Virginia Giuffre was a victim of careless cruelty

The death of Virginia Giuffre by suicide at the age of 41 brings to an apparent end one of the grimmest and saddest sagas that has unfolded in public life in the past few decades. Giuffre, who came from a troubled and unhappy background and later became prey for both the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his enabler Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the classic “small people” who is used and discarded by the powerful and perverted. It is hard not to remember the famous lines from The Great Gatsby when thinking about her fate:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Giuffre was one of those victims of “vast carelessness,” although it was rather worse than that in her case. She first met Maxwell when she was a teenager – at, of all places, Donald Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, where she was working as a spa attendant at the club. After forming an apparent friendship with Maxwell, Giuffre was thrust into a nightmarish existence of transatlantic horror, where her sole purpose was to be trafficked from country to country in order to be abused by wealthy and powerful men. She was, in her evocative description, “passed around like a piece of fruit,” used and discarded at will, and forgotten about as soon as she was taken away on another private jet.

By far the most notorious of her rumored liaisons was with Prince Andrew, who has consistently, and angrily, denied any knowledge of her, let alone having sex with her while she was underage. While Giuffre’s death brings an end to the possibility of her ever testifying in any criminal case that might be brought against the Duke of York – itself an unlikely prospect, given that he has never been arrested, let alone charged with any offense – the significant out-of-court settlement that he made with her in a civil case in February 2022 was seen by many as a tacit admission of involvement, if not outright guilt. It led to his removal as a working member of the royal family, as well as questions over whether he had dark secrets that would be embarrassing to be revealed in court.

Yet Giuffre herself was also tainted by association. She made allegations of abuse against the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, which she then had to embarrassingly retract later in 2022 on the grounds that she had “made a mistake,” which then raised the question of how truthful she had been in other instances. Although she married Robert Giuffre in 2002, and had three children with him, her personal life continued to be a chaotic and unhappy one, as she remained an object of prurient fascination. Even after Epstein’s death by apparent suicide, Maxwell’s conviction for child sex trafficking and Andrew’s departure from public life, she was understandably unable to cope with the pressure that she felt.

Her Instagram account, for a long time a harmless repository of pictures of her family, started to take on a darker and more paranoid air last month. After a separation from Giuffre, she wrote: “Hurt me, abuse me but don’t take my babies. My heart is shattered and every day that passes my sadness only deepens.” Her final post on the platform on March 30, in the aftermath of a car accident, showed her bruised and battered. She claimed that the crash had given her renal failure, that she had only four days to live and that “I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time, but you know what they say about wishes. S**T in one hand and wish in the other & I guarantee it’s still going to be s**t at the end of the day.” The severity of this was publicly disputed by local police, not to say seized upon with ghoulish relish by conspiracy theorists.

Whatever the truth of her situation, it was clear in retrospect that she expected, even wanted, to die, as can be seen by the valedictory end of her post: “Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life. Godbless [sic] you all xx Virginia.” Her decision to kill herself must be seen as a tragedy for both her and her family, who issued a statement praising her as “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.” It is also a sad indictment of the lasting wickedness caused by the “careless people” who took their grim pleasures where and how they could. Her death makes her the latest in a long line of their victims: something that should be on the conscience of all those who paid to abuse her when she was a teenager, leaving scars that could never be healed.