Virginia Giuffre: 'We have to believe women while they’re alive' - by Emily Maitlis
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On Saturday morning, I woke just before 4am. Jolted awake by the radio playing softly beside me that reported the death - by suicide - of Virginia Giuffre, at the age of 41.
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I never met Virginia Giuffre. But her story lay at the centre of the 2019 interview I did with Prince Andrew. She was its core. Her allegations against the Prince - that he vehemently denied - were what brought him to talk to Newsnight.
She claimed the prince had sex with her - as a 17 year old - when she was trafficked by his friend Ghislaine Maxwell and her boyfriend, the now notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Virginia lived a hellish existence, by all accounts. Abused first by a family friend at the age of 7. Then trapped into modelling as a teenager by a man who promised her fame but delivered yet more sexual abuse. She ran away from home, lived life on the edges, ended up in hostels and children’s institutions.
Perhaps the worst irony of her life was that when she finally returned to her family, ready to start a steady job - at Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago beach club in Florida - she was then fatefully, fatally introduced to Epstein.
She was flown around the world - as a sex toy for him and his friends. Until she ran away to Thailand and married an Australian man she’d met just ten days earlier. This was her escape from a life of abuse. And she remained in the shadows until the FBI came knocking. Asking what she could tell them of Epstein. A man who would never face the consequences of his actions even after his initial arrest - until his own suicide in jail in August of 2019.
When Virginia finally told her story - to the Mail In 2011 she spoke out for the victims of sexual abuse. And started campaigning for them through her charity SOAR.
She was unafraid to point the finger at those in power - who had made her life unbearable. After Epstein's death she wanted to face Prince Andrew in court. He agreed to a settlement of millions - but without admitting guilt. She gave much of that money to her campaign.
We didn't hear much from her in the subsequent years - until a random, odd post a month ago. She wrote that she had days to live - after a car crash had left her severely injured. It was accompanied by a picture of her bruised face. Something didn’t add up with her story. But her anguish was pretty clear. And at that point, the tone changed. In the days after, people who’d barely spoken to me about the interview would ask me what I believed. If I thought Giuffre ‘was in fact a fantasist’. Someone who’d made her story up... for publicity. What if she wasn’t to be believed - they asked. What would I feel then?
All that changed this weekend - when she took her own life. Suddenly the muttering stopped. A dead victim was somehow a believable victim. A sanitised tragedy that we could all get behind.
And it made me feel really uneasy. Because it suggests we can only believe victims of sexual abuse once they’ve literally lost their life to suicide. As if that last act of self torture proved they are speaking the truth. That cannot be right. We have to believe women whilst they’re alive. Breathing. And Speaking. We cannot wait for them to die - before they are beatified like a drowning Ophelia. Flowers and beauty and tragedy.
Virginia Giuffre was subjected to myriad and multiple abuse. And she did the hardest thing of all by talking about it - and trying to hold the powerful to account.
Her story is one of a life long pain. One that she clearly never managed to escape. Perhaps we should have been prepared to believe that damaged her beyond words - whilst she actually remained alive.
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