There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. The late Virginia Giuffre has gone a step further by serving up her final helping of vengeance against Prince Andrew by publishing her sure-to-be-revelatory memoir, Nobody’s Girl, from beyond the grave this October. Giuffre collaborated with the American writer Amy Wallace on a 400-page book that is expected to divulge in no doubt excruciatingly painful and embarrassing detail, the various relationships that she had with the notorious likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and – of course! – the Duke of York himself.
Announcing the book, her publisher Knopf claimed that it would offer “intimate, disturbing, and heartbreaking new details about her time with Epstein, Maxwell, and their many well-known friends, including Prince Andrew”. Although Giuffre died by suicide in Australia in April this year, at the age of 41, she sent Wallace an email expressing her wish that the book should be published in any event, saying that: “The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders. It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness.”
Knopf supposedly paid millions of dollars for the memoir, matching the rumoured multi-million pound settlement that Giuffre reached with Prince Andrew in 2022 out of court, which allowed him to avoid the potentially disastrous – and legally hazardous – prospect of testifying in court in the civil sexual assault case that she brought against him.
It was widely speculated that Andrew was informed by his family (or, at least, his late mother) that if he was not entirely certain that the case would go in his favour that he would have to pay up, but that if he was not cleared in a public forum that he would no longer have a place in the royal family. This has largely proved to be the case ever since, and although the Duke occasionally appears, embarrassingly and briefly, at set-piece events such as Christmas get-togethers at Sandringham, he has effectively become a non-person.
Will the book be great literature? That seems doubtful
Although Andrew might wish that his withdrawal from public life is enough, that seems unlikely to be the case. The rumours surrounding his behaviour with Giuffre (and others) are sufficiently widespread and persistent firstly for a recent biography of him, Entitled, to be a number one bestseller in the United Kingdom (although some critics, including me, found the book to be a relentless hit job that grew wearying long before the end) and now for the publication of Nobody’s Girl to be one of the biggest literary events of the year, perhaps even the decade.
Will the book be great literature? That seems doubtful, but it will, without any doubt, be essential reading for anyone who is interested in the downfall of wealthy and powerful men. It’s not even impossible that it might have some light to shed on that most vexed and controversial of issues, namely whether her tormentor Jeffrey Epstein really did repent of his sins long enough to commit suicide, or whether someone else stepped in during one of the convenient periods that the prison CCTV cameras were turned off.
In any case, Giuffre’s book will be unmissable proof that, even with its author no longer present to point the finger, she is still wholly capable of causing reputational damage to the great and the not-so-good. Many of those surviving may have breathed a sigh of relief at her death. This news has proved that such an exhalation would have been deeply premature.
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