What Nobody is Saying about Nobody's Girl: Virginia Giuffre was Autistic

Calling out Epstein and Maxwell was pure, Autistic Culture Justice Seeking (Pillar 9), but that's just the tip of the Autistic iceberg. Yet another reason we need to come together as a community.

Looking back on our lives as Late Discovered Autistic people, we often ask ourselves and each other: HOW? HOW DID NO ONE SEE THIS? It is so obvious we are Autistic once we understand Autistic traits and how they show up differently in different people. This is one of the reasons we meet at 4pm UK time/ 11am ET every Wednesday, because processing Late Discovery is not something to be done alone.

For most of us from the lost generation, the reason no one said anything is because they didn’t have an accurate list of traits, they had a very limited list of how some traits show up in a smallish cluster of Autistic people. It’s frustrating, but for people over 50, like Derek, Phoenix, and Amy from the Late Diagnosis Club I run, it does make some sense how difficult it was to get a diagnosis. For others, like Lily and Sarah, in their 20s and 30s, a missed identification is a little more heartbreaking because identification could have happened sooner.

Then there is the case of Virginia Giuffre, who sadly, I will never be able to induct into the Late Diagnosis Club. Whether she died by suicide or was murdered almost doesn’t matter because either way we know child sex traffickers Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein killed her. What is less known, and what I haven’t seen anyone else say, is Virginia Giuffre embodied the values, norms, and traditions of Autistic culture and her diagnostic criteria is all over her memoir Nobody’s Girl.

Psychologists famously like to say you can’t diagnose someone posthumously. I beg to differ. Autism is a culture. Can I identify her specific support needs posthumously, well, no, but doctors and psychologists haven’t been good at this when we are living either. There are 2 aspects of an autism diagnosis — Autistic traits that are causing significant problems in your ability to work or love; and evidence these traits have been there from birth and weren’t caused by something else. In Virginia’s case because of her extensive sexual trauma psychologists might try to pin her Autistic traits on phenomimicry because of the trauma but this memoir is a lifetime supply of evidence of her autism.

Here are a few of the things I noted in her book that made me realize she shares our Autistic Culture:

Genetics: Like ethnicity, Deafness, and Queerness; Autistic traits are inherited. Autism is a polygenic condition like eye colour or weight. In the book, she perfectly describes her grandmother’s Autistic traits. The way she was extremely particular about her home and her hobbies and had a lot of rules that everyone knew they needed to follow. Then she goes on to describe her middle child’s Autistic traits (including delayed speech and vestibular stimming). I can’t find it now but I wrote to a friend about her mother because something she described about her mother also sounded very Autistic to me. But in any case there is a family line here that is pretty easy to follow. Her child’s diagnosis should have led to someone pointing it out to her! Maybe they did?

Autistic Memory: Temple Grandin has a book called Thinking in Pictures. This isn’t how I think as an Autistic person, but you can tell from the book it is precisely how Virginia thinks and you can hear how she sort of assumes this is how everyone’s brains work. She is frustrated when her memory is questioned because of her drug use, because as she describes it “no one would forget someone’s face as they are raping you.” Of course though, that isn’t true. It’s just a really real experience with someone who has a hyper-visual memory. She remembers things in visual pictures and has a remarkable memory for certain details. So remarkable, of course, neurotypical people question us.

Monotropism: You can hear Virginia’s commitment to her special interests in the book and they do look a lot like Autistic passions.

• Her brother “Spider” when he was little

• Horses & Dogs

• Massage

• Her Kids

• And of course, Social Justice

Common Co-occuring Conditions: In her memoir, Virginia described several physical and mental health conditions that are highly co-occuring with autism. Having multiple of these conditions is always a reason to be screened for autism, as is having a child that is diagnosed on the spectrum, which is how she describes her middle child called Tyler in the book.

• Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) (diagnosed)

• PTSD (diagnosed)

• Eating Disorder (described)

• Chronic Pain (diagnosed)

• Fibromyalgia (diagnosed)

• Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) (described)

• Drug and Alcohol addiction (diagnosed)

• Burnout (described)

• Sadly, suicide (7 to 16 times more likely in Autistic people with low support needs)

Social Communication Differences: In Autistic culture we believe people should operate at a literal level. Small talk isn’t valued in our culture but direct communication is. The world isn’t made for Autistic people, and so we misinterpret and make mistakes that get us in big trouble. Identification doesn’t fix it, but it sure helps us catch these critical issues early. Here’s what unidentified Autistic social communication looked like for Virginia:

1. She was considered a “troubled teen” and sent to a school for Troubled Teens. You know what they call those schools now? Residential Programs for Autistic Teens. They are still abusive and awful though maybe a little less so, but we realized the teens smoking weed in the bathroom at school weren’t actually troubled; they were Autistic teens desperate to survive.

2. She was so naïve! For instance, she is working at Mar-a-lago and Ghislaine Maxwell offers her a high paying job as a Massage Therapist despite her complete lack of training. Her (not-Autistic) brothers think this is suspect but, since Virginia takes things at face value, she believes Ghislaine’s explanations.

3. She was so easily fooled and conned. Like many, many, many Autistic people she was abused and taken advantage of as a child but didn’t think to tell anyone. Her fawn response was on full blast, which in our culture makes sense because our natural ways of behaving are often not accepted so we become trained to try to please others, even and often at our own expense.

4. You can also see how impossible she found it to understand manipulation and disloyalty even at the time of writing the book before she died. When she was younger she kept going back to Ghislaine and Epstein. Okay, maybe dismissed by her youth and trauma. But then in her late 20s as a mom of 3 she went back to her dad who abused her (and continued to) and her mom who did not protect her - multiple times. And her final undoing and her worst abuser of all was her husband Robbie. He cock-blocked Epstein and stole Virginia (just like Epstein stole her from Trump) but she was just trafficked again. She didn’t see how obviously controlling he was from the beginning.

5. She communicated better with horses and dogs. She mentions a few casual friendships in the book but this woman had no friends! She had people who controlled her and who used her - including her lawyers and journalists who used her for their career; her husband, her family in many ways, and of course the sex traffickers. The only real relationships she seems to have in the book are with horses and dogs.

6. You can see throughout the book how she expects that by acting a certain way certain results can be achieved, but despite the fact this isn’t what happens, she keeps going back and trying again and again. This, is part of Autistic naivety but it’s also part of alexithymia, which I think she exhibits in many of her stories. She has trouble identifying feelings unless they are extreme and she is an expert at dissociating from them like when she is describing giving oral sex to MIT Professor Marvin Minsky.

Targets for Abuse: Autistic people are more likely to be targets for abuse. In Virginia’s case she, like many of us looked and sounded younger than her age. I am sure this is part of what Epstein and Maxwell saw in her. Just one of the reasons they would have picked her and why I suspect many of the survivors are Autistic and ALL should be self-testing. She also has a strong FAWNING or people pleasing response, a heightened ability to disassociate because of interoceptive differences and alexithymia, can be easily manipulated with a small compliment that might boost her into a state of bliss.

”Experts” (who I look upon dubiously in this case) say it’s important to distinguish people with Autistic Traits from people with autism. I don’t and I wrote my Master’s Dissertation about this very topic. To me, if you have a lot of Autistic traits (like Virginia Giuffre clearly did), then you should have immediate and abundant access to tools for managing those Autistic traits in a culture context that does not appreciate them.

Autistic people are often not believed and we need and deserve to know in advance this is going to happen so we can prepare. In myth and legend we are Cassandra, the boy who cried wolf, and the boy who points out the Emperor’s New Clothes. As Virginia began to heal her trauma and find sisterhood in a community of survivors, Robbie’s controlling ways were no longer a fit. She had been physically beaten throughout their marriage starting in 2010 before the birth of her first child. Five years later Robbie got a domestic violence charge in Colorado for beating her and a dog. As so often happens when Autistic people stop masking, Robbie didn’t like the real Virginia — the one he couldn’t control. Virginia wrote in her journal, “Robert’s behavior became more controlling, the stronger I became, the scarier he became.”

From 60 Minutes Australia 14 Sept 2025.

In her final days, Virginia was prevented from seeing her children. If she did take her own life, I am confident this is why. How did she end up being the one accused of being abusive? To me, that’s easy to see and a typical problem Autistic people (especially those who have not discovered their autism) have. In the end Virginia was in chronic pain she and deep in burnout. She was medicating with pain killers which she was trying to get off and Ketamine, which she thinks was helping but I find that questionable in the context of her family history of drug and alcohol abuse. My suspicion was in this vulnerable state she was regressing (she even used that word as a way her estranged husband described her) and I bet she was having horrible violent meltdowns that were used against her. When I read Strong Female Character (Fern Brady’s book) I can see how easily someone could have meltdowns that were so big and violent it could lead to a restraining order. In this case, it seems like another example of society discriminating against an Autistic person.

Everyone having meltdowns should have tools for managing them and for getting support. Everyone having sensory overstimulation should have tools for addressing their sensory needs. Everyone having social communication problems, should have the tools to understand why life makes them feel like they are hitting their head against a wall. To me this isn’t a diagnosis issue, this is a human needs issue. As I have said before there are many reasons for medical diagnosis, but that exists separately from the need to know and connect with your culture.

I am culturally Italian, but I don’t have (or need) an Italian passport. The passport doesn’t make me Italian any more than an autism diagnosis would make someone Autistic. What makes you Autistic (with a capital A) is identifying with Autistic traits just like what makes someone Italian is identifying with Italian traits. It’s really that simple.

And that’s why every Wednesday at 4pm UK time / 11am ET/ 8am PT we gather in our culture where our values, traits, and norms are the default. We would love to see you there, in the Late Diagnosis Club. There is a Book Club, a Writing Circle, Crafting, online courses, Research Deep Dives (like next week’s workshop on Anxiety and Burnout), and much more.