Virginia Giuffre's 'big deal' litigator opens up on her journey and the Epstein files
Attorney David Boies rips the “counterproductive” resistance to releasing the Epstein files, including his late client’s FBI interviews.
Three years before connecting with her future attorney, the late Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre already had been searching for answers.
“When I met her in the summer of 2014 for the first time, she was already beginning to search for answers and express herself, but she didn’t really have any sense of what she was going to be put through, or how long or difficult it was going to be,” prominent attorney David Boies said in a phone interview.
The week of the publication of Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir “Nobody’s Girl,” Boies spoke to All Rise News in a half-hour interview about Giuffre’s journey into advocacy, the retribution she faced from the powerful people she accused, and the ongoing fight for transparency over the Epstein case. Those battles continue after Giuffre’s death.
Days before the interview, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) sued over the refusal of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to swear her into office, noting that she’s expected to be the deciding signature on a discharge petition to force a vote to release the Epstein files.
Asked whether it seems Johnson is trying to fight the release, Boies replied: “I can’t think of any other reason.”
“Legal dream team”
“Nobody’s Girl” describes Giuffre’s first meeting with Boies inside his 7th floor office in Midtown Manhattan. Guiffre wrote that she knew Boies was a “big deal” litigator who represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election and the National Basketball Players Association in the 2011 NBA lockout. She quotes herself telling him: “I’ve stayed silent for too long, but not anymore. I’m here to help stop Epstein once and for all.”
According to the memoir, Florida-based attorney Brad Edwards arranged the meeting, adding Boies and Sigrid McCawley to what Giuffre described as her “legal dream team” to “begin truly holding my abusers to account.” Boies said that everyone on the team understood what that meant for Giuffre.
“They knew that she would become a key target for Epstein and all of his cohorts, and that, of course, is exactly what happened as soon as she went public,” Boies said.
The team would ultimately take on a long list of powerful people and institutions, including Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and other people and entities.
“Maxwell, Prince Andrew and his publicity machine, and his lawyers, [Epstein’s lawyers] Roy Black and Alan Dershowitz, all turned their guns on her and the next several years were a constant battle, constant attacks,” Boies said. “I think some of the attacks made her stronger. It certainly convinced her that she was doing the right thing, that this needed to be taken on. But it was also terribly draining and terribly difficult for somebody who was trying to be a young mother as well.”
Boies said that the litigation process helped Giuffre understand what happened to her, including the reason Epstein kept boasting to her and other girls about his connections to wealthy and influential people.
“We talked to lots and lots of victims, and one of the things that we heard over and over again — almost as if it had been a script — was where Epstein would tell the girls about all his powerful friends and point out pictures of him with Trump and Dershowitz and the President of Harvard and people like that,” Boies said.
He said that Giuffre didn’t initially understand the purpose of Epstein’s name-dropping.
“When she heard it said over and over and over again to all these girls, it was clear that was part of a pattern where he was using this consciously and as part of a concerted plan to scare people and intimidate them,” Boies said.
“A right to know what’s not there”
Giuffre’s lawsuits against Epstein and Maxwell played a key role in creating a record that led to their criminal prosecutions.
She also helped in the criminal investigation of Epstein’s alleged accomplice Jean Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who died in Paris — under similar circumstances to Epstein’s — while awaiting trial on child sex crimes.
Asked about Giuffre’s interviews with the FBI, Boies said that he expects the notes of the conversations to be revelatory if they are released: “The FBI is going to have detailed notes about that. I think that will be something that will be productive for people to see.”
He added that Giuffre didn’t take notes of the interview herself, which took place when she was a young woman and “there was still a lot of trauma about it.”
Earlier this month, Boies filed new lawsuits against Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon, which already have been slated for a speedy trial next spring. He declined to speak about that litigation, but he spoke generally about his firm’s practice of seeking accountability against the financial apparatus behind Epstein’s sex trafficking operations.
“This was an international enterprise that trafficked hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000 young women, and did so for decades,” Boies noted. “It couldn’t have operated on the scope and scale that it did for the duration that it did without the complicity of a number of cooperators, conspirators, collaborators, including banks.”
Giuffre’s book briefly mentions revelations from the litigation against J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, which has helped fuel an ongoing congressional investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) into the financing of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.
At the time of the interview, Boies had just finished speaking at a panel discussion organized by the group Speak Up for Justice, which draws attention to threats against judges and the rule of law.
The Epstein story itself, he said, is rife with stories about pressure and intimidation of prosecutors, reporters, and financial institutions.
“This couldn’t have gone on for the duration it did, and at the scope and scale that it did without many people being corrupted and many good people being intimidated,” he said.
Boies found the push to bury the Epstein files “counterproductive.”
“I think there is much there that the public has a right to know, but I also think the public has a right to know what’s not there,” Boies said. “Conspiracy theories always grow best in darkness, and I think it’s critically important, so that we learn from this, that all the facts come out.”
I’m reading Nobody’s Girl now. The threats the powerful had over the victims made we always wonder how many victims were murdered.
Very hard to “like” this post but thank you for keeping us updated, Adam. 🦋