Wearing Away Their Reality
All of the following abuse tactics are ways that perpetrators hide the reality of their abuse in order to reduce pushback to it.
Once someone’s sense of reality is destabilized, they won’t fight back or hold the abuser accountable because they no longer trust their own perspective.
Similarly, this veil can be used to confuse bystanders into believing that nothing is wrong, and trick more victims into the trap.
Normalization of Harm
Virginia Roberts Giuffre writes in her memoir that her abuse started when she was 7 years old. At that age, she clearly didn’t have an understanding of sex or boundaries, and her father weaponized this naiveté.
He used ordinary activities, like her bathtime or bedtime routine as a framework for his abuse.
“If Mom was out, he’d molest me in the afternoon, promising me that afterward, we’d put on a movie—he loved scary films best—make some popcorn, and stay up late together. By mixing his sick behavior with cozy bonding, he normalized it, at least partly.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Similarly, when she was staying over at a family friend’s place, that older man told her he would give her a bath.
“He sat on the toilet next to me and acted as if this were the most natural thing in the world—a grown man scrubbing the naked body of someone else’s young daughter.”
In these instances, abuse wasn’t immediately recognizable as abuse. It was mixed in with the mundane- like it was just another part of life. This way, it seemed almost ordinary and trivial, unworthy of getting upset about.
When Giuffre first met Jeffrey Epstein and gave him a massage, both he and Ghislaine Maxwell made it seem normal to have a teenage girl rubbing the bare buttocks of a middle-aged stranger, and for the massage to end in sex.
And after Virginia was trafficked to one of Epstein’s friends, she recalls Epstein asking her how it went “as if having sex with a stranger were a final exam, or a root canal, or some other everyday activity.”
The abuse had become so normalized, that it took years for her to understand the extent of it- to disentangle the horrific from the commonplace.
A Shiny Fantasy Hides the Truth
While normalization makes abuse feel unremarkable, fantasy makes it feel exceptional.
Normalization says: this isn’t a big deal, while fantasy says: I’d be lucky to have this (and ungrateful to question it).
If the girls believed they were entering a glamorous world full of opportunity, they would walk in willingly, instead of being dragged, kicking and screaming.
Bystanders, too, saw the glamorous lifestyle of Epstein and didn’t think to question what was happening behind the curtain. Virginia’s parents, for example, were excited that she was given the opportunity to work for Epstein. Her dad drove her to Epstein’s door.
Polished People
Virginia’s initial impression of Ghislaine Maxwell was that she’d be lucky to grow up to be anything like her. Maxwell didn’t present as a villain, she presented as a beautiful, self-assured, rich, woman.
Epstein, too, presented himself intentionally.
For example, in order to lure women into his orbit, he often told girls falsely that he was “a Victoria’s Secret scout”.
“From that first meeting, Epstein wanted me to regard him as a mentor, not a predator.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
And when Virginia was trafficked to others, they were represented in a similar glossy way. Their status and titles were used to convey a sense that Virginia was lucky to be in their company, even if she was being trafficked to them.
Before she met Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (previously known as Prince Andrew), Maxwell compared Virginia to Cinderella, told her she was going to meet a handsome prince, and took her on a shopping spree for the occasion…. And then Virginia was expected to have sex with him; a 17-year-old with a 41-year-old man of immense power and status.
The victims themselves were expected to perpetuate this fantasy- to play their part well, for the entertainment and enjoyment of others.
Epstein wanted the girls to act happy and enthusiastic, even if they weren’t.
“(Epstein) ordered me to seem more ‘into it’. Men liked it when women appeared to love sex, he said. In that area, I needed to do better.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Virginia often faked her orgasms to make others happy. She knew they didn’t actually care how she felt, only that she pretended to enjoy it. The illusion of a sexual fantasy overlaid the true reality of events. It wasn’t enough to go through it, she had to pretend to like it.
Places, too, did similar things.
Ornate rooms hid dark truths.
Luxurious Places
“Were it not for what went on (at the Island), the place would have been paradise.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Luxurious places were used to lure victims, then keep them trapped, and coming back. They were not only a material example of Epstein’s wealth, power, and prestige, they were often hard to physically escape from.
Gates and bodies of water are beautiful- unless you want to cross them.
Epstein made himself a king in his own world- and he wanted people to know it.
And later these places created a sort of morality optical illusion. How could something so terrible happen in a place so beautiful? It prompted questions like: weren’t the girls lucky to have access to these places?
The Subjectivity of Experience
As mentioned, Epstein was a king in his own world. But this creates a problem.
Healthy relationships recognize that every person has their own thoughts, emotions, boundaries, and preferences. Abusive relationships don’t have that distinction.
Often perpetrators will center their own perspective and expect others to as well. They see it as the only one that matters, and expect others to prioritize their experience, even at the expense of their own.
“Day and night, my every waking moment was circumscribed by his wants and needs.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Such phrases that they use might be along the lines of: “this is fine”, “you like this”, “I know you want it”, “I know what’s best for you”, and “this is how it is”.
By behaving this way, they can wear away a victim’s sense of identity and their belief that they have the right to make their own choices.
They can define both the external world (reality) as well as a victim’s inner world (their sense of self). When a victim is cut off from the true reality of these, they accept the abuser’s word as law.
“In fact, cutting myself off from my own wishes or wants had been one of my coping mechanisms.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
One way that abusers center their own perspective is by determining what is “good” and “bad”.
After Epstein’s first assault of Virginia, Maxwell had offered her effusive praise for how well she had done.
In fact, Virginia was called a “good girl” by many men throughout her life when she did exactly what they asked- to the point that she came to really dislike the phrase.
To her, it not only conveyed the men’s desire for her obedience, but it also made it clear that her childlike appearance was part of her sexual appeal to them.
“For so long, I had only been seen as ‘good’ if I did what was required of me, no matter how painful or upsetting.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Conversely, whenever Virginia would try to avoid the abuse, she’d be told she was being bad, ungrateful, wasn’t doing what she was taught, wasn’t respecting her elders, and so on.
In short, if she didn’t put up with the harm that was being done to her, she was disappointing others.
In those environments, her value came from her willingness and ability to please others, never herself.
“…I was expected to make all the men happy, even though doing so made me miserable.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Over time, Virginia found people in her life who valued her opinion and cared about her experience.
The first person to ask her what she enjoyed sexually was her (future) husband.
He wanted to please her, but up until that point, she had almost entirely been a tool for others’ pleasure. It took some time for her to know what she was comfortable with and enjoyed; it hadn’t previously been relevant, so she had stopped asking herself these things.
Suddenly, she was allowed to have preferences and interests again. Now she could acknowledge her own perspective as valid, genuine, and even valuable to others.
People blossom when they are given the space and safety to be themselves. But if they haven’t had this, it can take years to regrow their sense of self.
Minimization of Harm
The first time Virginia met Epstein, he had asked her about her intimate life, but not for any noble reason. She told him that she had been sexually abused as a child, and he responded by making light of it.
Instead of looking at her with a pained, devastated expression, or contacting the authorities on her behalf, he joked that she was “a naughty girl”.
“Not at all,” she tried correcting him, “I’m a good girl”.
But he said he liked naughty girls, before rolling over on the massage table, revealing an erection.
Her childhood sexual abuse was life altering, yet he turned it into a punchline.
Moments like this can be confusing for victims, and repeated moments can pull victims away from the reality of the severity of their abuse.
They may believe they aren’t allowed to get upset over these violations, and may themselves try to minimize it for their own comfort and for others, even going along with the belief that “it wasn’t that bad”.
Minimization pulls them from outrage and into doubt.
Later, when Virginia told Epstein that her boyfriend had been unfaithful, he said men were genetically programmed to be that way: “You can’t hold that against him/ He’s only doing what every guy in the world does.”
He said he was only telling her this because he was on her side, and that she shouldn’t expect too much from men so that she wouldn’t be disappointed.
Again minimizing her pain, and specifically, the harm done to her from a man.
She even quoted Epstein as saying: “I’m not a sexual predator; I’m an ‘offender’. It’s the difference between a murderer and person who steals a bagel.”
That is an incredibly nonchalant self-description of one of the most prolific child sex offenders in modern history.
And after Virginia was brutally raped by a well-known Prime Minister, she begged Epstein not to ever send her back to him. He again responded indifferently, telling her blankly: “You’ll get that sometimes”.
Even when her life was on the line, Epstein still brushed it off.
That moment helped break the spell for Virginia.
She realized that Epstein never really cared about her, he cared about her loyalty to him, and that he had been emotionally manipulating her all along.
Dehumanization
While minimization shrinks the harm, dehumanization shrinks the person. If minimization taught her that what happened to her didn’t matter, dehumanization taught her that she didn’t matter.
Epstein was not the first to define Virginia’s worth through his own eyes.
Virginia had been used repeatedly as a tool for others’ gratification, and her self-esteem paid the price for this.
“Every night, as I lay in my bed, dreading the now-familiar creak of the door, I tried to remember a time when I’d been more than nothing. I longed to be worth something again.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
She was often blamed for her own abuse. Starting when she was a child, she was regularly called a “slut”, a “whore”, a “piece of shit”, and more.
She began to develop a belief that she was worthless and that her body was the only thing about her that had any value to others.
So when Epstein told her that she had value, she wanted to believe that was true.
But she would later find out his true feelings.
For example, she mentions that he called women merely “a life-support system for a vagina”.
He, too, believed women’s value came from their bodies and from their service to him, but he wanted his victims to believe otherwise.
He would alternate between putting them on a pedestal and dehumanizing them based on their behavior towards him.
When Giuffre began accusing Epstein and his co-conspirators, she felt the sting of familiar tactics.
She and other Epstein accusers were called “sluts”, “prostitutes”, “opportunists”, “drug addicts”, and more- all in an attempt to dehumanize them and make them seem less worthy of our collective trust and empathy.
Use of Drugs
Drugs and alcohol can separate a person from reality, which means they can make abuse easier- easier to perpetrate and easier to bear.
Whether a perpetrator administers substances to a victim, or a victim turns to them to cope with the harm being done to them, the physiological effect is the same.
Perpetrators may use them to incapacitate a victim so that they don’t object to the harm, and can’t remember it- and are therefore unlikely to hold the perpetrator accountable.
As a young teen, Virginia was assaulted by two boys (one seventeen, the other eighteen) when she was unconscious in the back of a car after they had been drinking and smoking pot.
The attack lasted hours and she awoke to them taking turns on top of her. She couldn’t run away or defend herself.
Maybe the boys intentionally got her high, drunk, and alone, or maybe they just opportunistically took advantage of her when she was incapacitated. Either way, it is horrific.
Epstein, though, hated drugs and alcohol.
He wanted his victims to be healthy, slim, perky, and attentive, not detached and listless.
He didn’t want chemical submission, he wanted fealty.
Virginia, though, had developed a reliance on drugs and alcohol as a way to escape her bleak reality. She was self-administering this separation from reality to protect herself.
Drugs separate a person from reality, regardless of who administers them.
But the drugs weren’t actually helping her to escape her situation, only to withdraw from it.
In fact, in many ways, they made it harder for her to break free from the harm and get her life back on track.
“When I had opportunities to take control and advocate for myself, I often found it easier to get fucked up on alcohol or drugs instead.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Her drug use also made people later question her worth as a person and if she was a reliable victim.
Did she remember the events correctly if she was so fucked up?
Is a drug addict worthy of our sympathy?
Those were two common arguments against her that she had to fight again and again that clouded the reality of the abuse. The thing that had protected her in the moment was discrediting her now.
Gaslighting
Virginia had used drugs to detach and wipe away the memory of her experiences. Other people used gaslighting to try to erase the experiences entirely.
Virginia experienced many instances of outright gaslighting: before, during, and after the abuse. This didn’t just come from the abusers themselves, but also lawyers, the media, ordinary people, and those in Epstein’s circle.
This can cause self-doubt even over the most obvious things.
For example, Epstein’s personal chef from 1999-2003, Adam Perry Lang, said that he never saw any harm, nudity, underage girls, or anything suspicious.
But Virginia recalls often standing naked in front of him while on Epstein’s private island- a place widely known by locals as “Pedophile Island”. He also travelled regularly on Epstein’s Lolita Express private jet.
He may be intentionally minimizing his knowledge of what happened to protect himself, but to those who were hurt, this unacknowledgement can sting- especially because he was someone that Virginia considered kind (within the circumstances at least).
“He could have said something as simple as, ‘I saw what happened to you because I was there,’ and that would have helped me heal.”
– Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Similarly, men who abused Virginia claimed to have never even met her: the former prince, as well as the modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel.
The former prince’s story crumbled though, when a photo was publicized with his arm around a 17-year-old Virginia’s waist.
It looked damning, but still he tried to question its authenticity.
However, more condemning photos of him began to come out, making his denial seem weaker and weaker.
Despite all of this, Virginia and the other survivors had to stay grounded in the truth and in their own experiences.
She found solace in her writing- it grounded her thoughts, in a way.
And some victims found that the momentos from that time- photographs and physical objects, help remind them of the reality of what happened when the world would like them to forget.
They are material markers of psychological wounds.
There is power in remembrance.
The Role of Illusion
Each of the above themes presents a type of illusion that changes how people interpret what is happening.
These illusions can affect the choices people make- turning the most harmful ones into ones that look like the best option, making escape feel impossible, and memory seem unreliable.
Reclaiming reality- seeing events for how they truly are- is one of the most difficult barriers to escape and recovery.
It was through time, new experiences, writing, and connecting with other survivors, that Virginia was able to piece together the picture of what happened to her, and find her way out of the maze that she had been trapped in.
Messy Bun Book Lover
Leave a Reply