The Burden Placed on Sexual Abuse Survivors

Last October Virginia Roberts Giuffre and I sat together on a comfy couch at her family’s remote ranch, about 45 minutes outside of Perth, Australia. We cued up the mini-series “A Very Royal Scandal,” based in part on a book by Emily Maitlis, the British journalist whose devastating 2019 interview with Prince Andrew revealed, among other things, his royal highness’s lack of empathy for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s victims.

By that point, I had been working with Ms. Giuffre, one of that duo’s most outspoken survivors, for more than three years on writing her memoir. Before we locked the final manuscript, however, I had an unusual request: to watch this historical drama series because it forcefully posed a question that had frustrated both of us for years. Why do we expect victims to shoulder the burden of explaining themselves, on demand, over and over and over again?

The moment I had in mind took place after the actor playing Ms. Maitlis had won accolades around the world for her sit-down with the prince. Sitting alone in her darkened kitchen, she is listening to a years-old podcast of herself being interviewed about a stalker who had once upended her life. When her husband walks in, he asks her why she’s revisiting this painful episode.

“Because,” she says, “I wanted to remember how it felt to be interviewed about something that wasn’t my fault. And what happened to Epstein’s victims wasn’t their fault. They still had to, you know, parade their pain in the hope of even the slightest justice.”

Since 2011, when Ms. Giuffre publicly accused Mr. Epstein (she was the first of his victims to forgo anonymity), she repeatedly revealed — in depositions, lawsuits and interviews — what was done to her in the hope of preventing others’ suffering. Especially in the years before federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, this parade of pain seemed the only way to keep public attention focused on their depravity and that of their associates.

But the constant telling and retelling of her story had consequences for Virginia — a campaign of intimidation that included death threats and at least one break-in at her family home — and took a devastating toll on her family, not to mention her well-being.

Though mostly populated by actors, “A Very Royal Scandal” ends with a close-up of Ms. Giuffre’s actual 17-year-old face. I could see in her eyes that day how validated she felt as the actor playing an outraged Ms. Maitlis spoke up for her and other survivors.

Six months later Ms. Giuffre died by suicide. She was 41 years old. The immediate, and ultimately unanswerable, question: Why?

But what also lingered for me, amid my immense sadness, were other questions: Why do we, as a society, ask those who have been weakened by abuse to do the heaviest lifting — not just calling out the predatory schemes of those who abused them, but also testifying and being deposed under oath, as well as sitting for interviews and news conferences?

And why is it that even when survivors do this, so many of us still don’t give them the benefit of the doubt? Instead of requiring the wounded to endlessly recite their worst memories on repeat, why don’t we bear down more forcefully on those they accuse of wrongdoing? Ms. Giuffre pursued justice in civil court and received settlements from Mr. Epstein, Ms. Maxwell and Prince Andrew. But these alone, in Ms. Giuffre’s mind, did not deliver justice.

Ms. Giuffre was a 16-year-old high school dropout who was working a $9-an-hour job at the spa at Mar-a-Lago when Ms. Maxwell first procured her in 2000. More than two years later, Ms. Giuffre left Mr. Epstein’s orbit. During her time with Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein, they would force her to sexually service not just the two of them, Ms. Giuffre said, but also a long list of prominent and wealthy men. The trauma of being trafficked would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Her life in the years after she escaped their grasp was happier than she had ever expected it to be — she married and, before long, despite having been told she couldn’t bear children, had two sons. But when she gave birth to her third child, a daughter, it lit a fire under her to hold Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and everyone she’d been trafficked to, accountable. Once she made that decision, she pursued her abusers relentlessly, even though she risked living out the rest of her days in courtrooms if she didn’t remove their names from her mouth.

Mr. Epstein died by suicide in jail in 2019, one month after being denied bail on federal sex trafficking charges. In 2020 Ms. Maxwell was indicted on criminal charges in part because of statements she’d made in 2016 depositions related to a defamation suit Ms. Giuffre filed (which Ms. Maxwell settled).

Ms. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually abuse minors. Ms. Giuffre sued Prince Andrew in 2021 under New York State’s Child Victims Act, claiming that he’d raped and battered her when she was a teenager. The royal family would soon strip him of his titles, and he eventually settled the case (while still denying wrongdoing). Then on Friday, the Prince relinquished his Duke of York title.

Speaking out turned Ms. Giuffre into an advocate for victims, many of whom came forward after they saw her do so, and writing a book felt to her like a way to help other survivors of sexual abuse, both male and female, by making them feel less alone. This intention, to give her torment meaning, inspired her, and made her feel hopeful — empowered, even.

But she insisted that the book frankly present the lingering damage she struggled with every day. She did not want to imply that survivors of abuse could (and thus should) simply get over their physical and psychic injuries. Ms. Giuffre herself wished she could erase the ghastly images of abuse that lived in her head, but she couldn’t. She knew trauma was always waiting to pull her down.

Of the countless brave things Ms. Giuffre did in her life, the bravest was sharing her own vulnerability. She wanted to force attention to be paid to the ongoing scourge of misogyny in our culture and, in particular, to the fetishization and abuse of young girls. And the way to do that, she felt, was to unflinchingly show the damage it caused — starting with her own.

There was a specific narrative she was fighting to reframe: that survivors of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell’s abuse were money-hungry “bad girls” who deserved whatever indignities they’d suffered. If these girls were so unhappy, this narrative asserted, they could have simply left.

Before she could take back control of her history, Ms. Giuffre first had to forcefully rebut this. Because she understood innately that writing a memoir wouldn’t matter if the public believed Mr. Epstein’s victims weren’t worth listening to.

Ms. Giuffre and I would often imagine how things might unfold when her book was published and she could stop reliving her most terrifying and dehumanizing moments with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell. In this imagined future, she finally would, for the first time since 2011, be able to aim her energies toward two things: spending more time with her own family, and protecting all kids by calling for the elimination of statute of limitation provisions for sexual abusers of minors.

It was ironic, Ms. Giuffre and I both knew, that the only way to wrench back her own power was to do the very thing we wished abuse victims weren’t always asked to do: tell her story, one last time.

“When I was a sex slave, I had no say,” she wrote in her book. “I will never have ‘no say’ again.”

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