The woman who committed suicide after accusing a prince, a prime minister, and a billionaire of abuse

Young girls and boys do not end up being sexually trafficked and experience serial sexual abuse in a vacuum. In many cases, they are first abandoned by those who claim to love them.

While growing up in Loxahatchee, 30 minutes from West Palm Beach, Florida, Virginia Lee Roberts suffered a litany of abuses, including incest, parental neglect, corporal punishment, molestation, and rape.

At six, her father began repeatedly molesting her. Her alcoholic mother, who discovered the abuse, began calling her "a big mistake," labelled her "good-for-nothing," and responded by whipping her with thorny rose branches.

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Virginia contracted a severe urinary tract infection. A doctor informed her mother that her hymen had been broken, and she could not hold urine. In school, other children recognised the smell and nicknamed her "pee girl." At seven, her father lent her to a friend who raped her. At 11, she ran away from home and began begging on the streets of San Francisco. At 14, she was drugged and gang-raped by two teenagers.

In her posthumously released memoir, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, Virginia writes that danger lurked everywhere when growing up as a girl. She describes being in a constant state of psychological distress.

The abuse turned Virginia into a defiant, troubled student who began skipping class and was prone to emotional breakdowns. Her mother enrolled her in a treatment centre called Growing Together in Lake Worth, Florida. During her one-year stay, Virginia writes that she was subjected to weeks of solitary confinement in a rodent-infested room with no toilet or mattress. She describes being physically abused by staff, strip-searched, pepper-sprayed, and verbally degraded.

Train to Miami

In December 1998, at 15, Virginia escaped from the facility and boarded a train to Miami. From the station, she began walking on foot. A man in a white van offered her a lift, then took her to a room where he raped her at gunpoint and choked her until she lost consciousness. When his phone rang, and he left to answer it, she fled.

She ended up in tears by the side of the road, battered and bruised, where she was found by Ron Eppinger, a 63-year-old heavyset, balding man in a stretch limousine. Eppinger, of Czech descent, ran Perfect 10, a $1,000-a-night escort service disguised as a modelling agency. According to Virginia, he took her to his apartment in Key 
Biscayne, across Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway, raped her, and held her captive for six months, during which he trafficked her to his associates. She writes that she began taking Xanax and oxycodone to numb the pain and contemplated suicide.

In the summer of 2000, Virginia's father, then a maintenance worker at Donald Trump's 20-acre Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, helped her secure a job as a $9-an-hour locker-room attendant at the club.

It was there, she writes, that she encountered Ghislaine "G-Max" Maxwell, the British socialite and daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell. According to Virginia, 
Maxwell was notorious for recruiting underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein, a 47-year-old wealthy financier and convicted sex offender.

Virginia recounts how Maxwell approached her with a polished, friendly demeanour, offering her a job as a masseuse for Epstein at his pink-hued mansion on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach. She writes that her trauma and lack of childhood love made her cling to even disturbing expressions of affection.

Epstein's sprawling two-storey, six-bedroom mansion became the centre of what Virginia describes as two years of captivity. She writes that from the beginning, Epstein and Maxwell sexually abused her and threatened to harm her brother, Skydy, if she spoke out. Epstein instructed her to quit her job at Mar-a-Lago, and from then on, she was at his disposal.

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According to her account, Virginia accompanied Epstein at least 32 times on his private jets—a Gulfstream IV and a Boeing 727—both domestically and internationally. She alleges that Epstein and Maxwell began lending her to their associates, including, she writes, a billionaire couple, a psychology professor, and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II's second son and then fourth in line to the British throne, was a long-time friend of Maxwell. Virginia writes that she first met the then 41-year-old prince in London on March 10, 2001, and was paid $15,000 after a sexual encounter at Epstein's London residence. She describes a second encounter at Epstein's Upper East Side residence in New York a month later, and a third on Epstein's 72-acre private island in the US Virgin Islands, near Saint Thomas.

Virginia also alleges that she was trafficked to Ehud Barak, the recently retired Israeli Prime Minister at the time, who she claims sexually assaulted her on the island.

Prince Andrew has consistently denied any sexual contact with Virginia. Barak has also denied the allegations.

Burdened by years of trauma, Virginia took her own life on April 25, 2025. She was 41.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Canter @jeffbigbrother