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As Ghislaine Maxwell barked ‘Stop!’, the chauffeur slammed on the brakes and looked around to see what had caught her attention. It was a young blonde girl — perhaps aged 14, he thought.
In fact, Virginia Roberts was 15 but she looked younger in her white uniform. She had just come out from the spa of Donald Trump‘s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, where she was working as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant.
Business had been slow that Tuesday in 1998, so she had gone outside to read a book on anatomy. Having watched the club’s masseuses at work, she had set her heart on becoming a massage therapist herself.
Sitting in the warm sunshine, she looked up to see a good-looking woman in her late 30s walking towards her. To her surprise, the woman introduced herself, then asked Virginia about the book she was reading.
It was Virginia’s first encounter with Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite daughter of the disgraced British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell and procuress for billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
As Ghislaine Maxwell barked ‘Stop!’, the chauffeur slammed on the brakes and looked around to see what had caught her attention. It was a young blonde girl — perhaps aged 14, he thought
She had excellent manners, a ‘prim and proper’ English accent and seemed very friendly. After they had chatted for a while, Ghislaine asked if Virginia did massages. The teenager explained that she wanted to, but had yet to start her studies.
Ah, said Ghislaine, ‘It’s so funny that you’re reading a book on that because I know this older gentleman who’s looking for a travelling masseuse. He’s super-rich. He flies around everywhere. If you want, you can come by for an interview.’
Virginia declined: she didn’t yet know enough about the human body to risk a trial, she admitted. But Ghislaine said that didn’t matter: if the gentleman took a shine to her, he would get her the finest training.
‘He’s got amazing abilities to help people out. That’s what he likes to do.’
Then came the flattery. You have a cheery personality, said Ghislaine — just the sort of thing my rich friend is looking for. And, from the Post-It notes stuck on the edge of the pages of your anatomy book, it’s clear you’re an enthusiastic learner.
By THE time they parted, Virginia had agreed to let her know if she could come over for a ‘trial’ after work.
With high hopes, she hurried over to the tennis courts, where her father, the club’s maintenance manager Sky Roberts, was working. Far from raising any objections, he thought Ghislaine’s proposition sounded like a wonderful opportunity to get accreditation as a massage therapist.
That evening, he drove her to Epstein’s pink waterfront mansion. Ushered in, they were greeted by Ghislaine, who shook Mr Roberts’s hand and thanked him for bringing his daughter.
Nervously, Virginia followed her upstairs, past long tables laden with pictures of beautiful women and young girls, some of whom were naked.
They entered a room containing a king-size bed and a turquoise massage table. The carpet, Virginia noticed, was Burberry. A nude man was lying face down on the table. She tried not to gawk.
Ghislaine made the introductions, then said she would show Virginia the ropes, starting at Epstein’s toes and working her way upwards. Virginia steeled herself. As a masseuse, there were clearly some things — such as nudity — she would have to learn to accept.
In fact, Virginia Roberts was 15 but she looked younger in her white uniform. She had just come out from the spa of Donald Trump’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, where she was working as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant
Epstein looked up with a Cheshire-cat grin and asked her to call him Jeffrey. Somehow that was reassuring; at least he didn’t seem scary.
Ghislaine did most of the talking, telling Virginia that if she did well, she would travel around the world as Jeffrey’s masseuse and be well paid. It sounded like a dream come true.
Both of them softened their hands with rich body butter, then Ghislaine started with Epstein’s feet — with Virginia mimicking her every move for about 40 minutes. During that time, she was peppered with questions about her life.
She answered them frankly, telling them she had been sexually abused as a young child. Epstein made light of this, telling her she was a ‘naughty girl’.
Then he rolled over. Virginia remembers going red with embarrassment. She was even more surprised to find Ghislaine had taken off her own top. Suddenly the older woman started undressing her, licking her breasts and sliding up her skirt. ‘Oh, you’ve still got little-girl undies,’ crowed Ghislaine, exposing Virginia’s ‘love-heart’ panties. Epstein snickered.
Moving around her, Ghislaine — now completely naked herself — began caressing her intimately from behind. Then Epstein had sex with Virginia.
No one asked if she was comfortable with what was going on. She wasn’t, but she didn’t dare protest.
Media proprietor and fraudster Robert Maxwell at a party on his yacht with daughter GhislaineÂ
So why did she let it all go so far? A large part of the reason was that she had already been sexually abused by older men.
During these nightmarish experiences, she had learnt the survival tactic that would help get her through the next few years. She simply numbed herself to what was happening and forced her mind to drift elsewhere.
What made this latest abuse all the more devastating was that Virginia had made a determined effort to draw a line under her troubled past. She was going to have a normal life. A profession. Maybe get married one day. During the first 40 minutes with Ghislaine and Epstein she had even been on a kind of high, congratulating herself that she was already getting a valuable lesson in massage technique. Then they had sexually assaulted her.
For a girl who had already suffered terrible abuse, it was relatively easy to retreat to that familiar feeling of numbness. At the same time, she consoled herself with the thought of the golden future she had been promised.
Afterwards, Epstein — acting as if nothing had happened — asked Virginia to resume massaging his feet while he rambled on about how clever he was and how much money he had made. She knew he was pleased because he told her he would become her mentor and she’d be his teacher’s pet.
He paid her $200 for the ‘massage’ and Ghislaine asked her to return the next day.
Ghislaine made the introductions, then said she would show Virginia the ropes, starting at Epstein’s toes and working her way upwards. Virginia steeled herself. As a masseuse, there were clearly some things — such as nudity — she would have to learn to accept
When Virginia Roberts fell into the hands of two rich and sophisticated predators, she didn’t stand a chance. At the age of seven, she had been sexually abused by a close family friend who used to tuck her in at night.
‘It turned my entire life around,’ she recalled. ‘Everything changed. I went from being a very happy child to a completely different person.’
Dreading to come home at night, she started staying out as long as she could, smoking weed with a group of misfits. Often, she ran away from home, staying at friends’ houses.
Unable to cope, her parents sent her to a centre for juvenile delinquents — but she escaped one day and bought a one-way ticket to Miami. There, she lived on the streets, sleeping with at least two older men in return for food.
Virginia remembers sitting on a kerb one day and weeping. She was 13 years old and hadn’t eaten in three days. Just then, a black stretch limousine pulled up and the back door opened.
A fat, balding man, who was accompanied by a striking young blonde, asked her: ‘What is such a sweet little girl like you doing sitting alone on the street looking so upset?’
Although she was suspicious, at least these strangers were showing some concern. So Virginia told them she was very hungry, hoping the man would give her money for food. Instead, he invited her into the car so they could talk some more. She got in.
The man introduced himself as Ron Eppinger, owner of the modelling agency Perfect 10. It was, in fact, a front for international sex trafficking.
The girl beside him was Yana, a teenage model and illegal immigrant from the Czech Republic — one of many he rented out to his uber-rich clients for more than $1,000 an hour.
After treating Virginia to a restaurant meal, Eppinger took her to GAP Kids, where he bought her some tight shirts and cut-off shorts, then back to his marble-floored apartment.
She was introduced there to five Czech girls, all either nude or wearing just a G-string. Her common sense told her to run, but where to? Childishly, she pretended to herself that everything would be OK.
Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, aged 17, and Ghislaine Maxwell at Ghislaine Maxwell’s townhouse in London, Britain on March 13, 2001
It wasn’t, of course. Eppinger took her to the bathroom, where he gave her two blue pills that he said would relax her.
It was the start of a terrible ordeal: repeatedly raped by him over the succeeding days and nights, Virginia soon realised there was no escape. Keeping her for his exclusive use, he controlled every second of her time.
Months later, on her 14th birthday, she stood at an open window many storeys up, trying to muster the willpower to jump. But Eppinger hauled her back and forced her to take more pills.
One day, in desperation, Virginia crept into an empty guest room and made the first of several calls to her first boyfriend from school, Tony Figueroa. She told him all about her life as a sex slave, adding that she didn’t dare ring her parents.
Unfortunately, Eppinger noticed the repeated calls to a number he didn’t recognise. Incandescent with rage, he accused Virginia of trying to get him caught and told her he was passing her to another man. She had five minutes to pack.
Eppinger’s driver drove her to her new owner, a balding man called Charlie who owned a club-restaurant. He didn’t even bother to ask her name before taking her to his bedroom.
From then on, she was never allowed to leave his side. They would go shopping and meet his friends and business associates, none of whom questioned why Charlie was with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter.
Feeling utterly hopeless, Virginia resigned herself to a life of sexual servitude, believing that if she tried to escape, Eppinger would surely find her and kill her.
What she didn’t know was that FBI agents had tapped Tony’s phone and had been tracking her for weeks. They had discovered where she was staying, then followed the car when she was driven to Charlie’s.
At 6am one morning, an FBI SWAT team burst in, dressed in black with helmets, visors and rifles. It was over. Eppinger fled to the Czech Republic but was later extradited to stand trial on charges of smuggling aliens for prostitution, interstate travel for the purposes of prostitution and money laundering. He died in jail.
The most recent known image of Ghislaine Maxwell, released by her lawyers in 2021
Virginia was accepted back home by her parents. At 15, she got a job in a fast-food outlet, then a pet shop — and finally at Mar-a-Lago.
The day after her first encounter with Epstein, Virginia was back. Again, Ghislaine undressed her, took off her own top and molested her. Again, the financier wanted sex — as always, without a condom.
This soon became a daily routine. Sometimes there were variations: Virginia would have to perform sexual acts with Ghislaine, or soap the older woman in the shower.
At home, she had difficulty sleeping at night, although she kept telling herself it would all be worth it in the end.
One evening, while she was massaging Epstein’s feet, he asked her to quit her job at Mar-a-Lago. If she worked full-time for him, he said, he would be paying for several massages a day at $200 a time.
It was a dizzying amount of money to a girl in her mid-teens. Swallowing her qualms, Virginia told her parents she had passed her trial and got the massage job.
In the morning her father drove her to work. Epstein came out to shake his hand and reassure him he’d take good care of his daughter.
There was certainly no shortage of luxury in Virginia’s new job: she travelled with Ghislaine and Epstein on his black Gulfstream G500 private jet and was bowled over by the opulence of his mansion in New York.
Maxwell and her paedophile boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein are pictured together at a NYC charity event in 2005Â
His office, she noted, was draped with hangings depicting salacious scenes.
Elsewhere, there were numerous pictures of young girls in a state of undress, and pictures of Epstein with politicians and royalty — even with the Dalai Lama. Her bedroom had an intercom, so Epstein could summon her at any time of the day or night.
That first day, he gave her a bundle of $100 bills so she could go out and enjoy her first visit to New York. Having no idea where to go, she bought a camera and just started snapping anything that took her fancy.
When she returned at dusk, Ghislaine was furious. Virginia had been gone too long, she said, and Jeffrey needed to know where she was at all times. The next day, she was given a mobile phone.
In the weeks that followed, Virginia was allowed to go out but only if she agreed to return at a moment’s notice to attend to Epstein. Then he upped the ante: he would pay her double if, on her peregrinations, she picked up other pretty young girls and brought them back — either for sex with him or to put on a lesbian show.
What she had to do, he said, was get them to agree to a first meeting with him. She should use her charm, then tell them she worked for a multi-billionaire with contacts in the acting and modelling professions.
He was very clear about the type of girls he wanted. There were to be no African-Americans, no goths, no prostitutes or drug users, no piercings or tattoos. He wanted girl-next-door types with blue eyes and blonde ringlets.
This sketch shows the moment Maxwell was convicted of four of the five counts she faces in December 2021. She will be sentenced on June 28Â
His new demands brought Virginia fresh anxiety. She began to get headaches and started taking tranquillisers — which did little for her anxiety but at least dulled the pain of what she was being asked to do.
Her 16th birthday was celebrated on Epstein’s private island, Little St James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As Virginia blew out the candles on her cake, Ghislaine remarked that she’d be getting too old for Epstein soon and they would have to trade her in.
The arrival on the island of a girl called Sarah made her think this was about to happen. But Sarah, an ash-blonde with big brown eyes, turned out to be a little older. She had got to know Epstein when he’d promised to help her with her acting career.
Sarah, said Epstein, was brilliant at procuring young girls for him, and he suggested Virginia watch her do it.
She learnt fast. Back on the mainland, Virginia was soon supplying fresh blood for Epstein — as was Ghislaine.
When Virginia asked the older woman why she did it, Ghislaine said it relieved her of the pressure of satisfying Epstein’s voracious sexual appetite.
As she had been taught, Virginia would lead the paedophile’s fresh prey into the massage room, where he would already be lying naked on the table. She and the new girl would massage him until he instructed them to take off their clothes.
If the newcomer didn’t balk at this, he knew he had her. Incredibly, according to Virginia, none of the girls ever refused.
He would then tell the two to touch themselves or perform lesbian acts while he watched. Afterwards the girls would get $200, with Virginia getting an extra $200 as a finder’s fee.
She soon proved herself so useful to Epstein that he let her live rent-free in two of his apartments, in Royal Palm Beach and New York City.
By then, unable to stand the thought of continuing to spin lies about her job, Virginia was completely alienated from her family. She had also begun to smoke marijuana and take LSD and ecstasy with old friends from school.
When she told them she was a massage therapist, some girls asked if they could meet her boss. They were easy pickings.
Although she felt very uncomfortable betraying friends, the drugs and the extra money helped numb her conscience.
One day, Epstein called Virginia and told her to go to a hotel in Palm Beach called The Breakers, to see to a married couple named Glenn and Eva. She was to massage Eva gently as she was pregnant, but treat Glen just as she treated him.
Eva turned out to be one of the financier’s exes whom he had married off to an acquaintance when she got too old for his tastes. The massage went well, and then Virginia bedded Eva’s husband in the next room.
Maxwell is pictured at an LGBT rights event in New York City in 2013. Her glitzy world came crashing down in summer 2020 after she was arrested in New Hampshire on child sex chargesÂ
The following day, Epstein made her tell him every detail. Her humiliation was complete: she was now little more than a prostitute to be loaned out whenever her master felt like it.
Ghislaine now had a new evening routine: she would strip Virginia bare, then force the teenager to have lesbian sex with her, always in front of Epstein.
Virginia found this degrading. Even so, she tried to please her captors, hoping for occasional crumbs of friendliness — such as when they watched TV together, or Ghislaine taught her to use a knife and fork English-style.
Such moments were never enough. How could they be? But at 16, Virginia could no longer see any way out . . .Â
Adapted from Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story Of The Masseuse Who Pursued And Ended The Sex Crimes Of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell And Jeffrey Epstein, by Nigel Cawthorne, published by Gibson Square on June 30 at £9.99. © Nigel Cawthorne. To order a copy for £8.99 (offer valid to 02/07/22; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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