Analysis: In the Epstein scandal, like other Washington storms, the victims are an afterthought

CNN

6 days ago

Virginia Giuffre endured decades of torment after her alleged abuse by accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his jailed accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Giuffre took her own life earlier this year.
'The nightmares of being trafficked never left our sister, ever,' Giuffre's brothers said in a statement on Thursday.
And even in death, her tragedy continues.
Giuffre — who moved to Australia as an adult, but who ultimately couldn't outrun the horror that claimed her life — is again the victim of someone else's scandal. Her horrific experiences in the early 2000s have been dragged into Donald Trump's frantic efforts to squelch controversy over his past friendship with Epstein.
She's a photo on the news; she's diminished by the disrespectful language of the president; her name is being dragged into noisy reporter photo-ops. Her desperate past is being excavated again, in countless media accounts, as Trump critics and pundits ask: What did the president know and when did he know it?
Giuffre suffered terribly for the abuse she said she suffered at Epstein's hands. And her life was destroyed by media notoriety. She was pictured in a famous photograph with Maxwell and Britain's Prince Andrew, to whom she alleged she was trafficked by Epstein. The prince, who denied all claims against him, concluded an out-of-court settlement with her in 2022.
Now, in another tributary scandal seeded by Epstein's wickedness, Giuffre's dignity is being picked over again. That's because she once worked at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, where she encountered Maxwell — who pulled her into Epstein's circle — and who now may have politically pertinent information about the president and her onetime paramour.
In this ugly process, Giuffre has become an emblem of wider, regrettable truths about the Epstein case and Washington.
Her return to the headlines exemplifies how victims are pulled into Washington's poisoned culture with little thought about the human consequences.
Giuffre is just one of the alleged Epstein victims whose private torment is being largely ignored in breathless speculation about how the Epstein drama will impact Trump's presidency. And she's joining the long list of third parties in Washington scandals whose personal stories are shredded and coopted by the bitter maelstroms of the city.
There are legitimate questions about Trump's knowledge about the behavior of Epstein, his own hyping of conspiracy theories around the case, and about a politicized Justice Department's clumsy attempt to make it go away.
But assessing them in isolation from the plight of the victims, living and dead, risks denying justice and perpetuating the inhumanity they've already suffered.
Trump's struggle to extricate himself from a controversy over the Justice Department's refusal to release files on Epstein — that he himself claimed were subject to a huge conspiracy — is reviving a nightmare for survivors.
'They're feeling violated again. They're feeling re-victimized again. They are not given the opportunity to heal in private,' Randee Kogan, a therapist for some of Epstein's alleged victims, told CNN's John Berman this week. 'Everywhere they look, it's on their phone — whether it's a headline, whether it's social media — and they feel like there's nowhere to escape. They can't find peace to heal.'
Some, like Giuffre, are becoming objectified as their trauma is boiled down to political talking points.
This dehumanizing process was demonstrated by Trump this week, when he said he severed his friendship with Epstein because Epstein was poaching employees from Trump's Mar-a -Lago club. Trump acknowledged that Giuffre had worked in the massage parlor there. 'He stole people that worked for me,' Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
Referring to any human like a commodity would be offensive. Doing so about an alleged victim of sex trafficking and abuse is especially so.
'She wasn't 'stolen'; she was preyed upon at his property, at President Trump's property,' Sky Roberts, one of Giuffre's brothers, told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Thursday.
Trump has not been charged with any wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein case. But the comment posed new questions about the extent of his knowledge about the activities of Epstein and Maxwell. In a court deposition unsealed in 2019, Giuffre said she first met Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago and that Maxwell took her to her initial meeting with Epstein.
Giuffre's family told CNN in a statement on Thursday that if their sister was alive she'd be angered that the Trump administration, in an attempt to placate MAGA voters irate over the refusal to release the Epstein files, had sent Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to speak to Maxwell in Florida last week.
'It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been 'stolen' from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal actions,' the family said. In the statement, first reported by The Atlantic, the family urged Trump not to pardon Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022.
The experiences of Maxwell's victims should be front and center as scrutiny mounts over the administration's handling of the drama. Public debate over potential pardons or commutations for her have so far sketched over the pain inflicted by her crimes. The consequences of any attempt to incentivize her to offer information that could be politically helpful to Trump are enormous.
Trump has pointed out that he has the constitutional authority to pardon Maxwell and his history of politicizing such powers is one reason Blanche's talks with Maxwell caused controversy. A senior administration official told CNN that the president was not currently considering clemency for her.
Roberts said Thursday on 'The Source' that Maxwell should spend the rest of her life behind bars. 'She deserves to rot in prison where she belongs because of what she has done to my sister and so many other women,' Roberts said.
As Trump has failed to shake off questions about Epstein and the political heat rises, the voices of abuse survivors have been largely drowned out. Democrats have joined demands for a full release of all the files the government holds about Epstein as they seek to damage Trump, with little thought for the impact of such a step on victims.
On MAGA media, the controversy has again highlighted the strange obsession among some right-wing conspiracy theorists with sex crimes, trafficking and abuse, and the false claims that the government is complicit or covering up such activities. Many of the people most vocal in their outrage over sexual abuse ignore how amping up these falsehoods re-traumatizes survivors.
The justice that would be denied if Maxwell were pardoned as part of a political scheme to alleviate Trump's problems took years to secure.
When Maxwell was sentenced, US Attorney Damian Williams said she was held accountable for 'heinous crimes against children. This sentence sends a strong message that no one is above the law and it is never too late for justice.'
Maxwell was convicted of recruiting, grooming and abusing victims that she and Epstein knew were under 18 years old, over a period of at least 10 years. Some of the victims were as young as 14. Minor victims, according to the charges, were subjected to sexual abuse that included touching, the use of sex toys and providing sexual massages to Epstein in his residences in New York, Florida and New Mexico, as well as at Maxwell's residence in London.
During the trial, Maxwell's lawyers had pushed back at the government's framing of the case, arguing that what prosecutors referred to as 'grooming' — for instance, taking victims to the movies or on shopping trips — was lawful behavior. And they sought to minimize arguments that she ran Epstein's household.
But at sentencing, Judge Alison Nathan rejected the idea that Maxwell was a proxy for Epstein's crimes after his death. 'Miss Maxwell is not punished in place of Epstein,' she said. 'Miss Maxwell is being punished for the role that she played.' Maxwell did not testify in her own defense before her conviction on five counts, including sex trafficking of a minor.
Many of Epstein's alleged victims believe that they've already been repeatedly deprived of justice. Some were dismayed when federal prosecutor Alex Acosta in 2008 gave the disgraced financier a lenient plea deal under which Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. Acosta, who served as Trump's first-term Labor secretary, was later accused of 'poor judgment' in a Justice Department report.
Victims also lost their chance of a day in court with Epstein after he took his own life in prison.
'He took away the chance I had at having the future I had envisioned for myself as a young girl. And I think many of us here today will never fully heal from that pain,' one victim, identified as Jane Doe No. 4, said in court after Epstein's death.
Epstein's return to the headlines after Trump's administration was caught in the crossfire of conspiracy theories that he and top aides fanned on the campaign trail has made the distress of survivors even more raw.
Kogan said that endless news coverage of Epstein and Trump's language dehumanized the women.
'They have been trying to heal for 18 years, and every time they're on the road to recovery, something new comes out in the news, something new, a meme in social media, a skit on a TV show, or a stand-up comedian bringing up Epstein. It's everywhere,' Kogan said. 'When they hear the fact that they're not being humanized, even by the president, it — they feel defeat.'
Julie K. Brown, a Miami Herald reporter who wrote 'Perversion of Justice,' a 2021 book about the Epstein case, said she's been speaking to survivors as the scandal intensifies.
'They are beside themselves because they don't understand what's going on. Imagine … after all these years, this has turned into an international story once again,' Brown told CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday. 'This is a re-traumatization of what they've always felt, which is that nobody is really listening to them or understanding that this was such a serious crime and a travesty of justice.'
The dehumanizing of victims and the tendencies of warring political factions to use them as props is nothing new.
Those caught in the storm, whether wittingly or unwittingly, suddenly become known to millions, lose control of their stories and reputations, and become the face of the scandal.
Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern with whom President Bill Clinton had an affair, spoke recently about how her life blew up in a second when the scandal erupted. 'It was a moment where life as I knew it was over,' Lewinsky said in an appearance on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast earlier this year.
Everyone in the world, it seemed, had an opinion on her personality, her conduct, her reputation and her morals. Lewinsky said she quickly lost control of her narrative in the media storm and was accused of being a 'a stalker, a whore (and) mentally unstable.' 'There was a creation of a version of me that I didn't recognize.'
A similar process of dehumanizing someone caught in a scandal occurred in the case of Chandra Levy, a former Bureau of Prisons intern who was found murdered in a Washington park in 2002. Photos of the 24-year-old were soon on every television show and newspaper and magazine.
Levy's disappearance gained national attention after her parents discovered a connection between her and Gary Condit, who was then a congressman for Levy's California district. Outsiders were soon speculating on Levy's personal life and behavior as rumors flew that she was having an affair with Condit.
Condit was never a suspect in the case nor implicated in the apparent Levy homicide, and has for decades denied any involvement in her death. A man was convicted in 2010 of killing Levy and sentenced to 60 years in prison. But the charges were dismissed in 2016. The man, Ingmar Guandique, was later deported to his native El Salvador. The crime remains unsolved.
But Levy's treatment at the time was a classic case of how someone who had been a private citizen suddenly becomes a helpless cog in the wheel of a Washington nightmare. Levy's image was fixed in the public imagination for millions who never knew what she was like but who all saw a photo of her in a white tank top and jeans.
The sudden loss of anonymity and moment when someone's story is no longer their own and was also experienced by Christine Blasey Ford after she accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of an assault that took place decades before his confirmation process in 2018. Kavanaugh denied the accusation.
'I had lived a relatively quiet life as a mom, professor, and surfer,' Ford wrote in her memoir. 'Quite literally overnight, I became a headline news item. With little preparation, my name would be forever encompassed by one image — me in a navy-blue suit I would never normally wear, being sworn in to solemnly tell the truth.'
Ford experienced how a vicious political spotlight is often used to assail the characters of those caught up in scandals — and the way that the consequential trauma can linger for years afterwards.
But as the Epstein scandal shows, the grim dehumanizing of victims and their manipulation for political schemes and goals never ends in Washington.
'Here ruining people is considered sport,' wrote Clinton administration Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster in a note found after he took his own life in 1993.