The death of Virginia Giuffre by suicide at the age of 41 brings to an apparent end one of the grimmest and saddest sagas that has unfolded in public life in the past few decades. Giuffre, who came from a troubled and unhappy background and later became prey for both the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his enabler Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the classic ‘small people’ who is used and discarded by the powerful and perverted. It is hard not to remember the famous lines from The Great Gatsby when thinking about her fate:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It was clear in retrospect that Virginia expected, even wanted, to die
Giuffre was one of those victims of ‘vast carelessness’, although it was rather worse than that in her case.
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