guess before we wrap this up, I I I and this is a difficult interview first off and I very much appreciate both of you and everything you're doing in this in trying to make sure Virginia's story is told. What else should people think about and know about Virginia as a person and as an advocate before we go?

I think we always smile when we say this because it's just, I think we're at a point in grief where we're in this sense of joy and like remembering her personality. Especially him, like their relationship was so special. Like they had such a twin-sy relationship and like you get to really see that bond in the book. And I will tell you, that broke me. It broke us multiple times. And the one thing that I told him was like, what a gift it is to have that in writing after someone is gone, to know like what they felt about you. And so I would say when you read that in her book, it is the very core of who she is. She is like the epitome of love and caring for someone else. And it's an honor. Like it's such an honor to know her.

Yeah. It is a beautiful remembrance. You know, I was very moved by the book and it's interesting because I knew enough of her story, but she did come off as a person in full when you read this, you know, the ups and the downs. And I think the work that you guys are doing and your brother Danny as well, who's not with us today, but is also part of this telling the story, is so important. Hey folks, before we leave, what tell me about the butterfly pins?

Um, so butterfly pins are, it was one of Virginia's favorite symbols. Um, it was also, I think, one of her favorite creatures out there because it's just, it's such a, it's such a strong resemblance to a survivor's story. It's, you know, a survivor starts out in, you know, what you would perceive as a cocoon, experiences a lot of pain and what would be perceived as ugliness and sacrifice to end up by the end transitioning into a butterfly, which is beautiful. And in some ways is, you know, it's just the epitome of what a survivor is. And so, um, this represents also her nonprofit, which is SOAR. She never got to see that full or all the way through, which is something that's very passionate to us. So if you go to the SOAR, the butterfly is her symbol, and that's Speak Out, Act, Reclaim, which is what it stands for. But essentially, it's to provide survivors resources moving forward. She wanted to, she always used to say, like, if I only had, you know, educational resources or financial resources or therapeutic resources when I got out of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's reach, like where could I have gone? And I think that's what she wanted to provide to so many survivors out there, whether from trafficking, abuse, or sexual abuse, or childhood abuse, like they're all kind of intertwined together. And she wanted to provide those resources so that survivors could learn to find their voice and step up and be that advocate because with together, collectively, we're feared. I mean, we know that we're on the right side of truth. So, 100%.

Anyways, long story short, the butterfly is very important to us because it was very important to Virginia and it truly represents, you know, her transition from a victim to a survivor.

It is a symbol wired down in literature back to the Babylonians of the caterpillar, the chrysalis, the butterfly, the evolution to something through something through something tough and ugly and hard to something beautiful and liberated. So, um, I want to thank you guys so much for coming on the show today. Uh, and I want to encourage our listeners to reach out and explore Virginia's organization and to read this book. It is moving. It is tough, folks, in parts. It is really a hard story because you are seeing the insight of how power and sexual abuse have intersected in this country and the need for us as a country and a culture to push back on it. Amanda and Sky, thank you, my friends, for coming on today. I am deeply grateful for your time today and folks, I encourage you to take a read of Nobody's Girl. It is a harrowing story and I think you'll learn something from it about resilience and strength and courage. Thanks everybody for listening to the Lincoln Project podcast. We'll be back again next week.

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Good night and good luck.