Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.
Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 m.p.h.
In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.
Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.
In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.
Ms. Giuffre in 2023 with a photo of herself as a teenager. She said she was recruited to Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring as a minor and that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among his powerful friends.Credit…Emily Michot/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service, via Getty Images
