The murder of Virginia Giuffre

Virginia Giuffre’s death serves as a terrible reminder of the double suffering endured by women who have been sexually trafficked. First, there is the horrific experience of the sexual abuse itself. Layered on top of that is the trauma of speaking out about what has happened and of trying to get justice despite all the mud that the powerful men who are accused fling at survivors to try and discredit them to make the allegations go away.

Giuffre’s bravery in trying to hold the men who abused her accountable was exemplary. She was a victim of abuse from a young age, later recounting how she was sexually abused by a family friend from the age of seven. She later cycled in and out of foster care.

When she was 17, she got a job working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where she met socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who introduced her to the financier Jeffrey Epstein. After she started working for him as a masseuse, Epstein flew her around the world on private jets and coerced her into having sex with his wealthy and powerful male associates.

Giuffre was not the first to go public about the crimes of Epstein; parents of a 14-year-old girl accused him of sexually molesting their daughter at his mansion in 2005. After striking a cushy deal with Florida prosecutors he was sentenced to just 18 months in jail in 2008, with day release for 12 hours a day, six days a week.

It was a few years later that Giuffre herself decided to speak out about what happened to her after she became a mother in her late 20s. That decision was instrumental in ensuring that Epstein faced charges of sex trafficking in 2019 (he killed himself in his prison cell later that year while he was awaiting trial) and in helping to secure Maxwell’s conviction for sex trafficking offences in 2022 as a result of the assistance she gave Epstein. Giuffre also set up an NGO to support other victims of sex trafficking and sexual abuse just over a decade ago.

But speaking out about what happened to her and other young girls, some as young as 14, inevitably came at huge personal cost to Giuffre. Her family quite rightly described her as a “fierce warrior” and “the light that lifted so many survivors”. But warriors are not impenetrable and, in her family’s words, “the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle”. She was reportedly experiencing issues in her family life when she took her own life last week.

Her legal battle with Prince Andrew typifies what women who publicly accuse men of abuse have to face. In 2015, it emerged in court documents relating to Epstein that Giuffre alleged that Andrew sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17.

Andrew has always denied these allegations, and says he has no recollection of having met her, despite the fact that there is photographic evidence placing them together in Maxwell’s London house, one of the places she says he assaulted her, and that several witnesses have put them together on more than one occasion, including one who claims to have seen Andrew kissing Giuffre while she was topless at Mar-e-Lago in Florida, where the age of consent is 18.

After Giuffre brought a civil case against him in the US, Andrew reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount with her in 2022 that involved no admission of liability. But not before his allies spent years doing all they could to undermine her. His PR adviser accused her of doctoring the photo that showed her and Andrew together at Maxwell’s London home.

His lawyers aggressively threw every tactic in the book at her, including accusing her of being a gold digger, and trying to cast her as an offender who helped to recruit other young girls as victims despite the fact she was still a child when Epstein trafficked and abused her. Powerful men accused of terrible crimes have a serious arsenal at their disposal should they choose to use it.

It is striking that the only person who has been convicted for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking ring was Ghislaine Maxwell. None of the men who were involved in abusing these girls have had to answer for their crimes; apart from Epstein, we don’t even know who they were.

This is by no means unique to this case involving the rich and famous. There is always a gross power imbalance between the men who sexually exploit young girls and boys, and their victims. These men always know how to manipulate those imbalances to offend with impunity. There is always a tendency to disbelieve the girls, or to write them off as sluts and prostitutes.

It’s a dynamic that plays out again and again in relation to child sexual exploitation, whether that’s in relation to Epstein and his victims, or in the grooming gangs that raped and abused young girls in towns and cities across the UK. It’s been grim watching the politicisation of the latter play out; by one side seeking to use this the fact that the highest-profile cases of child sexual exploitation have involved mostly British Pakistani men as perpetrators to further their own anti-immigration political agendas; but also by government ministers who seem to want to underplay the existence of any racial dimension to the abuse in these particular cases and who have tried to mislead the public that the independent inquiry on child sexual abuse answers all the outstanding questions about the extent of grooming gangs – how many children have been historically affected, and how many still are – when it categorically did not do so. The voices and needs of the victims have been completely lost in this political to and fro.

Societies that pride themselves on being kind and compassionate fail survivors of child sexual exploitation over and over. There is nowhere near enough effort put into preventing it happening in the first place, a failure to sufficiently hold the men who perpetrate these terrible crimes accountable, and then far too little support to help victims live with the profound and lasting consequences.

Giuffre’s suicide shows just how much it’s still an abuser’s, not a survivor’s, world.

Sonia Sodha is a writer and broadcaster. She was a senior adviser to Ed Miliband during his time as Labour leader