“I implore the people in the UK to stand up beside me, to help me fight this fight, to not accept this as being OK.
“This is not some sordid sex story. This is a story of being trafficked. This is a story of abuse and this is a story of your guys’ royalty.”
Wow! Princess Diana may have appealed to the nation’s public to take her to their hearts over her royal rivals in her own excoriating Panorama interview in 1995, but 24 years later Virginia Giuffre is asking a hell of a lot more of all of us. In her first sit-down interview for British television, she doubled down on her claims that she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to his friend Prince Andrew, for the latter’s sexual gratification.
If Prince Andrew’s previously hand-in-mouth Newsnight interview opened the doors onto a seedy transatlantic world of entitlement and exploitation, this latest Panorama special gave us the guided tour through its corridors, stopping to shine a light on the darkest, murkiest corners.
There was some new material. We learned of the contents of a very dodgy-looking email between Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell where he requested information about Virginia Roberts, as she was known previously, we saw previously unpublished pictures of Maxwell and Epstein dolled up in their finery as guests of Prince Andrew at Royal Ascot. And we learned of another FIVE women who have prepared subpoenas for Prince Andrew in their ongoing lawsuits against Epstein’s estate, for which their lawyer, the indomitable David Boies, says he must testify. Something tells me the Duke won’t be taking Manhattan again any time soon.
It’s true that for those who can’t get enough of this story – and to be sure, the untold wealth, access to power, the mixing with royalty, and all of the underlying depravity make for a heady mix – much of Panorama’s background material has already been covered in tireless depth by a series of American TV specials and particularly podcast series. ‘The Mysterious Mr Epstein’ and ‘Real Crime Profile’ being just two – nevertheless, it survived the re-telling: young girls plucked from deprived or fractured backgrounds being deliberately targeted by Epstein and his agents to live a life of undreamt luxury, but at massive personal cost. Epstein received an inexplicably lenient plea deal after his 2008 conviction whereby he was allowed to visit his office every day and immunity was also granted that barred the prosecution of anybody who’d helped him – something unheard of in the courtroom, according to legal experts.
However, what gave this documentary its real power was in the technicolour and the voices.
Pictures, both video and stills, brought the story into damning focus. We saw Jeffrey Epstein dancing and giggling with Donald Trump, juxtaposed with him grinning with silent power while highly-paid lawyers help him dodge authorities’ questions. We saw pictures of a smiling, glamorous Ghislaine Maxwell, joining Epstein to dress up in finery for Royal Ascot, enjoying the hospitality of Prince Andrew and by extension the coin of the British taxpayer, juxtaposed with photos of the girls she allegedly employed – often blonde, all fresh-faced, all wide-eyed, and all, of course, young.
Even more disturbing, two of the young girls involved, finally shrugged off the longtime objectification bestowed on them, to emerge centre-stage, with voices and memories intact. It was possible to enjoy their new-found self-determination and freedom in coming forward, even as the stories continued to horrify.
One of them, Sarah Ransome, described the singular aspects of life on Epstein’s Caribbean island, how “wild sex in front of everyone was as normal as a cup of tea”, how he abused the girls there at whim, while Maxwell ran operations and “treated us like shit on the sole of a shoe”.
Virginia Giuffre added her own choice descriptions of a life that we may have thought existed in distant countries, where human rights are not celebrated, where women remain subjugated, where leaders and other powerful figures exist in a world of whim, far away from our own glamorous spots, peppered by people with lots of money and familiar faces.
“Passed around like a platter of fruit”… “Now they knew how vulnerable I was”… “It was a face of reality that I succumbed to.” And in summing up, “It was a wicked time in my life.”
And possibly most thought-provoking of all for us Brits, Giuffre detailed exactly how it was possible that a teenage girl could be transported across the world all the way to London, enjoying the luxury and privilege of her wealthy patrons. Photos taken during this period reminded me of similar snaps of Michael Jackson bringing his young pals to awards events, another chapter where nobody really asked the rich central figure to explain his choice of companion.
Describing the three occasions she claimed she had to service the royal figure on Maxwell’s instruction, even as the Panorama team cut between Giuffre’s clear account and Prince Andrew’s blustering, laughing non-memories of events, more disturbing was the gauntlet she lay down to the rest of our Royal Family, and everyone who continues to prop up a system of deference, entitlement in which such behaviour gets a pass.
“I had just been abused by a member of the Royal Family. I couldn’t comprehend how the most powerful people in the world and governments allowed this to happen,” she sobbed.
“He knows what happened, I know what happened, there’s only one of us telling the truth, and that’s me.
“I implore the people in the UK to stand up beside me, to help me fight this fight, to not accept this as being OK.
“This is not some sordid sex story. This is a story of being trafficked. This is a story of abuse and this is a story of your guys’ royalty.”
None of us can say we haven’t heard her. The question now becomes, what do we do?
