New York
Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex-Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41
Virginia Giuffre, a 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 (pronounced JIFF-ree) died by suicide, according to a statement by the family. She wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in an automobile crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 miles per hour.
In the statement, her family called her “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.”
In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, 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, 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.
In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday.
“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2022 book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.
Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a multimillionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but he relinquished his royal duties in 2019.
In 2021, she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles III of England, contending that he had sexually assaulted her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James, in the Virgin Islands.
A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist. He said he had no memory of the occasion.
After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”
The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.
In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account, she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.
Ms. Giuffre sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015 for calling her a liar; they settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other counts. The verdict was viewed as the legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system, and his victims, by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.
She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes; boarded with an aunt in California; fled to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the former hippie haven; lived on the streets when she was 14; and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker, who abused her.
Compared with living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage several times a day was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”
But her mandate went well beyond those duties, she told the BBC in 2019: She said that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.
In 2002, when she was 19, Ms. Giuffre enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.
The couple had three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated.
He and their children survive her, as do her mother and two brothers, Sky Roberts and Danny Wilson.
Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She explained why she had originally agreed to work as a masseuse for Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and to provide sexual services.
“They seemed like nice people,” she said, “so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused. That was the worst thing I could have told them, because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Hank Sanders contributed reporting.
New York
They Witness Deaths on the Tracks and Then Struggle to Get Help
‘Part of the job’
Edwin Guity was at the controls of a southbound D train last December, rolling through the Bronx, when suddenly someone was on the tracks in front of him.
He jammed on the emergency brake, but it was too late. The man had gone under the wheels.
Stumbling over words, Mr. Guity radioed the dispatcher and then did what the rules require of every train operator involved in such an incident. He got out of the cab and went looking for the person he had struck.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Guity said later. “But this is a part of the job.”
He found the man pinned beneath the third car. Paramedics pulled him out, but the man died at the hospital. After that, Mr. Guity wrestled with what to do next.
A 32-year-old who had once lived in a family shelter with his parents, he viewed the job as paying well and offering a rare chance at upward mobility. It also helped cover the costs of his family’s groceries and rent in the three-bedroom apartment they shared in Brooklyn.
But striking the man with the train had shaken him more than perhaps any other experience in his life, and the idea of returning to work left him feeling paralyzed.
Edwin Guity was prescribed exposure therapy after his train struck a man on the tracks.
Hundreds of train operators have found themselves in Mr. Guity’s position over the years.
And for just as long, there has been a path through the state workers’ compensation program to receiving substantive treatment to help them cope. But New York’s train operators say that their employer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has done too little to make them aware of that option.
After Mr. Guity’s incident, no official told him of that type of assistance, he said. Instead, they gave him the option of going back to work right away.
But Mr. Guity was lucky. He had a friend who had been through the same experience and who coached him on getting help — first through a six-week program and then, with the assistance of a lawyer, through an experienced specialist.
The specialist prescribed a six-month exposure therapy program to gradually reintroduce Mr. Guity to the subway.
His first day back at the controls of a passenger train was on Thanksgiving. Once again, he was driving on the D line — the same route he had been traveling on the day of the fatal accident.
M.T.A. representatives insisted that New York train operators involved in strikes are made aware of all options for getting treatment, but they declined to answer specific questions about how the agency ensures that drivers get the help they need.
In an interview, the president of the M.T.A. division that runs the subway, Demetrius Crichlow, said all train operators are fully briefed on the resources available to them during their job orientation.
“I really have faith in our process,” Mr. Crichlow said.
Still, other transit systems — all of which are smaller than New York’s — appear to do a better job of ensuring that operators like Mr. Guity take advantage of the services available to them, according to records and interviews.
A Times analysis shows that the incidents were on the rise in New York City’s system even as they were falling in all other American transit systems.
An Uptick in Subway Strikes
San Francisco’s system provides 24-hour access to licensed therapists through a third-party provider.
Los Angeles proactively reaches out to its operators on a regular basis to remind them of workers’ compensation options and other resources.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has made it a goal to increase engagement with its employee assistance program.
The M.T.A. says it offers some version of most of these services.
But in interviews with more than two dozen subway operators who have been involved in train strikes, only one said he was aware of all those resources, and state records suggest most drivers of trains that strike people are not taking full advantage of them.
“It’s the M.T.A.’s responsibility to assist the employee both mentally and physically after these horrific events occur,” the president of the union that represents New York City transit workers, John V. Chiarello, said in a statement, “but it is a constant struggle trying to get the M.T.A. to do the right thing.”
New York
Video: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid
new video loaded: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid
transcript
transcript
Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid
Nearly 200 protesters tried to block federal agents from leaving a parking garage in Lower Manhattan on Saturday. The confrontation appeared to prevent a possible ICE raid nearby, and led to violent clashes between the police and protesters.
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[chanting] “ICE out of New York.”
By Jorge Mitssunaga
November 30, 2025
New York
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