Posthumous memoir tells painful story with charm and courage

There is a strand running through Nobody's Girl - a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who killed herself in April this year - in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse.

- Emma Brockes

"I know it is a lot to take in," she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.”

Throughout the book Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger.

Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

Of course, these assumptions of hers aren't wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died, and whose deft, smart book is co-written with the journalist Amy Wallace, knows that to be a victim of sexual violence is to be at best pitied, at worst reviled. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein accuser was not a sex slave, but a money-hungry sex kitten, her former friends say.”)

Does Nobody's Girl give any insight into the so-called Epstein list, the catalogue of prominent men to whom Giuffre and others were trafficked? The closest we get to a fresh allegation is Giuffre's description of one of the scores of men Epstein forced her to have sex with as a "politician" and "former minister", who choked and beat her almost unconscious, but who, she writes, is too powerful to name.