BOOK REVIEW: The (Real) Memoir of Virginia Giuffre
by Maria Bustillos
THE BILLIONAIRE’S PLAYBOY CLUB by Virginia Giuffre
★★★★★
An early cache of the Epstein Files was published by Courier/Good Information last November, and they were the first ones I read. I scanned a few documents at random, but soon found myself deeply absorbed in a rough draft of the late Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl. The book based on this document was ghostwritten by Amy Wallace and published by Knopf in October of last year, after the author’s death in April. I only recently thought to compare the draft to the published book, and was surprised by what I found.
The original draft of about 80,000 words tells the story of the author’s sexual abuse and trafficking at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell; I later learned that it had already been unsealed in August 2019, as an exhibit in Giuffre’s 2015 lawsuit against Maxwell. Unlike the eventual book, the draft’s opening is vividly (if haphazardly and ungrammatically) written, crackling with raw electricity and feeling. You can’t help but love the author right away, right from the first lines: Every single person in this shared world together has a unique story of his or her own to tell, this one is mine.
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