Epstein, Trump, and the Myth of the Happily Transactional Woman

On the Death of Virginia Giuffre

I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. The first time I read her name was in the summer of 2019, long after her years as one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of teen girls and young women lured into Jeffrey Epstein’s world and passed around “like a plate of fruit,” as she put it, to powerful men. Her name was prominent in hundreds of pages of court documents from a defamation case Giuffre had filed against Epstein procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, a wealthy British socialite, had publicly called Giuffre a liar for claiming that Epstein trafficked her around to powerful men, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre took her to court, and Maxwell eventually settled, but the record remained sealed until just a day or two before Epstein died.

The documents were filled with redactions – powerful men had been fighting the release of their names in court for years – but it was also filled with horrifying Easter eggs, like depositions from other teens lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach lair, household staff describing the endless parade of girls paid by Maxwell, some of them lost and terrified.

I sat up all night, glued to the stomach-turning pages, and wrote about the documents for Rolling Stone a few days later. In 2020, I worked as executive producer on a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell, still streaming on Peacock.

That’s all to say: I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. As does most of the informed public and the legion of Epstein conspiracy theorists. I know enough to recognize that the MAGA cult belief that Donald Trump was put on this Earth to vanquish “pedophile”* sex trafficker Epstein and his ilk ought to go down in history as one of the greatest branding psy ops in recorded history. Trump and Epstein were close pals, sleazeball, greasy, handsy Manhattan modelizer running buddies in the 1980s, a fact easily ascertained in pictures, and if you don’t want to believe your eyes, listen to recorded tapes of Jeffrey Epstein that Michael Wolff released last fall.

I might have liked to talk to Virginia someday, but now she’s dead, reportedly by suicide, after long battles with physical ailments and depression. Virginia, like many girls lured into the sex trade, had already endured a difficult childhood: she was from a poor family, abused by a family friend at age 11, and in and out of foster care. Maxwell, always cruising for fresh teen flesh for her sometime boyfriend Epstein, found Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts) at age 17, working as a “spa attendant” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Maxwell and Epstein soon groomed Giuffre into a plaything under their control, a young woman without agency. And that is not good for any woman’s mental or physical health.

There is a cherished lie that many men – and some women – tell themselves that women like Virginia are naturally pliant and happy to service men for money as part of “the oldest profession.”

This myth of the happily pliant and transactional female is not just resurgent but increasingly enforced in the Trump years. We are now witnessing increasingly brazen applications of raw state power over female physical autonomy, reduced public authority for women including electoral disenfranchisement, forced marriage via legally limiting divorce options, public humiliation and threats of violence toward women in power, social and cultural marginalization and erasure of women, and the reduction of women’s roles from economic agency to isolated baby-maker in abject dependence on a man.

You hear it in public statements – utterly unthinkable just five years ago – that maybe women shouldn’t vote because husbands know best, that no fault divorce should be rescinded because it’s too easy for women to leave their household duties, and that women should not have jobs. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh and others have even started to attack their own prominent working women on the right as de facto feminists.

You see it in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest project, revealed in the Wall Street Journal - a sex-playing AI chatbot that can pretend to be a “Submissive Schoolgirl” pretending its interlocutor is a middle school principal. Zuck is so pissed he missed out on Snapchat, he whined to colleagues, he wants to get out ahead on the AI sex bot.

You see it in Elon Musk’s insane harem of an untold number of women paid to incubate IVF embryos selected for male chromosomes.

You see it in porn that suggests girls and women like to be choked – which we now empirically know causes violence against women in the real world.

The Silicon Valley authors of our virtual world have been setting this up for a long time. It’s all around us. Online, we swim in a miasma of sexism. Ask AI Google what women want. I did this recently, looking for the famous Freud quote. AI will tell you that what we women want is empathy, love, and affection from a man, and nothing more than a relationship. Ask it the same question about men, and it adds an entire section about what men want beyond a partner, all of which have to do with worldly accomplishments.

This is exactly the crap that Christian nationalist pastors like the utterly mad and yet influential Doug Wilson (one degree separated from open affiliation with Vice President JD Vance) preaches, besides arguing that marital rape is impossible by definition, that women are constitutionally incapable of having a “mission” or “purpose” in life beyond marriage and childbearing, while men require the chance at least to aspire to greatness through worldly accomplishments. (The sermon is here, titled “The Natural Use of a Woman”.)

This age-old mythology was born in the eons before contraception, modern medicine and rape laws, in the dark ages when women were denied even a glimmer of economic independence and died often in childbirth. It has survived the epochal changes that modern science and feminists have managed to achieve for women over the last several decades, and is now the framework on which the whole MAGA enterprise with respect to women lies.

The primary plank of the Trumpist anti feminist movement is the notion that a viable route – and perhaps the only viable route – to success as a woman is to have children and serve men who need assurance that we are nothing more than sexual playthings with no agency.

This is, of course, a lie – both that women could or should ever be reduced to that and that it’s any kind of path to real success. The sad childhood and adolescence, the slow physical decline, and now death by suicide of Virginia Giuffre – if it means anything, and it should – reminds us that the myth of the naturally pliant woman is evil and damaging. And it is absolutely at the core of MAGA politics with regard to women.

* Epstein is often called a pedophile, but in fact, the term for his particular affinity is ephebophile - a man attracted to mid to late adolescents, age 15 to 19.