‘Women are being believed’: Virginia Giuffre’s ghostwriter Amy Wallace on the global impact of Nobody’s Girl

Amy Wallace met Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a world-leading advocate for change in the wake of her abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, in 2021, when Giuffre hired her to be her ghostwriter. The pair spent four years together, meeting all over the world, with Wallace travelling to Giuffre’s home in Australia and the pair spending time together in France. After a career ghostwriting for top business executives and working in news and magazine journalism, Giuffre’s memoir was a departure for Wallace – and would come with unprecedented twists and turns.

The result of those many years of work was Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre’s memoir about not only her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his clients, but also her life before that – which featured sexual abuse from a very young age by family members – and her life after escaping Epstein, which was defined by the trauma that comes with speaking up against the rich and powerful. She endured attempts to humiliate her, discredit her and silence her for more than a decade.

But after the book’s publication on 21 October last year, Giuffre can no longer be silenced. The memoir has sold more than a million copies worldwide and proved to be a vital intervention at a time when the attention being paid to Epstein’s victims by lawmakers and the public was flagging. Tragically, Giuffre died last year and never saw the publication of the book – which meant, in a very unexpected turn for a ghostwriter, that Amy Wallace became its public face overnight. Since then, she has done events and interviews all over the world to promote this agenda-setting memoir.

Wallace began her career as a journalist, starting off as an assistant at the New York Times and going on to work at the Los Angeles Times, the NYT’s Sunday business section and Condé Nast’s Portfolio. She has shared in two staff-wide Pulitzer prizes and ghostwritten books for the chief executive of General Electric and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation. 

On Monday night, Wallace and Giuffre were honoured with the British Book Awards’ book of the year and non-fiction book of the year prizes, and the anti-censorship Freedom to Publish award. One of the judges said Nobody’s Girl would “change the world”.

We spoke with Wallace, who lives in California, to discuss her journey from ghostwriter to international public face of one of the defining books of the decade.

Can you tell us about the experience of ghostwriting this book?

I was hired as a ghostwriter, and the reason “ghost" is in that term is that you're invisible, theoretically. And that was what I signed up for and what I was looking forward to. And then, tragically, Virginia died a year ago, in April. 

The book was already finished and we already had her express request that if anything happened to her, she wanted it published – and then the job of promoting the book, much like this interview, fell to me, which was not ever supposed to be part of my role. I was happy to do it: it was an honour to speak up for her. I was grieving, of course, and remain very sad that she's not here to see the reception for the book. She accomplished so many of the things she wanted to do. I just wish she could see that.

The main thing that Virginia really hoped for, and it's even in the last lines of the book, is to help other survivors of sexual abuse: not just survivors of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, but anyone who's been coerced into a sexual situation that they don't want to be in. And she has accomplished that. And I know that because I've become the public face of the book.

Her family is also speaking up very eloquently on her behalf. But people reach out to me in every social media, every email – you know, every every different kind of way – and I've heard from so many of them, women and men, who are survivors of sexual abuse, who have said “reading this account has helped me”. So that's been hugely meaningful to me and I know it would have meant so much to her. 

So in that fundamental way, it's a home run, the book. Obviously it has sold a lot of copies, which is also gratifying, and proof that it's really reaching people of all stripes all around the world. 

You know, I think, with a difficult book like this – and definitely the first half of the book is very, very difficult – you always worry that this is going to be one of those books that people go “I ought to read that, but not right now”. I've definitely done that with some books that are hard. So it's been amazing to see that people have been willing to do something difficult to learn about her experience and that it's really moved people. So that's been a huge, wonderful thing.

Well, [the fact that] more than a million of those people, almost probably a million and a half at this point, have gone out and plunked down their money, in whatever format, to hear her story is just incredible. And I just know that would mean everything to her. It would be so validating. I mean, the book really spells out not just what happened to her during the abuse, but then the second half of the book is what happened to her as she begins to heal or tries to heal and then decides to speak up. And then how she is victimised all over again: how her name is dragged through the mud, she's accused of all kinds of things, she's sued, she's deposed many, many, many times, and those depositions include incredibly graphic questions about her medical history, you know – just incredibly humiliating experiences.

And these experiences are part of the strategy of how powerful people make people back down. So she really did suffer a lot to get her story out there. And so to have people embrace it would be amazing to her, I know, and I just it's a tragedy that she's not here to see it.

And also to watch the other Survivor Sisters come together publicly and honour her is always very moving to me. But to stand on the steps of the US Capitol and demand to be heard, and demand to be taken seriously, and then be taken seriously by a lot of congresspeople – that too has been incredibly gratifying to watch. So after working with her for four years on this, and knowing all her hopes and her dreams about what it would mean, it's been just really special to be able to see that.

I have kind of a double-barrelled answer to that because I do, but there’s a lot more that the needle could move, and there is resistance to the needle moving. But I think there's no question that the heightened awareness of Virginia's book – as well as her family being out there talking about it, me being out there talking about it, and then the Survivor Sisters pushing forward and getting the Epstein Transparency Act passed – has moved the needle. Trump had campaigned on releasing those files, but then completely backed away from doing so and basically said “we're not doing it”, but that was before this groundswell happened. So that's very heartening. I think there is evidence that women are being believed more. They've created this model for women: understanding that if we stand together, it's a little easier. 

And the reason I say double-barrelled is obviously because in the United States, none of the men who have been accused of being people that the young women and girls were trafficked to by Epstein have been prosecuted, or seemingly even investigated. And the Department of Justice has indicated that's the way it's gonna stay. But I am seeing a lot of signs of progress.

I think the going theory out there is that President Trump is getting phone calls from wealthy donors who are saying “don't let this go forward”. Because, remember, the people that at least Virginia was trafficked to were some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. And so those people have clout. They don't just have money, they have clout. 

It defies understanding – not just why movement hasn't been happening recently, but why it didn't happen 30 years ago. And not just under the Trump administration – many, many administrations, Democrat and Republican, didn't move forward on this. Annie Farmer and Maria Farmer reported in 1996. Think about that. It's 2026. That's 30 years. 

We can only surmise that these elites who are powerful, who have influence, use their influence. If the people who were being accused of rape were poor black men, they would have been investigated, just to add in another element. We have race, we have class, we have sexism, and all those things are at work here. 

But so many people have bought Virginia’s book: it’s not just people who tend to stand up for women's rights who are being affected by this book or are being moved by this book. It's Maga – you know, it's people who are like “we feel screwed over because we can never get ahead”. It’s lower-middle-class, middle-class, people who are thinking “we can't even send our kids to college, we're pissed off” – that's part of the Maga line. And for them to read about elites raping poor girls – which is mostly what these Epstein victims were: they were chosen specifically because they were vulnerable financially, and in some cases vulnerable because they'd been abused before – you know, that doesn't make anyone happy. 

So I actually find a lot of hope in that – the fact that the ideological spectrum is very broad in terms of who is angry about this. And I think that's a positive sign.

I try very hard not to speak for her and say “I know that this is how she would feel”. But absolutely it's clear, given how hard she worked to bring his abuses of her to light, that this would be enormously gratifying. 

The question has been raised that “he was only arrested for financial crimes”, but [Virginia’s sister-in-law and brother] Amanda and Sky were interviewed right away and they said, no, any investigation into this man is a good thing. I also do have cause to believe that, you know, they arrested him on that because they had him cold on that, in the emails that have been released. So you arrest him on that. But it's been reported they're investigating what was going on at the regional airports, for example – [allegations of] Epstein landing and procuring girls there, flying them out, flying them in. So I hope that this is just the foundation of a bigger investigation, and I can only imagine that it is. 

Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre is published by Penguin, £10.99