The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
So many young women, myself included, have been criticised for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us. How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away? But that stance discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable. Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless. We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care. A master manipulator, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning. If they wanted to be dancers, he offered dance lessons. If they aspired to be actors, he said he’d help them get roles. And then, he did his worst to them.
Her memoir also fleshes out how Epstein desperately wanted to be seen as the intellectual equal of prominent academics, and the way that he used Roberts as the means to got them into his circle. And they were easily bought.
The psychologist was only the first of many academics from prestigious universities who I was forced to service sexually. I didn’t know it then, but Epstein had spent years campaigning to keep company with the world’s biggest thinkers. Epstein had convinced himself that he – a college dropout – was on the same level as degree-holding innovators and theoreticians, and because he funded many of their research projects and flew them around on his jets, he was largely welcomed into their fold.
Scientists weren’t the only people Epstein used his vast resources to win access to – which is how I came to be trafficked to a multitude of powerful men. Among them were a gubernatorial candidate who was soon to win election in a western state and a former US senator. Since Epstein usually neglected to introduce me to these men by name, I would only learn who some of them were years later, when I studied photographs of Epstein’s associates and recognised their faces.
The long excerpt ends with this devastating critique of the culture that surrounds these people.
For all that’s happened to expose Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes, more action is needed. Because some people still think Epstein was an anomaly, an outlier. And those people are wrong. While the sheer number of victims Epstein preyed upon may put him in a class by himself, he was no outlier. The way he viewed women and girls – as playthings to be used and discarded – is not uncommon among certain powerful men who believe they are above the law. And many of those men are still going about their daily lives, enjoying the benefits of their power.
Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what he was doing. Epstein not only didn’t hide what was happening, he took a certain glee in making people watch. And people did watch – scientists, fundraisers from the Ivy League and other heralded institutions, titans of industry. They watched and they didn’t care.
These are the people who are being protected by Trump and his lackey attorney general Pam Bondi, by either redacting their names or withholding documents altogether.
The rats have formed a circle to protect each other and it is essential that the circle be broken through, exposing them.
The real victims are of course the many, many girls (which the White House is ignoring for some reason).
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But I also notice how slick he was when he targeted Noam Chomsky, then almost 80 and probably not as sharp as in his youth. Epstein claimed to have been targeted by a conspiracy -- and as NC had been targeted by bona fide repression during the sixties and seventies he was primed to believe the BS Epstein told him.
Epstein’s proximity to famous and influential people gave him credibility from nothing, and he had an uncanny ability to manipulate people, like that hippie cultist who died in prison.
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As for DJT, even if he is brought before a court before he dies he will play the same card Augusto Pinochet played in Britain and claim to be too sick for a trial.
No prominent American is likely to be held to account. It makes me want to approach those [censored] kooks in Syria and say, “guys, I have a little list”. Except those bastards are OK with sex slavery, so not even that will work. 🙁
I am not going to read the Giuffre book for the same reason I do not read books about the details about Auschwitz. To stay sane we need to keep some degree of distance to the abyss, I realise different people can handle different levels of horror.
For similar reasons I have started to digest US news through the medium of satire, like hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel or Seth Meyers. Laughing at the stupidity of evil makes it manageable.
This is the kind of thing people who have never suffered any kind of abuse might think. Or who maybe have but cannot empathise with the person this particular abuse victim for some reason.
Suggesting an abuse victim should have just walked away from abuse is the sort of spot on, one line problem solving that suggests curing depression by just being happy. Of course. So obvious. You’ve found the secret. So easy. No one ever need suffer from this again.
This kind of suggestion can only be made by someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. It’s a bit like taking someone who doesn’t keep up with sports and only vaguely knows the rules of a game, showing them a single play that didn’t work out very well and getting their opinion on it. That person doesn’t know the rules very well. They aren’t familiar with what that sport looks like normally. They don’t know the players or the teams. They don’t know any history those teams have together and they don’t know how this season has been going for either team. They don’t even know what the rest of this game has been like or how the plays before or after that one worked out.
They know almost nothing and their opinion is only as valuable as their knowledge of the situation. No one who knows even a little about sports would watch one play and insist they knew enough to coach either team on what they should do in the future.
Insisting that victims should just walk away from their abusers is little more than making excuses for abusers. Don’t do that. Don’t let other people do that, not to you or anyone else.