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It’s the morning of Tuesday, January 14, 2025 and Virginia Giuffre is hiding from her husband, Robbie Giuffre. Virginia, the most prominent of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, texts her sister-in-law in the United States. She’s safe in a Perth hotel, she says, “so it would be difficult for him to find me”.
Virginia had told her US-based family that Robbie had assaulted her on a family holiday. In the days afterwards, as she moved from hotel to hotel, she documented her injuries. Her photographs from that time show a smattering of bruises, like tiny storm clouds, crossing her chest. There’s an arched mark on her right eyebrow and bruises above and below her eyes (Robbie has denied Virginia’s allegations, saying she attacked him).
Virginia sent these pictures far and wide. She sent them to friends and family, her publicist and Amy Wallace, the ghostwriter of Virginia’s bestselling memoir, Nobody’s Girl. She’d been with Robbie – an Australian she met in Thailand in 2002 – for 22 years, but now she was done keeping the marriage’s secrets.
A few months later, on April 5, she issued a statement to People magazine saying that she was able to fight back against Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, but was unable to escape domestic violence: “After my husband’s latest physical assault, I can no longer stay silent.” A few weeks later, Virginia was dead, taking her own life on her farm north of Perth. She was 41.
That January morning in the hotel, texting her American family, Virginia nuts out a plan to keep safe. “We’re getting our ducks in order and we are figuring this out day by day.” The “we” refers to Virginia and her devoted full‑time carer Cheryl Myers, then 71 (a degenerative spinal issue and broken neck had left Virginia often bedridden or in a wheelchair). “The police are coming to the hotel and they’re gonna go talk to Rob and hopefully he’s [taken] away [from] me please.” She also mentions her next step: “I go to court today to put a permanent [restraining order] on him.”
That text was sent at 7.31am. If she had gone to the court at 9am, perhaps the next few months would have unfolded differently. But a few hours later, Robbie Giuffre was walking up the steps of the Perth Magistrates Court, just several city blocks away. He submitted a seven-page form and had a 15-minute hearing with the magistrate. He feared Virginia, he said, and she’d been violent on a recent family holiday.
What the magistrate didn’t know was that, just hours earlier, he’d come off a 72-hour restraining order served on him by police. When he walked out of court that morning, Robbie had secured an interim family violence restraining order against Virginia, banning her for six months from contacting him and their two youngest children, a daughter, then 15, and a son, 17. “It was the worst thing that could have happened to her,” says her sister-in-law, Amanda Roberts. “Her children were her life.”
Virginia Roberts – who grew up in Loxahatchee, Florida, about 35 minutes from US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – fell into Epstein’s world after an unimaginably awful childhood. Abused by her father from seven to 11, he also trafficked her to a friend (he denies both claims). Her mother then sent her to a notorious juvenile facility. She escaped and was picked up by sex trafficker Ron Eppinger, who was later jailed. This was all by the time she was 15. Ghislaine Maxwell spotted Virginia, then 16, working as a Mar-a-Lago spa attendant and recruited her as a sex slave for Epstein.
Virginia’s lawyers estimated that, between 2000 and 2002, Epstein also trafficked her to about 30 men. Virginia named some in her book: Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modelling agent, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew (which he denies). Fearful of naming others, she called them things like billionaire number one, two or three in her book. As a kid with her history of abuse, Virginia said, she just thought this was how the world worked. She also genuinely feared Epstein, who’d claimed to know where her adored brother Sky went to school.
One day, when Virginia was 18, turning 19, Epstein and Maxwell surprised her with a proposal: they wanted her to have their baby. Virginia knew then that she had to get away but, terrified of upsetting them, she struck a deal: if they finally sent her to the massage training they’d promised, she’d have the baby. So they booked her a course in Chiang Mai, in Thailand.
That was where Virginia met Robbie, then 26. The son of Sicilian parents who had migrated to Sydney, Robbie had dropped out of high school and was in Chiang Mai studying Thai boxing. “I looked over my shoulder. Butterflies. And she’s it, that’s the one,” he told 60 Minutes. “Personally,” said Virginia, “I knew he was the one when he told me the people that are abusing you, it’s not right, and you don’t have to live like that.” They married in a Buddhist temple 10 days later. She called Epstein before flying to Australia. “I fell in love and got married, Jeffrey. I’m never coming back,” she writes in her book. There was a pause. “Have a great life,” he said. And hung up.
In Australia, she wanted to forget her previous life. But in 2008, Virginia was put in contact with a lawyer via the US Department of Justice (she had been identified as an Epstein victim). To Virginia’s outrage, the lawyer explained that Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal – for which he served minimal prison time – would mean no trial. Any hope of bringing Epstein to justice was dead. However, he said, there would be financial compensation. She filed a lawsuit under a pseudonym and, in November 2009, Epstein settled with Virginia, paying her $US500,000. She said she later learnt that one victim was paid 10 times that, but she’d just looked at house prices where she lived on the NSW Central Coast and asked for that.
But in 2010, after having two sons, Virginia gave birth to a daughter. Something shifted in Virginia: she decided to fight. She produced that iconic photograph of the Epstein scandal: Prince Andrew with his arm around the slim waist of a 17-year-old Virginia, a beaming Maxwell behind. Eventually, in 2022, Prince Andrew paid Virginia $US10 million – according to documents we’ve obtained – to settle a lawsuit she’d brought against him. She also sued Maxwell for defamation in a lawsuit that provided crucial evidence for US prosecutors in their case against the socialite. Maxwell settled for $US7 million (Virginia got about $3.8 million after lawyers and expenses).
Not all of Virginia’s legal cases were successful. In 2022, she signed a settlement with lawyer Alan Dershowitz saying she “may have made a mistake” identifying him as her abuser. In the end, from class actions, to compensation payouts and settlements, Virginia was paid the equivalent of $US25 million.
Going public had its price – paparazzi, online trolling, strange break-ins, a credible death threat that sent the family into hiding for several weeks – but Virginia inspired dozens of victims to come forward. “You have started a movement,” said Epstein survivor Danielle Bensky at Virginia’s memorial service in Washington in April, “and proved that one small girl can, in fact, change the world.”
Piecing together the secrets of Virginia’s and Robbie’s marriage is like finding clues in a cold case: Virginia kept the reality of their relationship a secret for a long time. On April 4, 2025, a few weeks before she died, Virginia sent her New York-based friend and publicist Dini von Mueffling a text about an alleged incident in 2010, the earliest allegation we’ve found. She wrote that Robbie, coming off a three-day bender, “punched me in the face, which dropped me to the floor, and continuously kicking [sic] me in the stomach”. He’d been violent “throughout the whole marriage”. She called police, but Rob pleaded not to be charged. “But as time went on, it only got worse. I am shattered even writing this.”
Last year, our colleagues at 60 Minutes tracked down about seven women – friends of Virginia’s – who saw signs of domestic violence during this time. One woman, whose identity was obscured because she feared Robbie, said she saw Virginia with a black eye. “I just said, ‘That wasn’t Robbie, was
it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, she said it was … just a little scuffle.’ ”
In 2013, Virginia and Robbie moved to her home state of Florida. Amanda Roberts, Virginia’s sister-in-law, first noticed something was wrong when she was giving birth and Virginia was by her side. Amanda noticed a mark about her neck, as if a chain had been pulled against it.
A few months later, at one of his children’s birthday parties, Robbie was complaining to her brother Sky that Amanda was gossiping about Virginia. Amanda and Sky said Robbie started screaming at Sky, so they decided to leave. “Robbie comes running from the backyard,” says Amanda, “and he charged Sky while he’s holding my three-month-old.” Virginia’s brother, Danny, intervened. (Few in Virginia’s family were immune to Robbie’s wrath: the brothers gave us reams of abusive texts and memes – such as “I swear I will bitch slap you”, “stupid” or “loser” – that Robbie sent to their mother using Virginia’s phone.)
In 2014, the family moved to a small town in Colorado called Penrose to be closer to Virginia’s mother. On March 4, 2015, police attended the Giuffre home after receiving several 911 hang-up calls. According to the police report, Virginia said she tried to stop Robbie punching and kicking their dog, Bear, which Robbie said had bitten him. She said Robbie then punched her several times in her face and head, grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. Virginia had a bruise forming on her left cheek, blood on her sleeve and a whitish-clear fluid mixed with blood leaking from her ear, which police noted could be cerebral spinal fluid, a symptom of severe head trauma. Robbie was arrested on domestic violence charges and taken to jail, where he told an officer he’d hit Virginia by accident.
Dale King, the then-detective sergeant who went to check on Virginia the next morning, tells Good Weekend he remembers Robbie flagged him down in the street. He knew the couple because he’d been to the house to keep the paparazzi in line and investigate the strange break-ins. King said Robbie seemed to be soothing himself with a story he’d heard him narrate before, about being the saviour. “He’s trying to convince me that I have to let him get back home so he can protect her,” he says. “Hell,” he remembers thinking. “You’re her biggest threat right now.”
Robbie was charged with assault but returned to Australia soon after. Virginia’s family begged her to stay, but she decided, for the kids’ sake, to give Robbie another go. She had the record of the Colorado incident suppressed – perhaps she didn’t want the distraction of media reporting – but last December, like a message in a bottle swept to shore, the police report emerged as part of the Epstein files. For Virginia’s brothers – who were in a battle with Robbie over Virginia’s estate and trying to prove he was a domestic abuser – it was a crucial piece of evidence.
It’s 2018 and two young families are barbecuing on the palm-fringed Kewarra Beach in Cairns. The two mothers notice each other. The blonde mother has a pram carrying her pet red-tailed black cockatoo. A rainbow lorikeet is perched on the shoulder of the dark-haired mother. This was Virginia Giuffre and her soon-to-be best buddy Linda Freitag. “We sort of looked at each other as these two crazy bird ladies … it was an instant friendship,” says Freitag.
After Virginia and Robbie moved to Cairns in 2017, things seemed brighter. “They seemed happy enough,” says Freitag of the Giuffre marriage. Freitag and Robbie were close too, back then. “He’s extremely passionate. He’s like a person of extremes,” she says. His darker side could be “quite severe”, but his loving side was generous and considerate, “and outspoken as well, in a good way”. With Maxwell’s payment, Virginia had become a multimillionaire overnight, which meant Robbie no longer needed to work.
But then, in 2020, Virginia contracted meningitis. Delirious, she was admitted to hospital where she got out of bed, lost her footing and broke her neck. She later had two surgeries on her spine and would rely heavily on painkillers. She would also later be diagnosed with fibromyalgia and serious gynaecological issues.
In January 2021, the family moved from Cairns to Perth. Virginia purchased a $1.9 million beachside home in the suburb of Ocean Reef with sea views, six bedrooms and a pool. They had plenty of money to live well but, as Virginia wrote in diary notes found after her death (undated but written post-separation), she felt trapped by Robbie’s increasing control. “The stronger I became, the scarier he became.” She describes it as manifesting in small ways at first: monitoring her daily activities and accusing her of unfaithfulness “on an almost daily basis”. She wrote, “Not allowed to go downstairs while any mate was over. And that was every day. I became a prisoner.”
In early 2022, Virginia hit rock bottom. She’d been hospitalised after a bad bout of COVID-19. Worn out from near-constant neck pain, haunted by nightmares of past abuse and with people online calling her a liar, sellout and whore, she tried to overdose on pills in hospital. She was revived, went home, and tried again. Her eldest son found her, saving her life. After that, she wrote in her memoir, it would be a long time before thoughts of self-annihilation would begin to subside.
In December 2024, a few weeks before everything blew up between Robbie and Virginia, there was an incident at their Perth home. In one of the documents we’ve obtained, she wrote that Robbie was following her around being argumentative and then called her a whore. “I noticed my daughter’s face go pale, her jaw drop and a shocked look. My instinct was a sense of preservation and to show my daughter it’s not acceptable and I just struck out to which he called the police.” They served her with a 72-hour on-the-spot violence restraining order. She didn’t know it then, but this would soon be used against her to devastating effect.
Virginia had everything planned for the girls’ trip. It was her daughter’s birthday (she’s still a minor, so we’ll call her Ellie) and they were off to the coastal getaway of Dunsborough, about 2½ hours south of Perth. It would be a mother-and-daughter thing. But then Ellie wanted her brothers there, which meant Robbie, too. Matters were strained between the couple then, but Virginia decided to make the most of it. The date was January 9, 2025.
Robbie and Virginia have different versions of what happened that night at their luxury rental on Geographe Bay. In Virginia’s version, Robbie argued with the then-girlfriend of one of his sons – a girl who was 16 or 17 – and kicked her out of the house late at night (we’ve also been told this by an independent source). Virginia paid for her $350 taxi ride back to Perth. Later, Robbie wanted sex, but Virginia – recovering from a spinal operation in November and a serious urinary tract infection – said no.
“It got physical, got violent,” says Sky. He said Virginia told them Robbie punched her in the face and put her in a martial arts position, a sort of stranglehold, cracking her sternum and causing her to pass out. Good Weekend can’t confirm the cracked sternum as we can’t access Virginia’s medical records.
Just before 3pm the next day, local police from Busselton attended the holiday rental and interviewed Virginia. They advised her to go to the local hospital. At 8.55pm, on January 10, 2025, Virginia texted her mother, one of the few people she told about Robbie’s violence. “Mommy, pls call me when you’re awake. Rob did it again, I’m in the hospital and I need your voice to help me calm down.” She FaceTimed Sky and Amanda and called her ghostwriter Amy Wallace, who later wrote in the memoir’s preface that Virginia was in extreme distress. Robbie and the kids left that morning. During the day, police served him with a 72-hour restraining order, which expired on January 13.
A day later, Robbie made his move.
On January 14, Virginia and carer Cheryl Myers were in a Perth hotel room when police knocked on the door. They had called earlier to find out where she was. They then served Virginia with a six-month interim family violence order. She could neither go home nor contact her two youngest children. And she – or anyone on her behalf – could not contact Robbie. “She was in total shock,” says Myers, a gently spoken widow who raised three sons. “And so was I.”
In WA, and across Australia, anyone can apply for an emergency or interim restraining order against a violent partner. The system is designed for people – mostly women – in genuine fear and immediate need of protection. Less evidence is needed compared to other court hearings and, for safety reasons, the alleged abuser does not have to be notified or be present. And that’s why, on January 14, Virginia had no idea what was about to happen.
On that morning, Robbie filled out an affidavit, which we’ve obtained. Robbie notes that Virginia had a police order made against her, “approximately four weeks ago” (presumably the incident when Virginia lashed out at Robbie for calling her a whore in front of Ellie). He writes that Virginia has been “physically, mentally and emotionally abusive and financially to myself and my kids”. She suffers, he writes, from mental health issues and has been admitted into mental hospitals numerous times. “She has attempted suicide on numerous occasions with kids present.”
In the form, he writes down his version of the Dunsborough incident. “We went to bed [and] were having a conversation and the conversation led to an argument and then she started physically assaulting me with headbutts, punching, scratching, hammerfist and spitting. I was trying to protect myself by covering my face. And as soon as I had a chance to flee I did and then seeked [sic] to protect my children and told them to pack to leave in the morning.” He had scratches and bruising to the head, he writes, and was constantly in fear and anxious Virginia would return to the house and assault him.
Two pages later, he says that he’s the primary carer and describes Virginia as a manipulative and unpredictable person who put “my children” in harm’s way to the point one required two surgeries (likely a reference to a 2024 incident when Virginia was driving a quad bike with Ellie on the back and they ran into a tree; Ellie’s jaw needed two operations).
With the form done, Robbie then argued his case before magistrate Lynette Dias. We don’t know what happened in that courtroom because the court has refused our request for the transcript twice and Robbie has repeatedly declined to speak to us. One of the few people who does know, however, is defence lawyer Nick Terry.
Terry filed an objection against the order for Virginia and applied for the transcript. He can’t give it to us because of his professional obligations to the court, but he said the hearing lasted about 15 minutes and that Robbie did not tell the magistrate about the recent 72-hour restraining order against him.
The system is so overwhelmed – the Perth Magistrates Court alone handles around 5600 family violence restraining order applications a year – the first time Virginia could challenge the order was in six months, the length of the order itself. (A statement released to Good Weekend by Robbie’s lawyer said: “Due to Virginia’s behaviour in January 2025, it was necessary for the courts to impose protective measures to safeguard Robert and the children from harm.”)
Meanwhile, Virginia was dealing with the police. She was interviewed again about the assault, this time in her hotel room by two female officers from Perth. “They were extremely good. But then a guy stepped in,” says Myers. “He just wanted to brush it off, you know. So I was not impressed.”
In the following weeks, Cheryl Myers says Virginia repeatedly called police with concerns about Robbie’s guns and his history of violence against her. Ultimately, WA police did not charge Robbie with assault. Myers thinks this is because the children told police their mother had injured herself. The police declined to talk to us about their inquiries into the January 9, 2025 incident, citing a possible coronial inquest, but last month Commissioner Col Blanch said they were reviewing their investigation after the family officially complained. “Her local police force failed her,” says her brother Danny Wilson.
Virginia’s “ranch” is the kind of place you’re likely to see kangaroos. We did when we went to Neergabby a few months ago: a mother and a joey minding their own business on the long driveway that curved to Virginia’s homestead. This property, with its 16 hectares of bush and running brook, is where she lived for the last four months of her life with carer Myers, two dogs, a horse, two sheep and 12 chickens. It was her favourite place.
As Virginia documented in her notes, she became increasingly isolated post-separation. Wilson remembers his sister ringing one night. She said she had been cut off from her mobile phone, satellite internet and power. It was dark. “She got up in the middle of the night, drove to Perth and checked into a hotel.” Later, she described being cut from her health and house insurance and locked her out of her personal and work emails. Due to the interim order, neither she nor Myers could contact Robbie to find out what had happened.
His guns were also causing her great distress. (Not long after Robbie had sole custody of the children, he pleaded guilty to a charge of keeping his ammunition unsecured.) “She was isolated, totally isolated,” says Myers of those last few months. “It was just a complete nightmare.”
During this period, police charged Virginia with breaching the restraining order after she sent texts to Robbie. She was told to appear before the Joondalup magistrates court in March. She also tried desperately to get through to her children, changing her Netflix profile to “Mommy Loves You”. “My beautiful babies have no clue how much I love them,” she posted to Instagram on March 22. “I miss them so very much. I have been through hell & back in my 41 years but this is incredibly hurting me worse than anything else.”
On March 30, 2025, Virginia Giuffre created another Instagram post that sent shockwaves around the world. She was lying on a hospital bed, eyes downcast, face bruised. She said a bus driving at 110 kilometres an hour had hit her car and she’d gone into kidney renal failure. “They’ve given me four days to live … I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time.”
Six days prior, Myers had been driving Virginia home – she was in the back seat with her dogs – when an orange school bus clipped her from behind as she turned into the farm. The next day, Virginia went to hospital where, Myers says, doctors were concerned the crash had ruptured her liver and would cause eventual renal failure. But Virginia left to move to a bigger hospital.
Initially, the WA Police said they had no record of a crash, which fuelled scepticism. The driver, Ross Munns, pointed out buses are legally not allowed to go 110 kilometres an hour in WA. “It was a fake crash, this evil woman should be arrested for making false allegations,” read one typical comment on a news story. Myers says the post was a message to her kids, that she needed to see them. Virginia’s family maintain it was never meant to go public: she didn’t realise her Instagram was connected to her private Facebook account.
After Wilson saw the post, he jumped on a plane. When he arrived on April 2, Virginia was staying at Perth’s Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and had undergone dialysis. “She was in pretty bad shape,” he says.
Around this time, three weeks before her death, Virginia started to seriously rethink the manuscript for her hit book, Nobody’s Girl. She’d approved its contents in October 2024, three months before her marriage fell apart. This version had Robbie starring as the white knight. But when Virginia went public, telling People magazine on April 5 about her violent marriage, it created an obvious problem: the white knight was now an alleged abuser. According to those closest to her, Virginia wanted either a total rewrite, Robbie taken out of the “saviour” role, or the book to be silent about him. Despite her feelings about Robbie’s portrayal, Virginia did want the book published, emailing Amy Wallace on April 1 that “in the event of my passing, I would like to ensure Nobody’s Girl is still released”.
After Virginia’s death, von Mueffling, Sky and Danny and their wives fought Penguin Random House, lobbying for her wishes to be realised. In August 2025, they went to The New York Times, declaring Virginia would not want it published in its current form. In the end, Penguin Random House released the version Virginia was unhappy with but added an opening note from Wallace that included the January 9 and Colorado incidents, the People article and the family’s concerns that the book underplayed domestic abuse (a titbit not included, Wallace tells Good Weekend, was that on one of her Australian visits, Robbie made it clear after 11 days that she was no longer welcome, slamming the door behind her).
Nobody’s Girl, which has sold 1.4 million copies, recently won three British Book of the Year Awards, including the overall book of the year for “honouring Giuffre’s memory, her story and her words”. But it has also become an important account for Robbie. Responding to domestic abuse allegations in this article, his lawyer pointed out that the book “praised and thanked Robert for his support of her throughout their marriage”.
On April 13, 2025, Sky flew to Australia, then Danny left. Sky has fond memories from this time, including watching The Red with Virginia, a horror film about a bloodthirsty zombie kangaroo. One day, he watched as Robbie had all of Virginia’s belongings delivered from the Ocean Reef house in garbage bags. Around this time, Virginia told her Cairns friend Linda Freitag that Robbie “was just waiting for me to die”.
But few people, including Myers and Sky, saw Virginia’s death coming. On the day before she died, she was excited because she had found a psychologist she connected with, a Canadian. He told her he wanted to focus on her future, not her past. Myers describes her as hugging him and calling later in the day about the treatments he’d mentioned. “She said, ‘You actually understand. I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go forwards.’ ”
The next morning, a Friday, was Anzac Day. Virginia insisted Myers go and see her soldier son march in the parade. She left at about 12.30pm. “We did the usual,” says Myers, “‘I love you, no, I love you, no, I love you more. No, I love you more.’ ”
Virginia phoned Myers an hour later, saying she’d realised they needed to pick up more medication the next day. “She said, ‘Look, Sky’s here, why don’t you stay home tonight, pick up the meds in the morning and then come back.’ … She was in a good mood,” says Myers. That was the last time they spoke.
Meanwhile, Sky had left to do some laundry and check out Perth’s beaches (he was leaving soon and hadn’t done much sightseeing). He says he got back at 3.30pm or 4pm and Virginia wasn’t out of her bedroom, so he had a nap. When he woke, he decided to get something to eat. He went to Virginia’s door and was going to knock, but heard what he describes as “some really nice therapeutic sounds”. He decided to leave her be and left the property to get dinner.
Before leaving, he noticed that the CCTV system he’d installed for Virginia had been unplugged (it had external cameras and one facing the kitchen and front door area). When he returned around 9pm, he was talking to Amanda on the phone when he realised he hadn’t spoken to Virginia all day. So he knocked on her door. No answer. Eventually, he kicked the door in.
And that’s when he found Virginia. He rang Triple Zero and tried to resuscitate her for 45 minutes. “That whole time I was …” He stops, trying to steady his wavering voice. “I was trying to bring her back to life. You could just tell, though, she was lifeless and her face was drained.”
When news of Virginia’s death broke, conspiracy theories went into overdrive. Online sleuths pointed to her December 2019 post that said “in no way, shape or form am I suicidal”. Her father went on television to declare “somebody got to her”. That she was murdered in a shadowy Epstein-related plot is still a common sentiment in online comments. But Sky, who will not reveal the method of Virginia’s suicide, said: “I know it’s hard to accept it because of the warrior she was, but she did commit suicide.”
No one can really know what, in those final moments, drives a person to take their life. Her family believe Virginia was broken by not seeing her children. One of her sons was to turn 18 in two days. “At the very core of her was being a mother,” says Sky. Says Myers: “If [she was] just allowed to speak to her children, not even see them but speak to her children, she would be alive today.”
Sky was initially impressed with the police investigation into his sister’s suicide. But, he says, they failed to properly investigate what Virginia alleged were Robbie’s isolating tactics and domestic and systems abuse. Sky says there was plenty of evidence for police: they took photographs of her diaries that detailed the alleged abuse. He says he spent hours telling them about Robbie’s alleged violence: the January 9 incident, Colorado.
The family – backed by 16 of Australia’s top domestic violence experts – are asking for a public inquest so that the coroner can examine the systems that failed her and look at issues such as the alleged misidentification of Virginia as a perpetrator, the hidden toll of domestic violence-related suicide, systems abuse, coercive control and the police failures. “I don’t want there to be more Virginias out there that have to go through the same thing,” Sky says.
Meanwhile, a battle is unfolding over Virginia’s estate which, with book royalties and investment returns, could be worth up to $30 million, Good Weekend has been told. Robbie’s and Virginia’s divorce is yet to be finalised, and Robbie may emerge from that with millions of dollars. The remainder will be divided according to whoever wins the case slowly making its way through the WA Supreme Court (Virginia died without a will).
On one side are sons Christian and Noah, backed by their father. If they win, Robbie stands to inherit just over a third of what’s left after the divorce settlement, with the remaining two-thirds divided between the three children. That would make him the main beneficiary and most likely the administrator of Virginia’s worldwide estate.
On the other is Myers and Virginia’s Perth lawyer Karrie Louden, backed by Virginia’s brothers and their wives. They say Virginia had an “informal will”, expressed to Louden and also emailed to her accountant in February 2025, stipulating a small amount of money going to Virginia’s family and friends, but the bulk to her children and none to Robbie. They say she wanted the money held in trust until the kids turned 25.
In a statement to Good Weekend, Robbie’s lawyer said Virginia suffered “significant mental health issues and overreliance on prescription medication”, due to the pressure of being in the public eye. “This may have led to Virginia’s change of perspective.” Robbie was limited in responding to “various unfounded allegations” for legal reasons, the statement said, but he and the children just wanted to “remember Virginia as a loving wife and mother”.
“What appears to be an orchestrated attempt by persons to gain financially from Virginia’s death by making unsubstantiated allegations, when they should have been aware of Virginia’s medical conditions, is simply disgraceful,” the statement said.
Sometimes Virginia would tell random people she was going to marry Cheryl Myers. This embarrassed the 71-year-old grandmother, of course. “I know you love me,” Virginia would say. And Myers did. “I loved her as if she was my own daughter.” Virginia, who always yearned for the unconditional, protective love of a parent, found that in Myers. But she also, in those last months, found something else: a clarity about healthy relationships. She wrote in her diary about the need to recognise early signs of control, such as jealousy and possessiveness. “We must challenge traditional notions that confuse love with control.”
In early February, she texted von Mueffling. Her life was a shambles, she wrote, but for the first time she felt liberated: “I am nobody’s girl.” Myers noticed this, too: “In that last four months, I seen the mother in Virginia, where she yearned for her children. I seen the child in Virginia that had missed out on her childhood. I seen the teenager in Virginia where she would put pranks on me all the time.”
A few days before her death, Virginia spent $8000 on furniture to set up her long-held dream of a retreat on her farm for victims of domestic and sexual violence. “She had so much more to offer this world,” says Myers. “She really did.”
Lifeline: 13 11 14; Respect: 1800RESPECT.
Listen to Virginia, a four-part investigative series hosted by Melissa Fyfe and Carla Hildebrandt, wherever you get your podcasts. The first episode is out today.
Read more of our coverage of Virginia Giuffre:
- WA Police Commissioner orders review into police interactions with Virginia Giuffre before death
- ‘Concerns’ raised over trust withdrawals in Virginia Giuffre’s estate battle
- ‘Profound injustice’: 16 experts demand inquest for Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre
- Virginia Giuffre’s family seeks coronial inquest, says she was ‘let down’ in final months
- Violent incident between Giuffre and husband revealed as legal fight over her fortune rages on
