Virginia Roberts Giuffre
And My Sorrow
I finished Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir today. I was saddened by her death last April, mostly having to do with my own hopes. I thought she could be a great help and powerful ally to us music survivors, the film Dear Lara, making change globally, and more.
I didn’t yet know her full story, and I’m so glad she left it for us to read and understand. I grieve for her family, yet I recognize that she had to leave them and us. Survivors have all had those times, where one can no longer tread water, so it makes sense to go under. For her, it was time, and I know she is at last at peace. She deserves it.
Her incredible work over decades has made a great difference in how we think about people like Epstein and other abusers of children, now and forevermore. So many of her reactions and feeling were a mirror of my own over the years, and although our stories are outwardly different, fundamentally they are parallel. The mockery, the gaslighting, the blame, the blacklisting and how she felt when trying to deal with it all was almost unbearably close.
After unspeakable abuse as a small child, she “acted out” in despair, because no one helped her. “I was unwanted, so I acted like a girl no one would want”. She also wrote: “It was about how being so fundamentally betrayed often made a person feel deserving of betrayal”.
Ah, how true. Every survivor, every victim, every child, feels that onus put on them, as though they were the ones to do wrong. Although victim-blaming, to a rational, sane mind, seems like utter madness, it’s precisely what happens, all over the world, every damn time. Even children are blamed regularly.
When she spoke out, she was accused of being a money-grubbing drug-addicted whore when in truth she was a young mother trying to help others and forego the Xanax she’d been taking to numb the pain and memories. I’ve heard over the years that I was a mad, wild drug addict (which has never been true except for nicotine) who ran off to live with Roma nomads (also untrue but more cool) and I was a risk to the classical establishment.
I guess I can be thankful that the Curtis Institute is not a billionaire bent on revenge or a Royal trying to silence me, so I haven’t had any recent threats to myself or my family like Virginia did. I’m thankful that she had her children and did everything she could for them, and that she took so much solace in horses and her pets. I’m incredulous at her forgiveness, not to Epstein and Maxwell (no one could) but to her own parents. She had a greater heart than I ever will.
In a short while, we shall see what will happen with the storm she was partly responsible for. The government of the United States has been shut down for the longest time in history, obviously because swearing in Adelita Grijalva of Arizona will tip the scales to get the Epstein files released in full.
40 million people have been afraid of hunger, millions of federal employees have been unpaid for more than a month, travelers have been worried about safety and finally mostly grounded, all because one man does not want the public to know what he once did.
Virginia didn’t get the justice she should have, to face Jeffery Epstein in court, and see him locked up for life, because of his cowardly suicide. The talk of commuting Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentence (presently enjoying minimum security jail with yoga and puppies) is abhorrent.
For the only time in my life, I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Release the Files.
Believe the Victims.
Read the Book.
Lara
I look forward to reading the book!
I agree. I was haunted by Virginia’s posthumous memoir and am so grateful she had the foresight to write it and insist that it be released. Thank YOU for your advocacy as well, Lara!