A British prince was arrested at 8am and was stripped of his title; ambassadors, politicians and numerous other high-profile men lost their prestigious jobs; millions of files relating to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released and a US president remains under scrutiny. So much has happened since the death of Virginia Roberts Giuffre in April last year, and the posthumous publication of her memoir Nobody’s Girl six months later, detailing for the first time the full story of her abuse by Epstein and his associates. “This year has been extraordinary,” says Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s younger brother. “I just wish Virginia was here to see it.”
He is determined that there will be many more advances to come. Giuffre had become one of the most recognisable survivors of Epstein; in the midst of grief, Sky and his wife, Amanda, have become accidental advocates. “She paved the way, and we want to keep paving that road forward for other survivors out there,” says Sky.
They’re speaking from their home in Colorado, in a room filled with photographs and mementoes, such as the butterfly motif that Giuffre adopted for her cause. They haven’t done interviews from this room before. “I see her all around me,” says Sky, who apologises for getting “teary-eyed sometimes, so just bear with me”. They have got two children, and have a background in retail management and property investing, not politics. “We got thrust into it, within months [after Giuffre’s death], we were in advocacy work,” says Sky. “A lot of it was driven by a sense of purpose. Virginia used to say, ‘How do you turn pain into purpose?’ And I couldn’t allow her story to be narrated by people that didn’t either know her or really understand who she was.”
They are about to relaunch Giuffre’s organisation Soar (Speak Out, Act, Reclaim), and are campaigning to get Virginia’s law passed in the US, which would remove the federal statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases, as well as maintain the pressure to release the rest of the Epstein documents and keep him and his associates in the public consciousness. All this against a government – and a president named numerous times in the files – that appears to be doing everything it can to make the whole thing go away.
Thank you for posting this, OP.
A difficult read for this Sunday morning, but a very important one as we seek justice for the many victims of these heinous crimes.
I guess I did not actually ever really believe it was suicide, because of her kids. And then I read this, and it was because of her kids: I was unaware she’d been separated from them.
Her experience mirrors what many survivors go through, and it was too much. Her brother was speaking truth when he said,
“I remember her saying, ‘If I make my life look too rosy and, like, yes, I was abused, but then I got married, had kids, and I won a few settlements, so now I’m not poor, and now my life’s great … I would create more shame in other survivors. And that’s not the truth. I struggle every day.’ She really understood, because of what she’d gone through, how she needed to describe herself honestly in order to be really of service to other victims.”
