The book Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre has just been released.
She was the young woman who died by suicide in April of this year at the age of 41. Her memoir reveals a horrific life of abuse and exploitation that continued right up to the end. After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, passed around to their wealthy and influential friends, including the disgusting Price Andrew, like she was some kind of plaything with whom they could do as they liked. Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.
What is astonishing is that all these people claimed to not have sensed that there was anything amiss. But Emma Brockes, in a review of the book finds these claims of ignorance hard to believe.
Giuffre’s recollections of Prince Andrew, meanwhile, a man with whom she was allegedly forced to have sex three times – once in the context of an orgy on Epstein’s island – present him in an even more buffoonish and grotesque light. “We disrobed and got in the tub, but we didn’t stay there long because the prince was eager to get to the bed … In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour.” Prince Andrew denies Giuffre’s allegations that he had sex with her, that she had been trafficked to him by Epstein or that he had ever met her. But so much focus has been put on the prince that after reading this book, it wasn’t him I thought about most; it was the casual visitors to Epstein’s New York mansion, the illustrious men and occasional woman whom Giuffre says she encountered at dinners there.
In respect of these people I’d like to ask: who the fuck did they think the 17-year-old at the table was? What did they think she was doing there? Only Melinda Gates, who met Epstein once and cited him as a factor in the breakdown of her marriage to Bill Gates, sensed what apparently none of these people could put their finger on. Giuffre quotes from a statement made by Gates after her meeting with Epstein: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified.” It was an insight that evidently escaped geniuses like the MIT professors Epstein continued to advise long after he’d become a convicted sex offender.
There is a fuller account of Melinda French Gates’s experience.
After three decades of marriage, Bill and Melinda Gates divorced last year. In Melinda’s petition for divorce, she described the marriage as “irretrievably broken.” Now, in an exclusive interview with CBS Mornings, she is speaking out for the first time about what went wrong—including Bill’s affairs and relationship with Jeffery Epstein.
Melinda told host Gayle King that it was “not one thing but many things” that led to their divorce. “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” the philanthropist, 57, told King.
She met Epstein one time, curious to see who he was, but says, “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.”
I always felt that there was always something about Epstein in photographs and videos that seemed creepy. Of course I only learned about him after the scandal broke and that may have colored my judgement. But I have had bad vibes from other people as well and thus was not surprised when I later learned that they had engaged in unsavory practices. I may not know on sight that they are sex offenders but I do immediately sense with some people that there is something off and that I do not want to associate with them more than absolutely necessary and definitely not be friends with. I suspect that most people have that basic sense.
While French Gates is clearly a perceptive woman and it is a credit to her that she immediately recognized what Epstein was like and refused to be sucked into his orbit, I doubt that she is possessed of an almost preternatural ability to sniff out someone as being odious. The signs must have always been there but others conveniently chose to ignore them because of the largesse that Epstein showered on them or the opportunities he provided to mingle with celebrities. Their later claims of being shocked, just shocked, at what he had been up to all along right under their noses ring hollow.
When I was a kid, maybe around 10 or 12? a salesman showed up at our house selling water purifiers I think (our water came from a rural well, so was pretty hard). I hated the man on sight. If I’d been a dog, I’d have bit him. It was like I felt this overwhelming urge to protect my parents from him. I attacked with overtly hostile replies to everything he said, and my mom just looked at me like, “What is wrong with you?” not a little embarrassed at my uncharacteristic behavior. All I could say later was, “I didn’t like him, he was full of lies.”
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I’ve never before or since reacted so strongly on meeting a stranger. Though it’s pretty close on seeing Poop Baby’s speeches. Just looking at his evil, beady eyes and smarmy expressions evokes a gut revulsion that I can’t fathom how so many others fail to see it or are, worse, attracted to.
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I think women have developed that sort of radar perhaps more than men, out of necessity. That’s also why women have been carefully socialized to mistrust or ignore their gut feelings, to make them easier targets of predatory men.
After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell…
I dunno about spotting abusers, but have no doubt that abusers can easily spot abusees, and know how to push their buttons and continue the pattern of exploitation and harm. As one abuse survivor told me repeatedly, “It’s like they’ve all read the same book.”
Mano: While French Gates is clearly a perceptive woman and it is a credit to her that she immediately recognized what Epstein was like and refused to be sucked into his orbit, I doubt that she is possessed of an almost preternatural ability to sniff out someone as being odious.
She did not have to judge Epstein just by his appearance. Most likely they met in a social gathering with other people interacting with him, possibly also girls like Giuffre. The interactions showed Epstein’s predatory nature.
Jörg @3: Yeah, the giveaway is how they treat others. For example, what is their attitude towards waitstaff in a restaurant? Do they seem to pick on people they see as vulnerable?
More about Andrew.
Phil Moorhouse:
Rayner Offered To De-Nonce Royalty
“King Charles Should Have Listened to Angela Rayner”
.https://youtube.com/live/um095puHYwA
I am told psychopaths often succeed in projecting a superficial charm that hides their deeper flaws.
As for other creeps, some broadcast so strong signals of being ‘off’ that even I -- who is so blind to social signals as being practically autistic -- sense something is not right.
Jörg @3: While you’re correct that she did not have to judge him just by his appearance, the fact remains that according to her, she knew the second she walked in the door, unless you’re writing her off as engaging in hyperbole. I take her at her word, because, as I noted above, I’ve felt that same sort of instantaneous revulsion to someone I’d never seen before.
I have pretty well developed creep radar after more than 50 years of experience, though there have definitely been times when I absolutely hated someone at first meeting. As Ridana said, if I was a dog I would have bit them. Narcissist behavior is not much different from the behaviors of addiction.
Sociopaths indeed are very skilled at charm offensives.
Every cult leader’s main skill is being highly adept at manipulating people.
Decades ago, there were articles written about people’s instant, instinctive dislike of George W. Bush--even people with dementia and/or traumatic brain injuries were picking up on the huge dichotomy between the image Bush was trying to present vs. his subtle body language. With Trump, it’s not at all subtle: it’s a full-on red alert with flashing lights and klaxons sounding. I am just astounded that anyone can’t pick up on that. Or worse, that they’re attracted to that.
Also, 100% what Ridana and Tethys have said.
For me it’s mostly about behaviors. I can’t see a picture of someone and get a feel for who they are, there has to be some motion. Even if they’re just standing around talking to someone.
When someone tries to hide who they are there’s usually some clue that they’re presenting a facade and lying to you. And from there, the way they’re trying to schmooze and the lies they’re telling can give you an idea what they’re after. I think it’s also a lot more concerning when someone confidently lies to you than when they seem nervous. If they’re nervous they’re thinking about you and worried about how you’ll react. If they’re confidently lying then whatever you’re thinking isn’t even on their radar.
I grew up around a lot of not great people. A lot of bullies and social climbers at school. When someone new transferred in, I was usually the first person to approach them even though I often didn’t do that until a couple days had passed. We’d be friends for a week or two then the popular people would get to them. And suddenly they’d look at me with revulsion and want nothing to do with me. I still have no idea why.
Between that and running into people who liked to claim they always knew such and such thing after it became obvious later, I’m never quite sure how much stock to put in such claims. Although the statements made by Melinda Gates do sound more honest than most. All in all these feelings seem like a difficult thing to verify because most of us are lucky enough to run into very few truly awful people in our lives. And frankly, the times when I ignored or couldn’t follow my gut feeling about someone and later wished I had stand out to me far more than when that feeling was wrong.
I do think that there is something that sleazy or criminal or what-have-you people give off, and that can be detected by some others.
A lot of it seems to be what subjects the creeps talks about, how they speak about them, their tone of voice, what things they show interest in, facial expressions, laughter, body language, etc.
I personally can spot the sociopathic dead-eyes from a mile off. And, while I don’t mean that such eyes show that the person meets the clinical diagnosis of sociopathy, it is a big, big warning sign that the person is untrustworthy at best and evil at worst.
If you watch a lot of old video of Andrew Wakefield, you can see the dead eyes. No emotion that he displays, or tries to display, ever reaches or contracts or moves the muscles around his eyes. Those muscles are motionless and dead, always. That’s because he’s not feeling those emotions. (And yes, he’s more than a con man, he is a sociopath.)
A famed security specialist, Gavin Becker, wrote a book called The Gift of Fear. His point was that if your gut is telling you that someone is creepy or the situtaion is a little off, or you’re just getting that bad vibe, that’s a gift, trust it, you’ll very, very, often be right.
Derek Chauvin also displayed the sociopathic dead-eyes during his nine-minute murder of George Floyd. At one point, a person in the crowd says to Chauvin “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” And yeah, even on video I could tell that he was, from his eyes.
Other places the dead-eyes are always seen are in the faces of *all* the white people in photos of lynchings. The photos are horrific enough, in their depiction of tortured, mulitated, murdered, Black men, and the 100%-dead-eyed white men and women staring into the camera makes the photos worse.
I wonder if you can tell by what and how they comment on blogs?
@ ^
Yes we can mate. Rest assured.
df #14
[citations needed]
…Though it’s pretty close on seeing Poop Baby’s speeches. Just looking at his evil, beady eyes and smarmy expressions evokes a gut revulsion that I can’t fathom how so many others fail to see it or are, worse, attracted to.
I think many people are attracted to that sort of thing, perhaps including people who have been bullied and who have been told that bullying behavior is proof of strength and superiority and they have no choice but to suck up to someone bigger and meaner than they are.
I think this attraction is also a result of decades (since the ’80s at least) of conditioning by rich men, Republican propagandists and demagogues, media suckups, and Christian-Evangelical con-men, all working together to portray everything rich men do as BY DEFINITION good, rational, strong, always right, and the very definition of class, culture and style. And also portraying everyone who criticizes rich men as whiny malcontents, jealous, weak, useless, naive, Communistic, unable to recognize the inherent superiority of rich men, and trying to compensate by dragging their betters down instead of lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps, etc. Criticize a rich man’s sleazy, obnoxious, dishonest or mindlessly selfish behavior, or his abusive treatment of his employees, and there will always be someone smiling smugly and saying “Yes, that’s the spirit that built America!” or “Yes, that’s how businessmen get things done!”
So of course men (those looking to be close to someone who can pay them at least) are conditioned to misread their internal alarms as “this is a strong man I have to suck up to” and women are conditioned to ignore their alarms because no one will believe them and their needs don’t matter anyway.
Also, in cases like Epstein and his hangers-on, the whole point is straight men paying to get what they want, so they already know and accept they’re in sleazy company. Women like Melinda Gates aren’t more perceptive than the men — they’re just more willing to admit they know what’s going on.
chigau @13: Couple of things come to mind, at random; using the royal ‘we’, and persistent misgendering.
Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.
I don’t know for sure, but what (little) I’ve read seems to indicate that, after being fired from a high school for preying on underage girls, Epstein thereby found his true talent, luring girls into his orbit (with help from Ghisaline and other women, possibly including Melania Trump), then pimping them out to other men in return for their money or other payment. And then he used that money to buy friendship and loyalty from other important people, all of whom had incentives to pretend not to notice all the underage girls who always seemed to be showing up at his parties.
I’m late to this, but I feel like there is a certain disconnect twixt a lot of people with good social skills/connections, and their ability to detect, or maybe just tolerate bullies/predators/creeps/abusers/etc.
I’m not a social person, I’m bad at social skills, and all that. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt “off” about someone who all the “cool kids” think is perfectly fine. Only to later find out they were engaging in some sort of predatory behavior.
I suspect that in a lot of people, there is more of a desire to “get along” than to apply moral judgement to a scenario/person, and feel that is only magnified as wealth, fame, influence, etc. increase in the people involved. -srsly, how many people married to billionaires do you think are maintaining that relationship out of a deep and personal adoration and cherishing of that individual? -- no shade towards those that can manage that, hell i’d probably do it if I had the opportunity… -it’s a systemic thing.
This ‘sense’ is likely to just be the sum of all of the tiny individual clues a person gives off with their manner of speaking, body language, politics and so on. Each one being too small to make an impression alone, but all adding together to give a general sense of whatever it may be to the person interacting with them.
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#10 lanir
“We’d be friends for a week or two then the popular people would get to them.”
I know what you mean! When I finished primary and started high school, only a single other person from my previous class went with me to this new school. We hadn’t hung out with the same people but we were on good enough terms that I assumed we would get along in the new place. We did for a few weeks, until he decided the best way to get in with the cool kidz was to take shots at me. Luckily I was making friends pretty quickly with the nerd contingent, otherwise that time would have been hell.
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#14 sbob
“Yes we can mate. Rest assured.”
Yes. We sure can.
At least the protagonist in “Wishmaster” was up front about wanting your soul. Another creepy actor was Mads Mikkelsen in the series ‘Hannibal’. *Emulating* creepy vibes without going over the top like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ must be difficult.
One who never had difficulty giving off psycho vibes on screen was Klaus Kinski. He was just being himself, as we learned after his death.
One of the people I used to work with went to high school with Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo.
She said that when he was exposed as the ‘Scarborough Rapist’… absolutely none of the women from her high school class were surprised.
Of course, that was more than just one look, that was being in close proximity with someone for months, so it’s a lot easier to pick up the vibes in that sort of situation.
Jian Ghomeshi had similar reports come up about him later, and he was someone who had gone to a lot more active effort to disguise that aspect of himself than Bernardo had. (Bernardo, until the end, was fully convinced that he was smarter than everybody and would beat the charges even when his own lawyer was trying to convince him otherwise. Ghomeshi on the other hand panicked when it looked like some of his issues would come to light and actually made things worse with his attempts at heading things off.)
Sometimes , perhaps. Other times , no (Neil f*ing Gaiman)
I suppose women may be better at detecting it than men, on average, because of the world we live in -- I had some women friends/colleagues tell me stuff about common acquaintances and I have to mentally slap myself before I respond “but I havent seen them behave this way.”. Predatory behavior is too normalized in our world.
Knowing me, this will be a long comment, but I’d like to start it with a excerpt from one of Josephine Tey’s mystery novels.
The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey. [1953]
Today we would talk about psychopathy, but the underlying idea is really the same. There are people who do not really understand that others have agency, that their desires are in conflict with others and compromise may be the best solution for all parties. If their desires are thwarted, they bear a grudge. If people who are in their circle of acquaintances (they don’t really have friends) leaves, it either doesn’t matter or is seen as a personal slight. They are often confident in themselves, and ignore (or get angry about) any suggestions that they should change.
They do tend to attract people. Confidence is an attractive quality, and these people are confident and sure about themselves. I’m not certain why confidence attracts people, but I think it is related to a person’s locus of control. A person with an external locus of control gets their personal feeling of value from others. A person who feels that, “I must have this because I am me.” can easily manipulate those feelings to become a focus for those people with an external locus of control. A little flattery and positive feedback from someone who is confident, and vain, can convince a person that they are a friend, to the point where they will do much for the manipulator without concern that there is almost nothing in return.
My wife has, on occasion, fallen into that trap. She has an external locus of control and if a person expresses pleasure in seeing her, or being with her, my wife considers them a friend. I generally hold my tongue, because while I quickly see that the relationship is one-sided, my wife does get some pleasure for some time and I respect her agency even if I think she is setting herself up for some pain. After all, I could be reading the situation incorrectly, I am not infallible. My wife also isn’t an idiot and eventually realizes that she is giving a lot more than she is getting. When she starts figuring that out we talk about it. What I find amazing is that in all cases, once my wife stopped reaching out to the apparent friend, my wife never heard from them again. The ‘friend’ was willing to take advantage of my wife, but not willing to reach out for companionship themselves. They were so self-centered, so vain, that they didn’t realize that they could be hurting others.
I’ve known a few men who I suspect as being sexual predators. I have no evidence, other than their predilection for a series of short-term relationships, or one-sided open sexual lifestyle. I do not have any problems with open relationships or poly-relationships. As long as all parties are aware of what is going on and agree to it. But I’ve seen a number of open relationships where the man is allowed freedom, but while the woman is ‘theoretically’ free to pursue other partners they don’t. I will not say those relationships are wrong, but I do suspect them of being one-sided. Further, when I chat with the man, I get the sense that they are, as in the example above, vain. They are willing to make huge promises and great commitments as long as they get their way, but as soon as they want something else, those commitments are void. Vanity. Or psychopathy. Take your pick.
I, myself, have a very strong internal locus of control. Have I miss-read people? Sure, I’m not perfect. But I have, at various times, gotten into conversations which people which I very rapidly find I dislike. On reflection, the reason I dislike them is generally because I feel they are trying to manipulate me, generally manipulate me into accepting their confidence, ability, and superiority at face value. With my strong sense of my own identity, I find that repellent. I don’t think I would be able to detect someone as vain simply by walking into a room, although I suppose would be possible if I saw them being fawned on by obvious sycophants. Maybe that’s what Melinda Gates saw when she encountered Epstein.
Which is, I suppose, the point of this entire essay. It is easier to detect falsehood and deceit in others if you have a strong sense of your own identity and value. Bullies prey on the weak. Psychopaths prey on the insecure. Both are defeated by a strong sense of self.
Am I a psychopath? After all, I’ll admit that I’m overly confident and aggressively certain of my identity. So, I don’t know. I don’t think I am today, but I might have been one 30 years ago. We change. I know that today I try to be aware of other’s agency, even to the point of letting them make decisions which I think may be a mistake, because I know I could be wrong. My actions would have been the same 30 years ago, but probably for different reasons. I am in no way humble, but I try to be respectful of the opinions, desires, and actions of others. Yet, I recognize that I am no position to judge whether or not my behavior borders on vanity, or psychopathy. The judgment of that would have to come from others.
Very thoughtful, flex.
Thanks!
I’d love to be able to judge people, to read people. I can’t. My wife often jokes about it. I’m definitely not neurotypical, and this is one of the more obvious symptoms. I haven’t had a label put on it as I’m in my late 50s and there doesn’t seem much point. I can usually identify the reasons OTHER people think someone’s a creep, but they’re always rationalisations after the fact. It’s like a magic trick. In the moment, I can’t see where the hanky went. When someone who knows what’s going on points out the fake thumbtip, I can see it plain as day… but until they do, I’m fooled, every single time.
I watched a disturbing video the other day. If you don’t like Sam Harris, stick with it -- this isn’t really about his opinions. It’s FACTS about how Donald Trump conducts himself. The most disturbing part is Harris’s observation that with other fascists from history, there’s at least some level on which you can understand their motivations and actions within the context of their background or prejudices or whatever… but Trump appears rather uniquely unfathomable. It’s only six minutes of your time -- I recommend a watch: