Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) died by suicide, according to a statement by the family. She wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in an automobile crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 miles per hour.

In the statement, her family called her “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.”

In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009, Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday.

“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2022 book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.

Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a multimillionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but he relinquished his royal duties in 2019.

In 2021, she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles III of England, contending that he had sexually assaulted her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James, in the Virgin Islands.

A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist. He said he had no memory of the occasion.

After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”

The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.

In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account, she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.

Ms. Giuffre sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015 for calling her a liar; they settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other counts. The verdict was viewed as the legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system, and his victims, by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.

She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes; boarded with an aunt in California; fled to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the former hippie haven; lived on the streets when she was 14; and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker, who abused her.

Compared with living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage several times a day was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”

But her mandate went well beyond those duties, she told the BBC in 2019: She said that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.

In 2002, when she was 19, Ms. Giuffre enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.

The couple had three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She explained why she had originally agreed to let Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groom her as a masseuse and to provide sexual services.

“They seemed like nice people,” she said, “so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused. That was the worst thing I could have told them, because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Hank Sanders contributed reporting.

On the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to convey an important message about the United States dollar.

Speaking to a crowd of global policymakers, regulators and investors, Mr. Bessent sought to allay fears that had ballooned in recent weeks about the dollar’s global standing and the country’s role as the safest haven during times of stress. He reiterated that the administration would continue to have a “strong-dollar policy” and affirmed that it would remain the currency that the rest of the world wanted to hold, even though it had weakened against most major currencies.

For participants at the event, Mr. Bessent’s comments were a needed salve after a bruising couple of weeks in financial markets as a result of President Trump’s trade war. Violent swings in stocks, coinciding with the weakening of the dollar as investors fled U.S. government bonds, had incited panic.

The fact that Mr. Bessent found it necessary to emphasize that message in front of such a big crowd underscored how precarious the situation had become since Mr. Trump returned to the White House less than 100 days ago. What now looms large are uncomfortable questions about what happens if the international community starts to lose faith in the dollar and other U.S. assets, something that economists warn would be costly for Americans.

“People are playing through scenarios that previously had been judged unthinkable, and they’re playing them through in a very serious kind of way in the spirit of contingency planning,” said Nathan Sheets, the chief economist at Citigroup and a Treasury official in the Obama administration.

“If the United States is going to pursue aggressive economic policies, it’s natural for the rest of the world to step back and say, ‘Well, do we want to buy U.S. assets as we have in the past?’”

‘New World Order’

At a similar gathering hosted by the I.M.F. and World Bank six months ago, attendees were preparing for an entirely different economic backdrop. Convening less than two weeks before the presidential election, they still had in their sights a rare soft landing in which the major central banks finished their fight against high inflation while managing to avoid a recession.

The tariffs Mr. Trump had been talking about on the campaign trail were top of mind, but for the most part, they were viewed as a negotiating tactic. Any turn toward protectionism was widely expected to push up the value of the dollar compared with other currencies. The rationale was that tariffs would lower demand for imported goods, since they would make them more expensive for American consumers, and over time result in fewer dollars being exchanged for foreign currencies.

But since Inauguration Day, the opposite has occurred. An index that tracks the dollar against a basket of major trading partners has fallen nearly 10 percent in the last three months. It now hovers near a three-year low. The sharpest slide came after Mr. Trump announced large tariffs on nearly all imports in April. While he temporarily reversed course, the dollar has yet to recoup its losses.

There are reasons not to read too much into its recent weakening. The U.S. economic outlook has fundamentally changed. Businesses are “frozen” by tariffs, Christopher J. Waller, a governor at the Federal Reserve, said this week as he warned about layoffs stemming from the uncertainty.

Economists have sharply scaled back their estimates for growth while raising their estimates for inflation, a combination that carries a whiff of stagflation. In that environment, it is not surprising that the dollar and other U.S. assets appear less appealing.

Dollar depreciation — even if extreme — also does not necessarily translate to a loss of stature in the global financial system. There have been previous big drops in the value of the dollar that have not incited a wholesale shift away from the currency’s primacy, said Jonas Goltermann, the deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics.

But at this year’s spring meetings, there was a palpable sense that something more ominous could be taking place. Joyce Chang, JPMorgan’s chair of global research, noted a disconnect between domestic and international participants at the conference that the Wall Street bank hosted during the week of the meetings.

U.S.-based investors appeared less concerned about a structural shift away from the country’s assets and more focused on the ways in which Mr. Trump could course-correct on his economic policies. International investors were consumed by the prospects of a “regime change” in the financial system and a “new world order,” Ms. Chang said.

Mr. Trump had recently escalated his attacks on Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, fanning fears about how much the administration would encroach on the central bank’s independence. That longstanding separation from the White House is broadly seen as essential to the smooth functioning of the financial system.

“The dollar’s role in the system was not ordained from above,” said Mark Sobel, a former Treasury official who is the U.S. chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. “It’s a reflection of the properties of the United States.”

Those include a large economy that transacts with the world; the financial system’s deepest, most liquid capital markets; a credible central bank; and the rule of law.

“I do believe that Trump is doing permanent damage,” Mr. Sobel said.

Few Alternatives

It is hard to overstate the dominance of the dollar globally, meaning there are real limitations to how significantly private and public investors can diversify away from it, even if they want to.

Most trade is invoiced in dollars. It is the leading currency for international borrowing. Central banks also prefer to hold dollar assets more than anything else, and by a wide margin.

“Anybody who’s looking for diversification has to be realistic,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago, the chief economist at BNP Paribas. “Reserve assets, by definition, have to be liquid.”

Alternatives do exist, but they are hobbled by their own weaknesses. China lacks open, deep and liquid capital markets, and its currency does not float freely, tarnishing its appeal globally. Top European leaders — including Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank — have talked more readily about bolstering the prominence of the euro, something that is considered more plausible now that countries like Germany are stepping up their spending. But the amount of available euro-denominated safe assets pales in comparison with that of U.S. capital markets.

Still, in the recent period of volatility, investors have found a number of places to take cover. The euro, Swiss franc and Japanese yen have been clear beneficiaries. Gold has rallied sharply, too.

“You don’t need to have the role of the dollar as a reserve asset go to zero,” said Ms. Mateos y Lago. “A multipolar system can totally work.”

Burden or Privilege?

When asked at Wednesday’s event, which was hosted by the Institute for International Finance, whether the dollar’s reserve currency status was a burden or a privilege, Mr. Bessent said: “I actually am not sure that anyone else wants it.”

But economists warn that Americans would be losing clear benefits if the government was too cavalier about the dollar’s shedding its special status.

The country’s exporters would reap rewards, as a weaker dollar would make their products more competitive. However, that advantage could come at the expense of reduced spending power for Americans abroad and higher borrowing costs at a time when the government has huge financing needs.

Despite the pain that Americans may have to bear, the global financial system would be far more “resilient” if other currencies shared the dollar’s global role over time, said Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. During times of stress, that would mean multiple sources of liquidity.

However, three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Eichengreen warned that a “dire scenario is now on the table” — a sharp sell-off of dollar-denominated assets into cash.

“A chaotic rush out of the dollar would be a crisis,” he said. “All of a sudden, the world would not have the international liquidity that 21st-century globalization depends on.”

Sarah Paiji Yoo started her career in finance and then founded several start-ups, mostly in the fashion and beauty worlds. But during parental leave after the birth of her first child, she realized how many microplastics her family was inadvertently consuming.

“I started to have mixed feelings around pushing people to buy more things, when I didn’t feel like they needed it,” Ms. Yoo, 40, said. “On the other side of becoming a mother, I realized I still loved working, and I still loved early-stage company building, but I just needed more meaning in the work that I was doing.”

So in 2019 she co-founded Blueland, reimagining household cleaning products to eliminate single-use plastic packaging. She appeared on “Shark Tank” (and scored a deal) that same year.

Her company sells tablets that can be mixed with water in reusable bottles to make things like hand soap and cleaning sprays, or dropped directly into a dishwasher, washing machine or toilet. The tablets come in compostable paper packaging.

Ms. Yoo is originally from Cerritos, Calif., and moved to New York City 19 years ago. She met her husband, Kenneth Yoo, at a bar; nine months after their first date, the two were engaged. They had their son Noah in 2017. Colin followed in 2020. The foursome moved into a five-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side the next year.

MORNING SNUGGLES I don’t need an alarm clock on the weekends — I can definitely rely on my kids to wake me up. These days it’s around 6:30, maybe 6:40 if we’re lucky. They run into our room and we usually bring them into bed, not only because it’s a nice moment, but Ken and I are trying to squeeze in an extra few minutes in bed.

RUNNING SOLO A new thing that started this year is I go for a quick solo run. I turned 40 last year, and I think it’s just hitting me that exercise is important: being strong, not falling when I get older, and just being able to be around as long as I can. We live right by Riverside Park and it’s always a good reminder that, wow, Manhattan is an island! I feel so grateful to live less than a five-minute walk from the water.

COFFEE AND CROISSANTS I’ll run for 20 minutes and then I’ll swing back to pick up my reusable mugs to bring with me to the coffee shop. There’s a new French bakery that opened up nearby called La Farine Patisserie et Café. I love that it replaced a gigantic Starbucks.

For the kids, it’s a chocolate croissant and a plain croissant, one for each. I will do a baguette with butter and jam. One of the best parts of the weekend is I allow myself to buy coffee. It just tastes better when somebody else makes it.

PLAY BALL We are a baseball family through and through. My husband played Division I; he was a pitcher in college. So, many Sundays for our family in the spring are occupied by a good amount of baseball. Noah plays Little League, and Colin plays T-ball. Noah’s games are usually in Central Park or Randall’s Island on Sundays.

ECO-FRIENDLY ERRANDS On Sundays, we have this loop that we do. First, there’s the farmer’s market by the American Museum of Natural History. There are a few stands that we always hit up for our fresh produce and flowers; Wood Thrush Farm is my absolute fave. We used to bring our compost to the market, but now that the city rolled out the smart compost bins, we stop at one on the way. And if we have any textiles that we wouldn’t donate, we hit up the textile drop-off at the farmer’s market.

Ken and I both wear contact lenses and they aren’t recyclable by the city. What can be recycled with the city is anything that’s hard and firm, but anything that’s soft has to go through a different recycling stream that’s not available curbside. There’s an optometrist near our house where we can drop off any used contact lenses. And then we also drop off plastic film, bags and bubble wrap at the Fairway in our neighborhood.

There’s still a lot of plastic that, unfortunately, is not recyclable, even with flexible plastic recycling. For example, the kids want animal-shaped Cheddar crackers that come in a chip bag with that inside plastic lining. I think these are things that, in my heart of hearts, I would love for Blueland to also tackle — but probably not in the next, realistically, 10 years.

GARDENING If the kids don’t have a birthday party or play date, we might stop by the West Side Community Garden. I’m a member, even though we don’t have our own plot yet. It’s a requirement as a member to volunteer four hours a month. I’m on the flower committee and composting committee.

I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM Ken and I are firm believers: Weekends are for eating ice cream. Noah loves gelato; he loves Amorino. I love Salt & Straw, and that they encourage sampling. It’s also nice because they do the metal spoons for the sampling. I would not feel comfortable if they were like, “Oh, here’s another single-use, disposable spoon.” Colin and Ken love Gelateria Gentile. If we have time, the kids will scooter and we’ll just hit up all three.

SOAP TEST When we can, Ken and I try to do a date night on Sundays. Typically, his parents come in from Queens. When we get home, I’ll do some cleaning — as much as they’re family, it’s still my mother-in-law! During that period, if there’s anything I’m testing, I bring in my sons to help. It’s kind of fun, because my older son is old enough to be interested. We might be dissolving new hand soap scents or trying out new laundry tablets.

DATE NIGHT We love doing date night at, like, 5 p.m. The world is your oyster at 5 p.m. because you can get a lot of reservations. Our ideal date night is omakase and a foot massage. We’ll typically go to a local walk-in massage place — one of the ones where you just kind of sit in a chair in the open — and get a foot massage. And then we’ll be home for bedtime.

EARLY TO BED I like to go to bed on Sundays very early, with the kids. I’m admittedly really bad about getting enough sleep during the week. I’m trying to embrace that we’re still in the moment of time where the kids still want to snuggle in bed and still want me in their beds. It just feels so warm and it helps put me to sleep in a way that I think I struggle with during the week.

Cereal. Ice cream. Flavored sparkling water. A Snickers bar. Donuts and brownies. Candy.

What sounds like the treats table at a child’s birthday party is, in fact, a list of snacks that can now be found crammed with protein.

Next week, Khloé Kardashian, the reality TV star and entrepreneur, will add her Khloud Protein Popcorn to the list. Her popcorn will come in three different flavors: white Cheddar, olive oil and sea salt, and sweet and salty. It will contain 7 grams of protein per serving, derived from the popcorn’s “Khloud Dust,” which is a blend of milk proteins and seasoning, according to a statement from Ms. Kardashian’s company, Khloud Foods.

“I’ve always been a snacker and constantly on the lookout for options that are convenient, healthy, and actually taste good,” Ms. Kardashian said in an emailed statement. With Khloud, Ms. Kardashian added, she wanted to create a snack that ticked those boxes and was “something I’d feel good sharing with family and friends.”

The introduction of Khloud Popcorn, which Ms. Kardashian announced on social media this week, fits with a broader food trend. Experts call it the “proteinification” of snacks, or desserts, or basically “everything,” said Jonathan Deutsch, a professor of culinary arts and science at Drexel University and a trend spotter for the Specialty Food Association, a national organization of food and beverage businesses. The brands hope to cash in on growing consumer demand for protein, which is driven largely by social media.

A trend report by Cargill, a company that sources and processes ingredients for food manufacturers, showed that 61 percent of surveyed consumers noted that they were hoping to increase their protein intake in 2024, up from 48 percent who said so in 2019. Sixty-three percent of consumers reported that they were looking for protein in their snacks in 2024.

The trend also stems from increased use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic and Mounjaro, said Dr. Lisa Young, a nutrition consultant and adjunct professor of nutrition at New York University. Those who use the weight-loss drugs report not only a loss in appetite but also a loss of muscle mass, which means that they are likely to try to pack as much protein as possible into the little that they do eat.

But, Dr. Young added, even people using GLP-1 drugs need only a fraction more protein than the recommended amount for an adult, which is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. People on the weight-loss drugs, and those who do intense workouts, like weight training, are advised to shoot for 1.2 to 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.

Protein-enriched snacks, she added, can also fall under the category of ultra-processed foods, the consumption of which, she cautioned, can add to gut problems.

From a marketing perspective, Mr. Deutsch said, there are only three macronutrients that the food industry can try to target in its new product lines: fat, carbs and protein.

“They’re not going to have a ‘fat popcorn’ and they’re not going to have an ‘extra-carb popcorn,’” he said. “That leaves one macronutrient, right?”

According to Mr. Deutsch, an apple or popcorn “as God made it,” or even just a glass of water, could be seen as the ideal snacks for most people because, “when you walk around civil society, you’re not stumbling over people with protein deficiencies.”