Virginia Giuffre still recalls the first time she ‘laid eyes on’ her now estranged husband – and the moment she told Jeffrey Epstein she was leaving him for the rugged Australian martial arts expert.
The 41-year-old chronicled her initial romantic encounters with Robert Giuffre at the age of 19 in a self-penned memoir – The Billionaire’s Playboy Club – dedicated to her ‘true love Robbie who believes in me every step of the way’.
The draft of her unpublished book was released by US District Court judge Loretta Preska in August 2020 alongside a trove of court documents in Giuffre’s lawsuit against Epstein’s former partner, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Listed as ‘Exhibit B’, the 139-page autobiography details her descent into being sex trafficked by Epstein, dealings with Maxwell and alleged sexual encounters with Prince Andrew when she was a 17-year-old minor.
The memoir has come to light again amid revelations Giuffre and her Australian martial arts instructor husband have broken up amid a major family bust-up this year and are now fighting over access to their children.
In the autobiographical account, Giuffre (née Roberts) revealed she first met the man of her dreams while studying Thai massage in September 2002 – just one month after her 19th birthday.
She had been sent to undertake the course at Epstein’s request – and expense – at the International Training Massage School Chiang Mai in Thailand‘s far north.
‘My celebrations started the second I landed, it didn’t take me long to make myself acquainted with a few fellow travelers and find the hot sports of the hustling city,’ Giuffre said of her first wide-eyed days in Chiang Mai.
Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Guiffre was sent to study Thai massage at an international training centre in the city of Chiang Mai just one month after her 19th birthday so that she could learn how to better please the disgraced sex offender
‘From the second I got there I knew Thailand was going to be a lot of fun and I was right! Popping bottles of champagne, dancing all night to the beat of every club’s rhythm’s along my way and carrying on like it was birthday…every night.
‘The first month in quickly passed me by. Having such an incredible time on my own and putting my heart into learning Thai Massage it seemed to just fly past.
‘Routinely I had to call in and check in with Jeffrey and Ghislaine letting them know my whereabouts and progression in class.
‘Counting down the time let until my course finished Jeffrey was anticipating my departure back to New York: “I can’t wait to get my first Thai massage from you. I’ve got you booked to come straight back to New York for my first one as soon as your course finishes next month.”
‘His eagerness put a twisted familiar knot in my stomach.’
Giuffre said she was about half way through the massage course and preparing for a night out on the town with her friends when destiny struck.
‘Unbeknownst to us girls as we sat there chatting away carelessly, this night was already written in the stars for me,’ she said.
‘It was this night my very soul was about to cosmically collide with the man I was always meant for, the man my heart already belonged to and would know from the instant we met.’
Little more than a month into her stay in Chiang Mai, Guiffre (née Roberts) met the man who would become her husband, Australian martial arts expert Robert Guiffre, at a Muay Thai boxing tournament
She said her fated romance with the man she would come to marry occurred after her group – which was ‘dressed to kill’ – received an impromptu invite to attend a Muay Thai boxing tournament.
‘The massive crowd lined the street where the fight was being held and, once I got inside the arena, it was push and shove to try to find a spot to watch from,’ she recalled.
‘Then it happened…the first moment I laid eyes on the man that would love me for the rest of my life.
‘I wasn’t expecting the most amazing time of my life to happen right there and then but it did and I would never be the same again.
‘Destiny fell right smack into my lap and there was no stopping it!
‘It wasn’t just his smoldering appeal that was obvious at first sight, it was the entire package of mannerism and chivalry that made him stand out of the crowd.
‘Stepping right out of the pages of the fairytales I used to read, he was nothing like I had ever come to know before.
‘Watching him from a close distance, he was playfully shadow boxing one of the guys from my massage class, and it was at that moment that this handsome stranger first caught me staring at him.
The couple embarked on a whirlwind romance – marrying after knowing each other for just weeks – and stay strong for more than two decades before splitting up earlier this year
‘From top to toe this athletically built man was intriguing to watch, I couldn’t take my eyes off him like I was magnetically drawn to his power of attraction.
‘He further interested me when he wasn’t acting like the majority of harping dogs that would jump at the eyes I was giving him now.
‘Instead he coyly played hard to get, making me work for any conversation with him.’
After the tournament ended, Giuffre said she invited the rugged Australian and his mates back to a pizza joint in front of the Prince Hotel where she was staying.
‘I made it my goal to make myself known to this appealing stranger,’ she said.
‘In the tuk-tuk on the way there I made sure I sat next to Robbie.
‘Scooting my knees closer and closer to him on the short ride he continued his chase by moving further away from me, a game of cat and mouse that I loved.
‘When he answered back the array of my questions he had the cutest Aussie accent that drove me absolutely wild.
Guiffre chronicled the intimate details of her courtside with ‘Robbie’ – and their early sex life – in an unpublished memoir released in a trove of court documents in August 2020
‘Gradually we got to know each other better over a pie of pepperoni pizza and two cans of Coke.
‘To me he might as well have been the only other person in the restaurant, he knew he had my undivided attention and I think he liked it.
‘There was no one like him that I had ever met before and I knew there was no other who could make me feel the way that I felt at the first sight of him…I was already smitten.’
The pair made plans to see each other again the following night and within a matter of days they had become inseparable with Giuffre crediting her new-found love with helping her cast off the shackle of her Epstein-enforced sexual slavery.
‘Never considering myself a person who believed in the existence of “Love at first sight”, but a true romantic deep at heart, I couldn’t help but believe in it now,’ Giuffre wrote.
‘When he wasn’t training for Muay-Thai tournaments and I wasn’t in school, nobody would ever see us.
‘Too enveloped in each other in my hotel room to care about anything else.
‘Enchanted by his words and tender touch, the way he made love to me was again like nothing I had experienced before.
Guiffe reveals Robbie proposed after little more than a week and asked her to start a new life – and family – with him in Australia, rather than return home to Epstein
‘Even down to after sex, as I had been routinely instructed by Jeffrey to get up for a warm washcloth to clean his genitals afterwards, he refused it, telling me I was no longer a slave and that he didn’t want me acting like one.
‘He’d just rather lay down together afterwards and repeat our sweet nothings with many adjoining kisses.
‘He offered me no judgment, instead only gave me his warmth and compassion as he wrapped his strong arms around me, making me feel so meager and small but so safe at the same time.
‘Encouraging me to see the worthiness of myself and leave that life behind, he adorned me with a kind love that I wasn’t accustomed too.
‘In the deepest caverns of my heart I knew this man would give me what I had never experienced before…True love.’
But always lurking in the back of her mind during those first, tantalising days was the fact she would soon have to return to her life as one of Epstein’s girls in the US. ‘Robbie’ had other ideas, however.
‘[He told me:] “Get out of it now, take my hand and follow me back to my home in Australia…you’re nobody’s property, you can do this. Marry me’,” she recalled.
‘Repeating the question he got on one knee and proposed again: “I am in love with you and want to spend the rest of my life making you happy. Please don’t go back to him…will you please marry me?”
In her 139-page autobiography, Guiffre says her ‘very soul was about to cosmically’ collided with Robert on the first night they met back in later 2002
‘Looking back up at him I said, “Yes!” I almost shouted the answer at him, as if saying it louder would give the word more meaning.
‘My heart was beating so loud I thought it was going to jump right out of my chest.
‘With the earnestly (sic) in my reply he picked me up in his strong arms and took me back to the bed and reiterated his words in a more physical sense this time.
‘Never had I felt loved like this before, so swept off my feet and unable to even think, eat, or do anything for that matter which would involve leaving the hotel room without him.’
Their whirlwind engagement was to be a brief one, with Giuffre revealing ‘Robbie didn’t just want to get married someday. He wanted to get married now, this week even’.
There was just one problem: breaking the news to – and breaking it off with – Epstein.
‘Seven days, exactly a week after his proposal, I sat on my bed in distress, contemplating what I would say to the man who I was about to call [Epstein],’ Guiffre recalled.
‘There was no nice way to go about it. I couldn’t last forever with him and this was my one chance to get out of it for good. I was leaving him, never to return to him ever again.
Virginia described the moment she was recruited as a teen by Ghislaine Maxwell who told her she was looking to hire a masseuse for Epstein
Guiffre claimed in the memoir that Epstein and Maxwell (right) encouraged her to engage in sexual intercourse with Prince Andrew (left) when she was still a 17-year-old minor
‘Calling his office in New York I was transferred to Jeffrey’s personal office – he picked up the phone on the third ring, pausing before I could get any of the words to come out of my mouth but I mustered up my courage eventually and gave him my prepared spiel.
‘Trying to contagiously pass on my excitement through the phone lines, I finally screamed out “I’m getting married! Can you believe it?”
‘No reply was given only a silence on the other end. Trying to make some conversation ridding the uncomfortable silence, I went on to tell him about Robbie and how I had fallen madly in love with him over the last amazing few days we’d spent together.
‘The absence of sound made my thoughts begin to run wild and, to get some response, I had to ask him what he thought about everything I was telling him.
‘Finally a few seconds later his reaction to the news sunk in and his only and final reply until many years to come was, “Have a good life!”
‘With that statement he slammed down phone receiver. Leaving only an echo of the dial tone to answer back too. I was to paralyzed from the shocking response.’
Next, the teenaged Giuffre called her parents to let them know she was marrying an Australian kickboxer she had known barely more than a week.
They took if far better than the late financier that had controlled her life for so long – the reason would not become apparent for years.
Guiffre successfully sued Epstein (pictured) – and was awarded $500,000 in damages – more than a decade before the sex offender took his own life in a jail cell in 2019
‘My parents took it well, considering their only daughter was marrying a foreign man that they didn’t know from the next guy on the street and too top it off I was moving to Australia, permanently,’ she said.
‘When I asked my dad many years later why they hadn’t put up a fight, he just simply replied that nobody expected it too last very long. I don’t think anyone did.’
They were to prove all the naysayers wrong for more than two decades.
Giuffre and her martial artist man married just one week later in a Buddhist ceremony at Chiang Mai’s ancient Doi Suthep temple, before moving to Australia to start a new life – and family – together.
‘Robbie and I have shared the common highs and lows that every determined marriage endures,’ Guiffre confessed in her unpublished memoir.
‘It has taken a lot of hard work and doesn’t come without its flaws but no matter what it is just perfect for the two of us.
‘He helped me how to remember to smile again and life has slowly began to sort itself out.
‘They say that time heals all wounds but what I had experienced in my young years wasn’t nearly long enough to let all of the hurt go.
Virgina Giuffre is now estranged from husband of 22 years Robert (above the couple in 2019) and in March she was charged with alleged breaching a Family Violence Restraining Order
‘Seeking help through many counselors and psychiatrists I was doing everything I could do to deal with the scars and all of the pain left behind.’
However, she said their ‘blissful life together came to a sudden halt in 2007 when FBI agents tracked her down in Australia and told her she had been identified as one of Epstein’s victims.
‘I felt my knees go weak and the anxiety churning in my stomach was now making me feel sick,’ she said.
‘Taking the bundle of paperwork from the agent who was now handing it to over me. I had to excuse myself before my legs actually buckled.’
Giuffre would go on win a victims’ civil suit against Epstein two years later, and was ultimately awarded $500,000 in damages, while Epstein was later found dead in his cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correction Centre in 2019. She reached an out of court settlement with Prince Andrew reportedly worth $20million.
But her psychological wounds never healed – and while the sex abuse survivor and her husband fought to keep their fairytale romance alive for 22 years, earlier this year the couple finally split.
And just last month, Guiffre was charged with alleged breaching a Family Violence Restraining Order.
Epstein had claimed his final victim: her marriage.
