In one of the most gut-wrenching sections of her posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre pauses the horror-show timeline to look straight at the reader and explain, in her own raw words, why she believes Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell targeted her with surgical precision.

“I was the perfect victim,” she writes in a chapter titled “Why Me?”—a question she says she asked herself every single day for twenty-five years.

“No stable family to report me missing. No teacher who would fight for me. No authority figure who would believe a troubled teenage girl over a billionaire and his glamorous girlfriend. I had already been molested, trafficked on the streets, and taught—over and over—that my body didn’t belong to me. I had already learned that screaming didn’t bring help. I was invisible long before they made me disappear.”

She continues:

“They didn’t pick me because I was special. They picked me because I was disposable. Because no one was looking for me. Because the world had already decided that girls like me didn’t matter. That was their entire business model: find the ones who won’t be missed, groom them with money and attention they’ve never had, and then own them.”

Giuffre describes the moment the realization crystallized—sitting in the back of Epstein’s black Mercedes as it sped from Mar-a-Lago toward his Palm Beach mansion for the first time. She was 16, clutching a $200 tip, dizzy with the sudden kindness of adults who seemed to see potential in her.

“I remember thinking, ‘Finally, someone wants me,’” she writes. “That was the hook. That’s always the hook.”

She goes on to detail how Epstein and Maxwell weaponized that longing:

“They studied broken children the way hunters study wounded animals. They knew exactly which wounds to press on. Mine were abandonment, low self-worth, and the desperate need to be told I was worth something. They pressed until I bled obedience.”

The passage has left readers reeling. On X, the quote “I was the perfect victim” trended worldwide within hours of the book’s October 21 release, with survivors sharing their own stories under the hashtag #IPerfectVictimToo. Mental-health advocates have called the chapter required reading for law enforcement and child-welfare workers, arguing it lays bare the predator playbook in language no training manual has ever matched.

Giuffre’s brother Sky Roberts, who read the manuscript before publication, broke down in an interview with The Daily Mail on November 12, 2025:

“When I got to that part, I had to put the book down and just cry. She wasn’t blaming us—she was explaining how the system let her fall through every single crack until those monsters were waiting at the bottom.”

In the same chapter, Giuffre refuses to let the reader look away from the broader truth:

“This didn’t just happen to me. It happens every day to kids who age out of foster care, to runaways, to the ones teachers label ‘troubled’ and give up on. Epstein and Maxwell didn’t invent vulnerability—they just monetized it. And the world let them because those girls were already invisible.”

She ends the chapter with a line that has been printed on protest signs from London to Los Angeles:

“If I was the perfect victim, then the real crime is that the world keeps manufacturing more just like me.”

Nobody’s Girl is available everywhere books are sold.