So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. - Galatians 6:9
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” —James Baldwin
“People can cry much easier than they can change.” —James Baldwin
Hello Friends,
I missed posting last Sunday because I was sick for a week over the holidays. I have a lot to catch up on, but have been feeling down and not exactly hopping to it, as they say. I’m missing those in my generation who have died—my brother, my lifelong friend, my sisters-in-law, and others. I miss my parents and their generation as well, but their exit feels more natural. With others, I have the irrational desire to call them and say, “Okay, that’s enough of missing you. You need to get back here right now!” Do you feel this way about loved ones who are gone too soon?
Friday, I was thinking about the three quotes above. I’d like to believe the first, am more inclined to believe the second, and worry about the third. All this was on my mind before the Venezuela debacle.
I was planning to post some gift links to things you might enjoy, but this Venezuela invasion made me think that a discussion of Nobody’s Girl —which I’d planned for next week—connects to the news right now. I know that the invasion is about so much more than the Epstein files (Heather Cox Richardson has a great assessment in this video showing the move toward ‘spheres of influence’ a la Putin). But Epstein is a piece. Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes points to it:
So—I’m going to put the book discussion first. I’m certain you know there are triggering events in the memoir. I need to include some of that here. Links to 2025 round-ups follow, in case you are up for that, too.
Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
“I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s house? And why haven’t they led to the prosecution of any more abusers?” (366)
From Publishers Marketplace’s Publishers Lunch newsletter on December 17, 2025:
Nobody’s Girl’ Sells 1 Million Copies
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s NOBODY’S GIRL, her posthumous memoir of sexual abuse and trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein, has sold 1 million copies around the world ….
“This is a bittersweet moment for us,” Giuffre’s family said in a statement. “We are enormously proud of our sister, and the impact she continues to have on the world. We’re also filled with so much sorrow that she couldn’t be here to witness the impact of her words.…”
Giuffre died by suicide in April. Before publication, Giuffre’s family asked for revisions to the manuscript to reflect the author’s relationship with her husband, who she accused of abuse and from whom she was getting divorced.
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
“Today I know that Epstein liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life support system for a vagina.’ I didn’t know that then.” (140)
Nobody’s Girl begins with a note from Giuffre’s collaborator, Amy Wallace. She lets the reader know that Giuffre had called her early in 2025 to tell her that her husband, Robbie, had assaulted her during an argument. She also mentions that Robbie was arrested in 2015—ten years prior to the publication of the book—after assaulting her. This is the edit that Giuffre’s family asked for. Throughout the book, Giuffre only has positive things to say about her husband. He appears as a rescuing hero.
Those frontloaded facts about the two assaults change the way the reader sees the couple’s relationship, the way we engage with the entire text. Between this and the knowledge that Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025, we read under a black cloud.
It isn’t just the sections on being trafficked by Epstein that are a rough go. Giuffre was abused from childhood, starting with her father, who began molesting her when she was only seven years old, letting her know that if she told anyone, he would kill her younger brother and bury him in the woods. A pedophile neighbor, who seems to have an understanding with her father, also rapes her repeatedly. She finds some solace in caring for and riding horses.
When, as a mere child, Giuffre has repeated UTIs and can’t hold her urine at school, she sees a doctor who tells her mother that her hymen is broken. Her mother replies that she rides horses.
Giuffre shares that she believes her mother knew early on what was happening to her but didn’t want to face the truth. Decades later, when she tried to address the issue, her mother would tell her that she couldn’t bear to hear about it.
“But if I was going to finally call Dad out, I wanted to make sure at least my uncles and aunts could hear. ‘This guy has been fucking me for years, since I was a little kid,’ I yelled in their direction, ‘and no one‘s done shit about it.’ I wish I could say they all stood up then to form a protective barrier around me. But they didn’t move. So after a startled silence, Dad grabbed me by my neck with one hand and punched me in the face with the other. Then he shoved me into the borrowed camper where we’d all been sleeping and continued beating me until my lips were split open, and one of my eyes was swollen shut.… The next morning I woke up thinking that since I’d finally revealed my father‘s abuse out loud, something would have to change. Maybe, at the very least, someone would acknowledge what I’ve been through. Instead, before we left to drive back to Florida, the entire extended family acted as if nothing had happened.” (47)
Giuffre’s trajectory is textbook abused-kid stuff: she begins starving herself, drinking and doing drugs, and acting out. She’s sent to a reform camp for juvenile delinquents, Growing Together, where kids supervised and restrained the ‘newcomers’ in what Giuffre describes as a Lord of the Flies atmosphere of hazing, physical, and sexual abuse.
Her ‘reform’ program includes such helpful exercises as being forced to stand in front of a mirror and hurl insults at herself. She runs away repeatedly. After being raped and nearly killed by a man who picked up Giuffre after asking her if she needed a lift, she escapes from a seedy motel room and is back on the street, afraid he will come back and find her (he has a gun). A limo stops and an old man with a young girl tells her he will help. She’s picked up by modeling agent Ron Eppinger, who rapes her, keeps her, calls her ‘baby’ and asks to be called ‘daddy.’ He trafficks her to a man in his fifties.
She thinks this is what all men do—this is what life is. And who wouldn’t, in her shoes? She accepts it.
“I didn’t know then what a therapist would tell me a decade later: that when children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together. I didn’t know that abuse victims struggle to see red flags because they become desensitized to inappropriate behavior.” (74)
Not long after an FBI raid leads to the arrest of the fifty-something ‘boyfriend,’ her father, who was a groundskeeper at Mar-a-Lago, helps her get a job as a locker room attendant at the spa.
One not-very-busy day, she sits at the reception desk reading an anatomy book. Her dream is to become a masseuse, and thereby escape the trap of her life. She’s studying. In walks Ghislaine Maxwell (who had seen her walking and targeted her). She chats Giuffre up, tells her she knows a man who wants a massage therapist to travel with him and is willing to train her. Excited, the sixteen-year-old gets her dad to give her a ride to Epstein’s pink mansion.
Maxwell thrives in the same swamp as Epstein. She, too, is an apex predator, convincing countless girls that she can be the caring mother they never had. She often participates with Epstein in raping and abusing victims.
“From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.” (75)
Like Giuffre’s father. Epstein threatens to harm her little brother. “‘We know where your brother goes to school. … You must never tell a soul what goes on in this house.’” (83) He and Maxwell sometimes take Giuffre on outings, just as parents would do, buy her little gifts, have her hair done and her teeth whitened, all of which make the abuse more confusing to her. She takes up to eight Xanax a day to cope.
The book continues with a detailed account of Giuffre’s abuse and trafficking by Epstein and Maxwell, in various countries, to academics from prestigious universities and to powerful and famous people, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre endures sadism. She is one in a vast corral of young women and girls caught up in Epstein and Maxwell’s predation. She escapes by marrying Robbie ten days after meeting him in Thailand, where she had been sent by Maxwell in order to go to massage therapy school.
The book turns its focus to the quest for justice (and quest is not hyperbole here). The reader can finally cheer what Giuffre and her fellow victims achieve while being defamed by Maxwell and maligned by the British tabloids and the conservative press (New York Post—my God!)
But the reader is feeling so sorrowful so early on that getting to this point in the text is a rocky journey.
“I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. Imagine if a trauma reel like this played in your head all the time, as it does in mine, and not just on the pages of a book you can put down if you need to, just for a moment, to steady your nerves. But please don’t stop reading. I know exactly how to help you get through these tough parts just as I help myself: by focusing on the present.” (49)
Giuffre gives the reader the present with details about her marriage, the births of her three children, and the highlights of family life.
But as she begins to win in courts and receive validation, she also starts to experience terrible health problems—bouts of pneumonia, meningitis, a serious staph infection, ovarian cysts and uterine polyps.
It seems her immune system is failing, turning against her. She falls and breaks her neck and is later required to have surgery to remove a shattered disk and attach “metal swivels” in its place. It feels that all of this must have contributed to her death by suicide.
“I have told you how cunning an enemy trauma can be. It hides in the shadows, then takes control of one psyche without warning. That’s what happened as I lay in that hospital bed in Perth: all my feelings of sadness and shame overtook me. I was worn out by the near constant pain in my neck. I was weary of defending myself against vicious, hurtful, words… I was sick of the nightmares… Alarmingly, I see now, I wasn’t afraid anymore; instead, I just felt hollowed out. So when my trauma tricked my brain into telling me lies, I listened.” (348-9)
Near the end of the book, Giuffre’s attorney, speaking of Ghislaine Maxwell, tells her:
“‘She is going to prison for a very, very long time, Virginia, and all of that has to do with you. You started this, sweetheart. You did everything to keep it going. There’s no way this could’ve happened without your bravery and your commitment. That is heroic – and I watched you go through it. It was a horrible, difficult job, and you did it. And you took some serious hits along the way. I’m so incredibly proud of you right now.’” (342)
We, too, feel pride in Giuffre’s courage. If only that had been enough.
Links to 2025 Round Ups and Surprises
2025: The Year in Pictures From the NYT (gift link)
Quiz: Do You Speak 2025? From the NYT (gift link)
An assortment of absurd, useful and funny words and phrases entered the vernacular this year. How well do you know them?
Alta Journal ’s Top Book Reviews of 2025
From timely social histories to joyful writer memoirs, here are some highlights from this year’s book reviews.
Dragons, Sex and the Bible: What Drove the Book Business This Year from NYT (gift link)
Nonfiction and Y.A. are hurting, but genre fiction and the Good Book are booming. Here’s how book sales looked in 2025.
This year brought more blockbuster books about sex and magic along with best sellers nobody saw coming. Yet while sales are solid and bookstores are generally flourishing, the book business still faces a dizzying set of challenges.
Rising costs ate into profits. Nonprofit presses lost federal funding. A.I. disrupted online search results and flooded Amazon with poorly written copycat books and slapdash genre fiction, making it harder for books written by humans to stand out from the slop. Major retailers ordered fewer books than they used to, and there weren’t as many companies distributing books to stores. And book bans threatened to limit collections in schools and libraries.
A thing that surprised me
Marjorie Taylor Greene-Trump MAGA Split interview in the NYT (gift link)
For writers:
Jane Friedman’s 2025 Year in Review
Thanks for reading!
