It began as I finished Nobody’s Girl, the torturous and devastating account of Virginia Giuffre’s life. It was what I can only describe as a kind of corporeal attack, an existential clutch followed by days of such powerful anxiety my body was taken in bouts of uncontrollable shaking. A sense of not mattering, a virulent dread and dissolving into an all-encompassing nothingness impossible to shake. How many times as a child, after being abused by my father, had I experienced this sense of erasure and disappearance?
Feeling that no matter what I did, what I accomplished, how hard I tried to lift my head above the parapet I would be cast out forever. This attack lasted days. Perhaps it was Virginia’s story, parts of which felt much like my own. Raped as a child by her father, then raped by her father’s good friend, then raped when she ran away, then the years of being raped by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, then being sexually trafficked to powerful and sadistic men to be raped again.
Perhaps it was knowing that after years of working, educating the public about the impact of sexual abuse, the world refused to understand the depth of its consequences. That once you are raped, once your body is taken against your will, once you are invaded and dominated your body ceases to be your own. You become a thing, what Virginia called a toy, to be used and abused and tossed and discarded.
Then the press, repeating infuriating, ignorant questions and notions: “Why didn’t she leave? No one was forcing her to stay. She could have walked away at any time. She was 16. She wasn’t eight. She clearly stayed for the money.” Still not understanding or perhaps refusing to understand that once you have been raped, self-love and self-agency or even the belief that you and your body are worth saving, have been decimated. That because you were forced to separate from your own body at the moment of invasion, you have essentially become a dehumanized object no longer worthy of protection. You are lost, a walking ghost in a permanent fog with no real ability to fight for yourself.
And once you have been raped you have an aura, a stamp of brokenness that until you have begun to heal, constantly attracts more abusers who can smell your vulnerability and do their best to exploit it. It is clear in all the reports coming out that Epstein and Maxwell conducted interviews with each young woman to assess the degree of this brokenness and exploitability. Or maybe the attack was brought on by living in America, a country currently led by a president, an adjudicated rapist, a man who openly hates women, living in a zone caught in a childhood sexual abuse seizure.
Months, even years of survivors bravely telling their stories, pressing charges, in hopes of getting accountability and justice and instead being gaslit, degraded, threatened and disbelieved. A zone devoted for years to protecting an international ring of the powerful men, all of them either rapists or pedophiles or willing to associate with them without concern or outrage.
The attack on my body was still shocking. Here, at 72, some 66 years after my own abuse, after years of work attempting to heal through every kind of therapy trying to transform my being from a colonized entity, an invaded landscape, a field of rubble. All those years of dedicated work and still this rape lives in my cells, lived in the cells of Virginia, in the collective cells of millions, actually a billion women survivors who attempt to live every day, struggling their way out of darkness.
We have names for it, sure – PTSD, recurring trauma or some diagnosis that often renders survivors insane. But the truth is survivors can read the room. They can surmise from the lack of care, accountability and justice that their anxiety is based in reality, a landscape where not only is there no safety or protection but where underground rings of sex trafficking emerge each day.
So let me try for the millionth time to explain. Maybe you will open your hearts. Maybe you will dig deep into yourself to try to have empathy and understanding, Rape is betrayal, invasion and theft. It murders the life force of the victim. Like plutonium it lodges itself forever in the chemistry of the body. It robs us of sleep, trust, our ability to be intimate. It destroys self-esteem. It distorts our desire.
For almost 60 years I have tried to understand what pleasure, what satisfaction any man or woman could take in ripping apart a child or a woman’s body against her will.
Where does such hate come from, such disregard? There are many theories – men’s rage at their mothers for their dependency, the jealous need to destroy life force, innocence and beauty, the simple unchecked trajectory of men’s need for conquest and dominance.
Whatever the causes, what matters now is how we stop this rampant insane abuse. Sex trafficking is a $200bn international industry. We are living in a world, as Manon Garcia describes in her new masterpiece about the Pelicot trials, Living with Men, constructed by “a scaffolding of rape”.
Virginia says near the end of her book:
“I’m learning to accept that sometimes I will simply not be okay. That is the process of serious trauma. It lays you low and sometimes makes you your own worst enemy. My goal is to prevent the emotional time bomb that lives inside me – my toxic memories and devastating visualizations of myself being hurt – from every detonating again.” Tragically the last explosion took her life.
But there is another timebomb about to explode and it will if there is no accountability or justice for the Epstein victims. This time it will be directed outward. It will be the alchemized rage of millions of survivors, who have had enough, who cannot and will not live a day longer with this torturous injustice.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
