The woman who accused Jeffrey Epstein of treating her like a sex slave and of trafficking her to Prince Andrew died by suicide in April. The end of her life was as confusing as the rest of her story. She was in a car accident near her home in Australia. Her car was hit by a bus and she posted a statement on Instagram saying her kidneys were failing and she’d been given four days to live by the hospital staff.
Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accused Prince Andrew of sexual abuse and is a known Jeffrey Epstein victim, shared a disturbing Instagram post claiming she has “four days to live” after being “seriously injured in a car crash.” 👀😳 pic.twitter.com/ocVSl9sJNB
— James Li (@5149jamesli) March 31, 2025
It turned out that wasn’t true (the part about having four days to live). She recovered and left the hospital but 3 weeks later she killed herself. There were immediately suspicions, from her father and others, that someone had gotten to her. But other members of her family remained quiet until today. Today the London Times published a story titled “What Really Happened to Virginia Giuffre?” According to that story her suicide was the result of an increasingly bad relationship with her husband from whom she had separated.
For the first time, Virginia’s family is sharing a diary she kept from the beginning of this year, in which she shares her memories of her marriage as it was breaking down, as well as photos, text messages and legal filings, in which she alleges that Robert was violent, abusive and “emotionally and physically controlling”.
Virginia claimed in her diary that her husband’s behaviour worsened as she became the face of the campaign to bring Epstein and others to justice. “The stronger I became, the scarier he became,” she wrote, accusing him of trying to stop her from “advocating for the victims of trafficking” and, in the final months, allegedly preventing her from seeing her children.
Evidence of the abuse goes back more than ten years:
Robert was arrested in Colorado for an alleged assault on Virginia that the couple kept private. The Times has seen a police record filed in Fremont County on June 3, 2015, against Robert, labelled with the case type “domestic violence”.
The criminal docket is sealed, but according to a civil lawsuit Virginia filed against Maxwell that same year, the couple “became involved in an argument over the welfare of the family dog … [Virginia] alleges she was assaulted by her husband as witnessed by at least one of their children”. According to the filing, Robert pleaded guilty to domestic violence and was placed on probation.
Meanwhile, she became well known internationally as the person who brought down Prince Andrew. It seemed everyone in the English speaking world had seen this photo.
Prince Andrew reaches settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre in sex abuse suit https://t.co/jFhDyzNjTi pic.twitter.com/kIetGXQEB5
— New York Post (@nypost) February 15, 2022
In her diary, Virginia wrote that the more well known and outspoken she became, the more controlling her husband became. “[He was] showing unease in my finding independence,” she wrote. She added, ““Instead of praising his wife’s accomplishments he began to be jealous, trying to make me stop advocating for victims of trafficking.”
By the end of 2023 she was talking to her brother and sister-in-law about divorcing her husband. She told them she didn’t love him anymore and in 2024 they separated but did not divorce. Then there was an incident in January of 2025 when she and her husband gathered for their daughter’s 15th birthday party.
Over a FaceTime call the next day, Virginia told Sky and Amanda her account of the incident. According to Sky, Robert went into Virginia’s room and asked her for sex. When she told him no, Robert allegedly “started to call her names and got aggressive”. Sky said Virginia claimed he “punched her over and over”…
In the days after the alleged assault, while Virginia was recovering at Royal Perth Hospital, she and Cheryl took photos of her injuries. They appear to show Virginia with a black eye and her face and chest bruised:
While she was still in the hospital, her husband filed a restraining order claiming she had attacked him and caused the injuries seen in the photos at the hospital to herself. And at that point she apparently never saw her children again. Her husband kept them away from her and that led to a downward spiral. Virginia’s public representative said she had indicated prior to her death that she was thinking about taking her own life.
Her final journal entry was a note to her children which said in part “Every day that I don’t see your faces has a little less light.”
It’s a very sad story but it makes a lot more sense now.
