Virginia Giuffre, the woman who stood up for victims of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when she accused him of trafficking her as a teenager, wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that she had been hospitalized after a traffic accident and was in critical condition.
“This year has been the worst start to a new year, but I won’t bore anyone with the details but I think it important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving 110km [approximately 70 mph] as we were slowing for a turn that no matter what your car is made of it might as well be a tin can,” Giuffre wrote in a caption on a photo that showed her in a hospital bed, her face badly bruised. “I’ve gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology.” Giuffre — who has been living in Australia, where she has citizenship — added that she was “ready to go,” except for wanting to see her three children one last time. “Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life,” she told her followers.
Giuffre’s representative has told the media that she’s “been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital,” noting that she “greatly appreciates the support and well wishes people are sending.” When reached by Rolling Stone, the representative declined to comment further.
Giuffre, 41, née Virginia Roberts, has alleged that she was brought into Epstein’s orbit by his now-convicted sex trafficker associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16, with the pair grooming her to provide sexual services to Epstein. At that point, she had already experienced the trauma of sexual assault, become a child runaway, and suffered abuse at the hands of Miami sex trafficker Ron Eppinger, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to smuggling women from Europe for prostitution.
Giuffre has said she spent two and a half years providing massages and sexual services to Epstein and his business associates, traveling between his properties in Florida, New York, New Mexico, and his private island in the Caribbean, Little Saint James. She said she only escaped this world when she met her soon-to-be-husband, the martial arts trainer Robert Giuffre, on a trip to Thailand to receive massage training — and, she alleges, to fetch a Thai girl for Maxwell and Epstein. Instead she started a family with Giuffre in Australia.
In the following years, Giuffre was contacted by U.S. authorities investigating Epstein, and in 2007, the FBI called to say she had been identified as one of his victims in the first criminal case against the wealthy, well-connected financier. Around the same time, Epstein and Maxwell both called her to ask if she was speaking with law enforcement, she told The Miami Herald. While initially reluctant to speak to the FBI, Giuffre would go on to be the most prominent whistleblower in the Epstein saga, filing successful suits against him and Maxwell, describing her experiences to reporters, and claiming in depositions that she had been trafficked to famous and powerful men including former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Prince Andrew. (Both have denied these allegations.) It was revealed in 2022 that she received $500,000 from Epstein in the settlement agreement that ended her 2009 lawsuit against him. The Maxwell suit was settled for an undisclosed amount.
In 2015, Giuffre founded Victims Refuse Silence, since rebranded as Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), a nonprofit advocacy group for survivors of sex trafficking. Following Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on federal charges of trafficking minors, she gave an interview to the BBC in which she claimed she had been trafficked to Prince Andrew and raped by the royal on three occasions, echoing allegations she had first made in a 2014 Florida court filing. She later sued the Duke of York for sexual assault, with Prince Andrew settling the case out of court in 2022, before he would have been forced to give a sworn deposition, for an amount that Giuffre’s attorney, David Boies, called “substantial.” Andrew also pledged a donation to Giuffre’s charity but did not admit to any of her claims, and the exact terms of the agreement are unknown.
Observers on social media reacted to the news of Giuffre’s injuries with disbelief, calling the car wreck a tragedy. “It’s a damn shame that she is going to die without ever getting justice,” wrote one user on X. “She deserved much better, and America has failed her.” But others were quick to imply that the collision was no accident, rather part of an ongoing cover-up in a wide-ranging case that has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists and spreaders of misinformation. There is, at present, no evidence to suggest a premeditated attempt on Giuffre’s life.
The public remains hungry for answers about Epstein’s sex trafficking circle, of which Giuffre’s accounts are perhaps the most detailed and harrowing on the record. In February, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to showcase the transparency of the Trump administration by distributing binders of supposedly revealing Epstein documents to a collection of MAGA influencers. The stunt backfired when it emerged that there was nothing newly disclosed in this collection, labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase One.” Bondi has made no mention of a “Phase Two” in the month since.
