Rina Oh had “mixed emotions” when she heard that Virginia Giuffre had died. They had known each other in the weird and twisted world of Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s, but by the time of her death their relationship had descended into outright hostility. “I was sad, but at the same time I felt like I could finally breathe, like, she’s not going to try to ruin my life any more,” she says.
Since Giuffre’s memoir was published last month, her words have been front-page news around the world. For many people she was a hero, the woman who exposed a sexual abuse network involving some of the world’s most powerful men. However, there have long been questions about Giuffre’s reliability as a witness and Oh, while recognising the terrible adversity she went through, is one of her most vocal critics.
Oh claimed Giuffre had twisted events that happened in her own life and in some cases made them up. In 2021 she sued Giuffre for defamation. Giuffre counter-sued and a protracted legal battle rumbled right up to Giuffre’s suicide in April. Weeks before Giuffre took her own life, a New York judge had swept aside Giuffre’s attempt to quash a sexual assault case Oh had lodged against her. It was looking increasingly likely that Epstein’s most famous accuser was going to have to answer questions in court. Oh has no idea how much this was weighing on Giuffre before her death but she thought there was a momentum building. “There were cracks building and they were cracks in her credibility,” she says.
The unsealing of the deposition
The clash began in 2019 when documents from Giuffre’s civil action against Ghislaine Maxwell were unsealed by order of the US Court of Appeals. The release included sections of a previously unpublished book written by Giuffre, The Billionaire’s Playboy Club. Oh, who was living in New Jersey with her husband and two sons, was eager to read it.
She logged onto her computer and skimmed the pages until she found a reference to someone who sounded a lot like her. According to Giuffre, “Rena”, an “unusual-looking woman” of “Asian descent” was to help Giuffre massage Epstein. “Jeffrey expected me to walk her through her duties,” Giuffre wrote. They all had a steam shower. “Rena took the instructions well and began to massage him too.” Over several pages Giuffre recounted how the situation between the three of them heated up. Epstein requested the girls start kissing. Then Rena “introduced me to my first taste of S&M”, Giuffre wrote.
The book suggested that those interactions took place repeatedly over a period of months, with Rena becoming “an official”. Rena “considered herself a dominatrix … She liked bondage, whipping, hitting and eventually cutting her sex partner with little sharp knives,” Giuffre explained before detailing how Rena would end their sessions together by hitting her across the face with the back of her hand. At home in New Jersey, Oh stared at the screen with a sense of creeping dread. She recognised the settings Giuffre had described, she recognised some of the people too, but that was where the familiarity ended. “The whole thing was made up,” she claims.
The scholarship
Oh was a 21-year-old art student in New York when she met Epstein. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and was devastated. Her parents, who were of South Korean descent, did not support her art career and she was broke. A friend, Lisa Phillips, offered to introduce her to a wealthy contact. “He owns a private jet and a private island and he’s an art collector,” Oh recalls Phillips saying. “I was like, ‘Yes … he can buy all my artwork.’”
In June 2000 she arrived at Epstein’s enormous New York townhouse with her portfolio, dreaming of finding patrons like the Rockefellers or the Gettys. She and Phillips were greeted by a secretary who ushered them into Epstein’s study. It was a huge room, Oh recalls, and Epstein was behind a desk with two computer monitors and had stock market data on the screen.
They chatted, then Oh showed him her portfolio. When they had finished talking through the pieces, “he led us into the little red room and something took place,” Oh says. She does not want to go into detail but says it was a sexual encounter involving her, Phillips and Epstein. Neither of them thought much of it at the time. “Back then, I just thought that he was a polygamist, just a weird, unusual and very rich man who had a constant need for sexual gratification. Neither of us took the relationship that seriously,” she says. Phillips says she does not recall the encounter at the townhouse at all.
Almost as soon as Oh had left, Epstein’s secretary called her and said he would like to see her again. On her second visit, Oh was taken straight up to the red room, where Epstein was waiting with another girl. He told the other girl to give him a massage while Oh sat beside him and he talked to her about her career. “He said: ‘I think you’re really talented and I think you should be in school.’” He explained that he often paid for talented young people to further their education. He wanted to offer her “a scholarship” to do a bachelor’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in the city. He had already picked the course. Oh listened, stunned — was this really happening? She left the house, elated.
Epstein’s harem
The logistics of the “scholarship” were left to his secretary and Oh started the course soon afterwards. Meanwhile, she was invited back again. “This is when it gets creepier,” she says. “He said to me: ‘You’re going to be part of Babylon’”, a reference to the Biblical city which represented idolatry and sin.
“He said, ‘You are going to be part of a harem and you are going to be a favourite.’” They went to the red room, where another sexual encounter took place, and before she left he gave her two illustrated books about sultans, “who had hundreds of concubines” — they emphasised the importance of hierarchy within the harem.
The way he reeled her in was cunning, she says. “It wasn’t ‘in exchange for your sexual services, I’m going to pay for your college course’. It was more ‘you are special in this hierarchy inside the harem, you are privileged and … you need to be educated’.” He seemed to be offering himself not just as a patron but as a teacher. She would be invited to Epstein’s house about once a week when he was in New York. They would always talk for an hour or more about art and ideas before some sort of sexual encounter in the red room.
Oh stops me when I ask if they always had sex. Epstein was a “serial masturbator”. “His genitals were deformed” and “he mostly liked to watch girls together”. As time went on Epstein would push her boundaries. He would “ambush” her by having another girl waiting in the red room when she arrived. “I was very uncomfortable. That was not something I wanted to happen,” she says. “And that was part of the thrill for him.” When she went along with it, he would reward her with some act of generosity. Soon she was living in an apartment he had provided for her in New York. He also pushed her to bring girls with her. She did this on three occasions, two of which ended in a sexual encounter. Another got a scholarship to New York University. Oh says she profoundly regrets bringing anyone to Epstein’s house.
Meeting Virginia
She knew logically that there must be other women in this “harem” but she never met them, aside from an occasional massage therapist, and had no real sense of what was happening outside of the New York house. Oh first met Giuffre in the autumn of 2000 in New York. Epstein had invited her to the house and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t “a massage room situation”. Instead he said that he wanted to introduce her to a “friend” from Florida. Giuffre was 17. Oh assumed that she was the daughter of someone he knew.
This was also the first time she met Maxwell, who stuck her head around the door and said: “Oh you’re Rina, you’re all he ever talks about.” Maxwell asked Oh to take Giuffre shopping, which she did. Giuffre wanted to buy “a schoolgirl skirt” so she took her to St Mark’s Place, not thinking too much of it — they were in fashion at the time. Giuffre “was shy and timid and I kept wondering the whole time, ‘Why am I taking you shopping?’” Afterwards she dropped her back to Epstein’s house and left. Oh says she never encountered Andrew Mountbatten Windsor during her time with Epstein and did not hear about him until years later.
The next time she and Giuffre met was in Florida, where Epstein had invited Oh to join him for a week. Giuffre was at the house every day, sometimes bringing other girls with her. In New York Epstein was discreet. In Florida, he wasn’t. There were pictures of semi-nude girls lined up on his desk facing outwards towards the incoming guests. Oh was appalled to see one of herself. “Occasionally people would recognise me from that photo and it was humiliating and embarrassing,” she says.
It was in Florida that Oh realised that Maxwell and Epstein had a relationship of some sort. Maxwell slept in his bedroom there, unlike in New York. Maxwell seemed jealous, Oh recalled, and Epstein liked to provoke her. “He would say things like ‘Look at Rina’s skin. She has the most beautiful skin.’” But he was also boorish. On one occasion they went to Mar-a-Lago, where Maxwell was playing tennis. He insulted her and she insulted him back. “They were going back and forth, Jeffrey laughing in her face and I was like, ‘Wow, these people are psychotic.’” Then Epstein started making lewd sexual actions behind Oh’s back. “I thought, ‘If he’s going to behave this way in public, I don’t know if I want to be seen with him.’”
On another occasion when they were out with friends, he sent her to Barnes & Noble to buy a book about sex slavery. He told her something shocking, Oh says, so shocking that she still won’t repeat it. He swore her to secrecy. “It was during that conversation that I started to distance myself from Jeffrey. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should really be around him,’” she says. “But then he continued to reel me back in.”
The end of the relationship
Back in New York, Oh got a job in fashion PR. She rented out the flat that Epstein had provided for her and moved in with a flatmate. “I became less available for Jeffrey,” she says.
The final time she saw Giuffre was in the red room in New York. It was one of the occasions when she had brought a friend with her. “I knocked on the door, and then I opened the door and walked in and froze … I knew immediately that this was an ambush.” What happened was by now predictable. She claims she was “ambushed by two females at the same time” while Epstein watched. “The last impression I had of Virginia was this girl had turned into one of the girls I hated the most, one of the massage therapists who ambushed me in that room.”
Her relationship with Epstein ended a few months later. She had been working on a sculpture, a monumental bronze which was unveiled outside Georgetown University in Washington. Oh came back to the city on a high and agreed to go to Epstein’s house. She thought he’d be pleased for her. “I ended up getting punished that day,” she says. I asked what she meant. It was a violent sexual act, she said. “I see it as an act of rape. It’s not something I consented to.” Oh adds: “There was no exchange of words when it was finished … It was pretty obvious I was never going to see him again.” She was evicted from her flat soon afterwards.
The lawsuits
By the time Oh read The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, she had been dealing with the fallout of the relationship for years. In the months after the alleged assault, she had relapsed into an eating disorder. “I didn’t want to be attractive to men anymore. I felt so ashamed. I didn’t want men to look at me in a sexual way,” she says. Decades on, having had therapy, Oh married, had two children and built a career in food media. She told her husband that she had been abused by a very rich man, but never told him who. The first stories about Epstein abusing girls in Florida started coming out in 2007, then started up again in 2019 when the details emerged of the sweetheart deal he had struck in Florida, which protected him and some of his aides from prosecution in exchange for pleading guilty to solicitation with a minor. Oh started posting anonymous messages online about her time in his world and became convinced that Epstein or his associates were threatening her. She had a psychotic episode and ended up in hospital.
Then came the unsealing of Giuffre’s memoir. “She cast me as a perpetrator and the whole thing was made up. The only part that is true is the shopping trip,” Oh says. In the months afterwards, she agreed to an interview with an American journalist, but it turned out to be a podcast about recruiters, framed around Giuffre and another girl, and casted Oh as the villain. Oh claims she was set up. What followed was vicious. “I was getting harassed by people, I was getting stalked by people, I was getting a lot of hate messages.” A row between the two women exploded on social media and each accused the other of abuse. Giuffre claimed to have a six-inch scar on her leg inflicted by Oh.
Oh volunteered an interview to the FBI, which later confirmed that it viewed her as a victim of Epstein and not a recruiter.
She submitted a claim to the victim compensation fund, asking to be given the equivalent sum of the course Epstein had paid for and used to control her. When the money came through in October 2021 she used the funds to start a legal case against Giuffre for defamation, valued at $10 million.
Giuffre sued back, arguing that it was her First Amendment right to say everything she had, and she maintained that Oh was not a victim but a girlfriend who changed her story to benefit from the compensation fund. She accused Oh of sexual assault, claiming to have “suffered serious psychological, sexual, and physical abuse at the hands of Defendant Oh”. Oh sued again, using the Adult Survivors Act in New York and saying Giuffre had sexually assaulted her during the final interaction at the townhouse. Much of the evidence put forward by Oh’s team has focused on the scar on Giuffre’s leg, which Oh’s medical experts claim was almost certainly not caused by a knife.
Questions for Giuffre
Giuffre’s credibility had been questioned over the years, most notably after she dropped her sexual abuse case against the lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 2019, acknowledging that she “may have made a mistake”. Other victims of Epstein spoke privately of having their experiences dramatically redrawn by Giuffre. However, they were afraid to speak out publicly, concerned about going against public opinion, undermining the cases against Epstein and Maxwell or becoming targets for Giuffre’s high-profile legal team. It was also true that Giuffre was herself a victim of smear campaigns. Both Epstein and Brian Basham, a friend of Maxwell, hired professionals to dig dirt on her.
Oh and Giuffre met face to face for the last time in 2023 at the World Trade Center offices of Giuffre’s lawyer, where Giuffre was giving out-of-court testimony in the defamation case. Oh says: “I wanted to see her in person. I wanted to see if she would lie to my face. And she did.” Oh recalls her becoming extremely angry. “People don’t understand that Virginia was a bully,” she says. “She created this entire survivor sisters group, it was like a clique of girls that were part of her sisterhood and anyone she didn’t like was excluded.”
I ask what she thinks of Giuffre now, in light of the recent memoir, from which Oh was noticeably absent. “I absolutely think she was a victim. She began her life in a very tragic way. There are a lot of people who failed her,” Oh says. “But eventually Virginia became a victimiser and her morals were twisted. I think she had a hard time distinguishing right from wrong.” I ask Oh what she thought of the other accounts in her book, whether the stream of billionaires and politicians she was trafficked to, who were anonymised in the book but easily traceable on the internet, were guilty of abusing Giuffre. Oh shrugs. “I know she was trafficked,” she says. “But knowing that my story was fabricated, I’m not sure how credible she is.”
Oh is horrified by the public unravelling of Giuffre in her final days, where she posted on social media images of herself bruised after a road accident, claiming her kidneys were failing and that she had days to live. “She was isolated, living alone in that farmhouse without the husband and kids, and to post all those things in social media just to me does not seem like a person is completely here. If there was a mental health team supporting her, then they didn’t do their job.”
Oh is in therapy, supported by a fund secured for victims by the former director-general of the US Virgin Islands as part of their suit against Epstein’s bank, JP Morgan. Victims are entitled to up to $50,000 worth of support a year. The legal case is not over. According to Oh’s lawyer, all the legal proceedings have been paused until an estate trustee is appointed as a party in place of Giuffre. A date has been set for this month. Kathleen Thomas and Jillian P Ross, lawyers for Giuffre, said: “We are moving to dismiss this case against her because we maintain and always have maintained as our client did that she was sexually abused by Rina Oh. The case is stayed until someone steps in on behalf of Virginia.”
As soon as a trustee is appointed, Oh plans to proceed with her claim. She believes it is the right thing to do: “My children, unfortunately, have read these stories,” she says. “It is not her right to have done that. She has caused me a lot of harm but I am reclaiming who I am.”
