Jeenah Moon / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

By Taina Bien-Aimé

When the House of Representatives released 23,000 additional documents related to the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein last week, and yesterday, when Congress voted to compel the Justice Department to release investigative files on the New York native, my thoughts immediately went to one woman in particular.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, just months before the October publication of her book, Nobody’s Girl, A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, was among the fiercest survivors who broke the silence about Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Her life shows how predators thrive when every institution meant to protect vulnerable people looks away. Her story exposes not just Epstein’s crimes, but the failures in our laws and systems that deny survivors justice.

Nobody’s Girl offers details of how Epstein and his chief procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, trafficked countless girls and young women into his multi-million-dollar dens of sexual exploitation.

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