Nobody's Girl

I bought Virginia Giuffre’s book, Nobody’s Girl, the day it was published. I was in the middle of a Nancy Mitford novel (I have much more to say about Nancy Mitford) so I didn’t get to it until a few days later. One big takeaway - Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were and are terrible, heartless people. Another big takeaway - there is just no way - NO WAY - that Jeffrey Epstein could have accumulated that much wealth based only on work or even only on investing. The man spent 24 hours a day fussing over his health and fitness routine, decorating his properties, getting massages, and - of course - raping people. He simply would not have had enough time to do any kind of meaningful, remunerative work. 

This leads, of course, to the biggest of questions: Where, then, did the money come from? How many people was he blackmailing, and for how much, and exactly how bad were their crimes that they’d pay that much money to cover them up? Because we all know that if it was just a matter of straight up sexual abuse of young women by rich or powerful men, they’d get away with it. Sure, there’d be a scandal, and lots of fuss and embarrassment, but it would all blow over, and the men in question would suffer nothing worse than cancellation, if that. Whatever is in those files is really really bad. 

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But the overall takeaway is devastation. This story is devastating, and not just because of what Giuffre suffered at the hands of her father and his friends and the other men who abused her, and the resulting feelings of worthlessness and despair that made her easy prey for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. 

It’s bad enough that this happened to Virginia Giuffre and Epstein’s other victims. What’s worse is that things like this tend to happen to girls and women who lack male protection - the ones who are “nobody’s girls.” We like to talk about how men need to protect the women they love. What we should be talking about is how we need to upend this entire patriarchal system that values women only as much as it values the men they’re associated with. What we should be doing is making abuse and harassment so unthinkable and unacceptable that single women and widows and orphans and all other women and girls can live in freedom and safety - even if they don’t have kind and benevolent male relatives and friends. 

RIP, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

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