the rape and murder of virginia giuffre

the trouble with 'troubled' girls

Long before Virgina Giuffre became famous for being the trafficked teenager who smiled for the camera while being fondled by an apparently sweat-free Prince Andrew, she was Virgina Roberts, a pretty little girl born in Sacramento, California, who later moved with her family to Palm Beach, Florida. Not much has been written about her early childhood except that it was ‘troubled.’ It’s a word that comes up a lot with Guiffre and other women like her, by which I mean victims who, after years of serial abuse at the hands of men, somehow find the strength to stand up for themselves — often with dire consequences and tragic ends, often by their own hand.

‘Troubled,’ in this instance seems to be a euphemism for the fact Giuffre was, by her own admission, molested at the age of seven by a family friend, thus setting her off on a chaotic childhood course in which the adults in her life failed spectacularly in their duty to protect her again and again. Marked out as a victim from the start, Virgina embarked on a short and tragic life in which her pleasing doll-like appearance made her a sexual target for predators posing as mentors and protectors. A life in which she was repeated exploited by her rescuers and then rescued and exploited again. Her courageous attempts to rescue herself and others like her set a shining example but could not ultimately save her. She died over the weekend, by suicide, at home in her farm in Australia. She was just forty-one.

By fourteen Virginia was a runaway, later taken in by an international sex trafficker whose hiding-in-plain-sight front business was a teen modelling agency called Perfect 10. Eventually she was reunited with her father, who worked as a general maintenance manager at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. He arranged, in his wisdom, an after school job for his ‘troubled’ daughter as a teenaged spa attendant at the notorious luxury resort. This ‘opportunity’ led to a chance meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, who offered Virginia an even better gig as a ‘travelling masseuse’ for her highly sociable billionaire boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, who in Guiffre’s words later ‘passed me around like a fruit plate,’ to all of his rich and famous friends.

The rest is history. A long and sordid one that continues to unfold in the courts. The statement released by her family laid the blame for her demise squarely at the feet of her abusers, stating the ‘toll’ of her experience eventually ‘became unbearable.’

‘She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.’

When Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019, the initial shock prompted a wave of public outrage (and in other, more rarified circles, undoubtedly quite a few sighs of relief). But the response to Giuffre’s suicide has been one of head-shaking regret. Even Donald Trump declared it ‘awful,’ a pity. The unspoken consensus here is that a death like Guiffre’s isn’t terribly surprising, that it makes a kind intuitive sense. She was, after all, ‘troubled’ from a young age.

Surely the real question is why, how and by whom? When an abused girl or woman is branded ‘troubled’ it’s just a clever form of victim-blame. She becomes a scapegoat. The word is used passively and as such, implies that the wrongs inflicted on her body and mind by corrupt systems and the men who control them are hers alone to internalise and wear.

This is what we are saying: The real trouble is her.

So no, Giuffre wasn’t troubled. She was born into a troubled world. She was a smart, brave and beautiful young woman who was groomed, objectified, abused and ultimately destroyed by a series of corrupt and overlapping systems run by rich and powerful men. Her only crime was being born conventionally beautiful which, combined with social conditioning that teaches girls to be pleasing, pliant and sexually available to men, left her continually vulnerable and ultimately dead.

Shortly before her death, Giuffre went public with allegations of domestic violence against her husband Robert Giuffre, with whom she was also said to be involved in an intractable custody battle for their three children. She met Giuffre, a martial arts instructor, at the age of 19, while in Thailand on an erotic massage course funded by Epstein and Maxwell. He encouraged her to cut off ties to her traffickers and then quickly married her and made her a stay-at-home mum. By the time Giuffre was thrust into the public spotlight, which led to a valiant career as a victims right campaigner, Giuffre’s post-Epstein life looked like fairytale, but this too seems rescue fantasy gone wrong.

Before she went public with her story, waiving her right to anonymity in a Panorama interview, Giuffre spent years trying to stay out stay out of the investigation’s public glare. She was dragged into the story for which she will forever be remembered against her will — yet another violation of consent. And while she made the best of it, Giuffre was right to be fearful.

Virginia Giuffre’s life had taught her one singular lesson: Fight back all you want but you are swimming against a riptide. Powerful men will have their way with you in the end. And they have.