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Podcast Episode Summary: Prince Andrew - Could More Women Now Come Forward?
Podcast Details
- Title: The News Agents
- Hosts: Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, Lewis Goodall
- Description: A daily news podcast providing in-depth analysis of current events with a skeptical and humorous approach.
- Episode Release: Available every weekday afternoon.
- Website: [The News Agents](https://www.thenewsagents.co.uk/)
Episode Overview
- Episode Title: Prince Andrew - Could More Women Now Come Forward?
- Description: In this episode, Amy Wallace, co-author of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, discusses the implications of the memoir's release and the ongoing issues surrounding Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein's network of abuse.
Key Discussions
Introduction
- Amy Wallace discusses the potential for more women to come forward regarding Prince Andrew's actions on Epstein's island.
- Calls for Prince Andrew to "name names" of other abusers associated with Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre’s Memoir
- The memoir titled "Nobody's Girl" reveals details of Virginia's experiences with abuse.
- Wallace emphasizes the importance of the memoir in shedding light on the powerful pedophile network and the men involved who have yet to face justice.
Virginia's Background of Abuse
- Virginia’s abuse began with her father and continued with other powerful men, including Prince Andrew.
- The memoir candidly presents her struggles with trauma and her desire to help other survivors feel understood and validated.
Ghislaine Maxwell's Role
- Amy Wallace argues that Ghislaine Maxwell was an active participant in the abuse, not just an accomplice.
- The idea of clemency for Maxwell is deemed unacceptable due to her direct involvement in the sexual trafficking scheme.
Discussion on Legal Accountability
- Wallace calls for authorities to investigate and release evidence related to Epstein's network.
- She highlights the systemic failure of the justice system regarding victims of sexual abuse, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds.
Prince Andrew’s Alleged Misconduct
- Specific instances of Virginia's encounters with Prince Andrew are discussed.
- The twisted interactions, including his attempts to minimize the severity of the abuse and his awareness of her age, are recounted.
Implications of Virginia's Death
- Virginia Giuffre's tragic passing raises questions about the pursuit of justice for victims.
- Wallace reflects on the challenges of holding powerful individuals accountable, especially when victims are no longer able to testify.
The Role of Authorities
- The episode explores the dynamics between powerful individuals and law enforcement, emphasizing the need for transparency and justice.
- Wallace urges the release of Epstein’s files to uncover potential co-conspirators and provide a clearer path for accountability.
Key Takeaways
- Victims’ Voices: Virginia's story is essential for other survivors, highlighting the importance of speaking out against abuse.
- Systemic Issues: The episode underscores systemic failures in the justice system regarding survivors of sexual violence and the difficulty of seeking justice.
- Need for Action: The conversation emphasizes the necessity for authorities to act on evidence and hold powerful individuals accountable.
Conclusion The episode of *The News Agents* offers a powerful examination of Virginia Giuffre’s experiences and the broader implications of her story for other survivors. It calls for accountability, justice, and the importance of empowering victims to share their truth in the face of overwhelming power dynamics.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Amy Wallace:This is a Global Player original podcast. You are clear that there are at least eight other women now who could testify, if they chose to, that Andrew had been on that island having sex with underage girls. If they are still alive, they could do that. Could Prince Andrew's problems be about to get a whole lot worse? That is Amy Wallace. She's Virginia Dufresne's friend and co-author, telling me that there are women out there who could choose to do what Virginia Dufresne has done and corroborate her story, their story of abuse. Welcome to The News Agents.
0:50Emily Maitlis:The News Agents.
0:52Amy Wallace:On today's episode, we're going to hear some extraordinary details about that first meeting between Prince Andrew and Virginia Dufresne. We'll hear about the extent of Ghislaine Maxwell's sexual depravity and we're going to understand what Dufresne really thinks happened to Jeffrey Epstein on the night of his death. Yesterday, we took you inside her memoir, Nobody's Child. It's a book that's hard to put down. I read it about 10 days ago and I find myself going back to check things I found almost impossible to read the first time round. It is publicly available from today. and we have an extended conversation with Virginia Dufresne's co-author, Amy Wallace, about the cover-up of one of the most powerful paedophile networks that may ever have existed and the men yet to face consequences for their actions.
1:41Amy Wallace:In the book, Virginia Dufresne claims she was abused by her father, by her father's friend Forrest and, of course, by Prince Andrew. All three men have denied those claims.
2:01Amy Wallace:Amy, in another world, you wouldn't be sitting here today. Virginia would have been retelling her own story. She would have been doing this interview. She died last April. Tell us about the last contact you had with her. And was there ever a question over whether this book would be published?
2:22Emily Maitlis:Well, a few weeks before her death, she sent me an email, me and another member of our team, an email explicitly saying, in the case of my passing, I want this book published. That email is actually replicated in the preface that I wrote to the book to help readers understand what had happened between when we finished the book last October and when it was published. There were many events and we needed to help people understand. And people obviously had heard that she had passed away. So we knew that that was her desire. And basically the question was, how could the team of us get it in fighting shape?
3:04Emily Maitlis:It was already finished, but needed to bolster it, particularly without her there to talk about it herself. We just needed to be very careful. So there was just a series of meticulous things that we went through to get it done. But it was never a question of whether we wanted to or whether there was interest. We felt all the more that it was important that her legacy and her voice live on. And so we got it done.
3:35Amy Wallace:It must have been a shocking message to get that. I mean, did you think that you were about to lose Virginia then? Did you understand what was going through her head at that point if she was talking about her own death?
3:47Emily Maitlis:Well, there is some context that makes it a little less like ominous, although it was still sad, is that she had just been in a car accident. And she had posted an Instagram post that she meant to be private, but it went out to the world and everybody had written about it with a picture of herself very battered. And so the email to us was in relation to that post, which had said, I may only have a couple of days to live. I'm in kidney failure. That post had gone out. And so it was not just I got something out of the blue saying in the case of my passing, it was a relation to something that had already happened very publicly.
4:29Emily Maitlis:But, you know, she recounts in the book that sort of this feeling of worthlessness that trauma victims often feel was always something she had to fight against. And it was sort of a wolf at the door, you know, that she had tried to hurt herself in the past. And that's in the book. She was adamant that we include her ups and her downs, her highs and her lows, because she never wanted other trauma victims to feel any shame. she wanted them to not feel alone and so she wanted to say look i struggled too and so she was very principled about when some terrible things would happen or some setbacks in her life she was like that goes in the book that and you know i've written other collaborative books that is not often the way people react to things that are difficult in their lives they don't necessarily think well i need to put that out for the world to see but for virginia since her whole purpose in this book was to help other survivors of sexual abuse, not just Epstein and Maxwell survivors, but all survivors, make them feel less alone, make them feel seen and understood.
5:37Emily Maitlis:She was very adamant that we include all of those things.
5:40Amy Wallace:Many people will know Virginia as the outspoken warrior who took on Epstein, took on Ghislaine Maxwell, took on Prince Andrew. But you reveal here that her sexual abuse started much earlier at the hands of her own father than his best friend claims he denies. And I guess it explains why she says she became used to powerful men having sex with children and never feeling the repercussions.
6:06Emily Maitlis:Yeah, I think the important thing here is, you know, for so long, and you know this very well, the victims of Epstein and Maxwell were treated like bad girls, sluts, people who shouldn't be believed. And a really important point in this book is that victims of sexual trafficking are not born, they are made. And they are made by terrible experiences that they endure in their lives. By the time she meets Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago spa, which Donald Trump, our president, owns, she's 16 years old, and she's already been treated very badly and been betrayed very, very painfully by members of her own family, people who she trusted.
6:54Emily Maitlis:So a lot of the victims of Epstein and Maxwell who are known, and there are many who have not come forward publicly, which I completely understand that decision and respect it. But a lot of the ones who are known have said that they had other traumas in their past. And I think Epstein and Maxwell had a particular knack for sniffing out those girls they were more they were easier to manipulate
7:19Amy Wallace:and easier to hurt so the sexual abuse destroys the relationship that she has as a child with her father she also thinks her mom knows and one day at a campsite a few years after the abuse has begun when he's rude to her friend virginia loses it and in front of her aunts and uncles she she turns around and she exposes him she says this guy has been fucking me for years since i was a little kid and no one has done shit about it. And she thinks that that moment is going to change everything. And then she gets up the next morning and life just carries on and they offer her breakfast. I guess that's the first time, isn't it, that Virginia Giuffre issues a cry for help which goes completely ignored.
8:00Emily Maitlis:It goes completely ignored and she's also beaten very badly after she says that by her father. I mean, she's bloodied. Her mom was not around the campfire when that utterance was made. I've spoken to her mother. She was inside the camper, I think, taking care of some other children. So she didn't hear that, she told me. She only learned of Virginia's allegations about her father later when Virginia was already grown up, a mom herself. She told her mother about it. her mother absolutely told me that she believes Virginia's allegations against her father and her mother and her father are no longer together.
8:42Emily Maitlis:They are divorced. And it was a very painful conversation that I had with her mom just because there's so much sadness and regret there.
8:52Amy Wallace:And as you say, when she's 16, she starts work at Mar-a-Lago. She thinks it's going to change her life. And that is where she meets Maxwell and Epstein. And she describes them as less boyfriend and girlfriend, more two halves of the same wicked whole. For anyone wondering about the part that Maxwell played, for anyone wondering if she should be granted clemency now after her conversations with Todd Blanche at the DOJ, what would your response be to Maxwell's role?
9:22Emily Maitlis:Well, I think it's just sort of fascinating. This is a woman who's been convicted of hurting girls and also of being a key part of the sex trafficking scheme. And somehow the narrative, maybe partly her family has pushed it, she's pushed it, is that she was somehow just some sort of receptionist who kept track of the daybook about who was coming when. There is absolutely no question that she was an active procurer of girls. She procured Virginia and many others who have come forward. But make no mistake, this woman was just as much of a sexual abuser as Epstein himself. She was in the rooms. She was having sex with the girls.
10:07Emily Maitlis:She was saying to them, come over here and sexually service me. She was hurting the girls during sex when she was angry with them for whatever reason. using various heinous sex tools to hurt them during sex. So this is a person who abused girls. She is a sexual offender and she's convicted. With so many of these things, everybody is innocent until proven guilty. This person has been proven guilty. So the idea that she would be pardoned is unfathomable to me. I don't even know why it would be even considered. She's been moved into a minimum security prison from where she was before, which is clearly a quid pro quo in response to her giving an interview to Trump's former lawyer.
11:01Amy Wallace:What message would it send out, Amy, if she was released?
11:05Emily Maitlis:Rich people can hurt poor people and not pay the price. Misogyny is alive and well in this country and in the world. fetishization of young girls is okay. And none of those things are true. And frankly, that's why people are calling for the release of the Epstein files, because people are sick of it. We know that these women have come forward, not just Virginia, and they have talked to law enforcement. There's a scene in the book of Department of Justice people thanking them for coming forward in a private room. Please come forward more. We need more information. We know they have the information.
11:45Emily Maitlis:I know from Virginia exactly what she told them and the name she named. She didn't hold back. So all of those things are in the files. We don't need anyone to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, who, by the way, has never shown any indication of wanting to help any of these girls. She saw them as trash and she made that clear. She doesn't think of them as people or people who need to be stuck up for. And so the idea that someone's going into her prison cell and saying, we need your help, they don't need her help. She's convicted. She's a sexual abuser. The case is closed on her. What they need to do is look back into the very rigorous, as far as I understand, investigation that was done over many, many years.
12:33Emily Maitlis:and unless they've somehow lost track of where those files are, they exist and the information inside them is powerful.
12:42Amy Wallace:So just explain what you're calling for now. Is this the FBI? Is it Palm Beach Police? Is it the Department of Justice? You're saying that they are sitting on many names, I don't know, dozens of names that they could be chasing and they're not.
13:01Emily Maitlis:Well, I have no inside. I have no window into what they are or not doing. I'm talking about the Department of Justice, the Palm Beach. Remember, the Palm Beach investigation, which was very rigorous, and I've read the entire file, which is public and anyone can read it. Very rigorous. They found more than 30 victims, some of whom were 14, 15, 16, most of them underage. They interviewed them all. They interviewed their families. And in the end, Epstein gets this sweetheart deal, which they don't tell the victims about. They don't consult the victims. He's sent to prison. And I put quotes around that because he's allowed to leave during the day and go to an office where he abuses more teenagers during his sentence.
13:49Emily Maitlis:So a slap on the wrist is a cliche, but that's what he got.
13:53Amy Wallace:Why do you think that happened? Because he was very close to very powerful people. Like who?
14:04Emily Maitlis:I don't know that I can spell out the names, some of the names I cannot utter.
14:14Emily Maitlis:But there have been reports that I haven't independently verified that he somehow promised the government something that would be helpful in other areas? I don't know what that is. But again, let's remember, this is 2008. This is a time when, and I would argue we're still in a time like this to some degree, but it definitely was worse in 2008, when women were not believed. And certainly poor women, young women were not believed. They were described as drug addicts, whores. They were described as liars and their class was used against them. They were not trustworthy. They were poor. They would do anything for money.
14:58Emily Maitlis:They were bad girls who just loved the lifestyle. They loved being on the jet. There was this whole campaign to cast them as unbelievable or to be disbelieved. And so in this period, you know, the old boys club worked. It stuck together, closed ranks and took care of him. So now we have subsequent investigations. The Department of Justice obviously went after Gillen and got her and convicted her and she's tried to appeal and it hasn't worked. But in the meantime, there were attempts to investigate Epstein, which is why he was picked up at Teterboro Airport and ultimately jailed and ultimately killed himself.
15:38Emily Maitlis:There were investigators who were working on that case. Those files exist. You paused before you said killed himself.
15:46Amy Wallace:Do you think that that was a question mark that Virginia Dufresne had? You talk about the powerful men and the ring of men that covered up for him.
15:56Emily Maitlis:Yeah, I noticed myself pause. In the book, Virginia kind of argues both ways. She says that she absolutely can understand why he would have killed himself in the sense that this is a man who had all these sort of pseudoscientific self-justifications for why he had to rape girls repeatedly throughout the day. And he had, you know, I need to have sex three times a day and I have to, he was very, very, very arrogant and he loved his ego to be stroked and to act as if he was so powerful. And so obviously being in jail, you don't get any of those things. It's a very humbling experience. And so she could imagine that it was awful and that he might want to end his life.
16:39Emily Maitlis:On the other hand, she also knew because she'd seen the videotaping equipment and the monitors in his homes, and he had said things to her that indicated that the whole goal of that taping system was to entice powerful men into the house, serve them up underage girls against their will, and videotape those things. Again, those tapes theoretically are in the Epstein files. So in that sense, she understood there were a lot of powerful people who might have an incentive to have him killed. So I don't know one way or another. I know that it's been officially ruled by authorities, law enforcement authorities, that it was a suicide.
17:24Emily Maitlis:I don't have any independent knowledge that I can use to interrogate that. Virginia could see it both ways.
17:32Amy Wallace:Let's go back to her story, because one of the things she says is that of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive. Will you just talk to us about that? Because I guess people still look in on this and say, why didn't she just leave? You will understand why not. Just try and share that with us.
17:53Emily Maitlis:Yeah, I think that one of the reasons that it was important that we include, and Virginia insisted on this, although it was difficult for her, that we include her earliest abuse is that she learned she was living in a world where she was going to be mistreated one way or another. And she kind of had to make the best of it. That was where she was coming from when she meets Epstein and Maxwell. But the complicity you're describing is the procuring. So remember, this is a pyramid scheme. So what they would do is they would bring in a girl. They would pay her$200 after they had abused her. She would think she was going in to give a massage, and then they would sexually abuse her.
18:40Emily Maitlis:Sometimes Ghislaine was in the room. Sometimes she wasn't. If she was in the room, she was participating in the abuse. Make no mistake. So the next time they call her, they say to this girl, and many people have testified about this, well, if you don't want to come, bring a friend, and we'll pay you$300 if you do that. And that teenager is thinking, well, I didn't like what ended up happening that first time. Maybe be better if I brought a friend. Virginia herself procured, and she writes about it in the book. Now, she didn't have much of a choice at that point, but that's no excuse, and she doesn't make an excuse for it.
19:24Emily Maitlis:She says it's the worst thing she's ever done in her life. But the pressure was always there to bring in more for him. So then you become part of it. You're no longer just a victim. You too are part of the scheme. And you two are vulnerable to being prosecuted if it was ever discovered. And you're still a child or a young teenager, but now you're part of it. And that was a key part of them keeping the women who were in the sort of tight circle complicit and quiet.
Read the full transcript
19:59Amy Wallace:We'll be back with Amy Wallace, looking at the Royals' fortunes now and what she thinks could be about to happen.
20:10Amy Wallace:News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff. Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app.
20:32Emily Maitlis:LBC. Leading Britain's conversation.
20:41Amy Wallace:I want to take you to her trip to London. This is the first time that she'll meet Prince Andrew in the Belgravia house that belonged to Glenn Maxwell. And he asks her age, or he's made to guess her age, he talks about his own daughters.
20:58Emily Maitlis:Yes, it's a game that Glenn liked to play, where she would say, guess how old she is. And she says that to Prince Andrew, who is a dear friend of hers, and he guesses correctly that she's 17. And he then adds, I have daughters around your age. I think he says a little younger than you, explaining why he can actually read correctly her age. So it's an important moment because I think if we could line up all the men that Virginia was trafficked to and make them answer questions, a lot of them would say, well, I didn't know what age she was. In this case, we know he knew because he guessed and he was right.
21:42Emily Maitlis:And he even makes the connection to his own daughters, which shows something pretty twisted about, I guess my daughters are royals, so they shouldn't be raped, but you can be raped by me. Like, I don't know exactly what the mental jujitsu is there where he's still about to go take her upstairs and have sex with her. But as she writes in the book, you know, it was as if it was his birthright, you know, that there was a sense of entitlement. He was fairly polite about the sexual encounter. And I say that within the context of there were people she was trafficked to who were incredibly brutal to her.
22:26Emily Maitlis:But he was not a brutal person. He was just taking what he wanted at the time. Her feelings be damned.
22:37Amy Wallace:And Maxwell has said jokingly at that time, oh, it's almost time that we trade Turin, as if to say that 17 is now the higher end of what would be desirable.
22:48Emily Maitlis:Absolutely. She said that to Virginia all the time. We need to marry you off. We need to marry you off to one of Epstein's friends because you're getting too old for this. And this relates also to the earlier point of complicity and procuring. There were women at that point, women who were no longer teenagers, who were in the inner circle, who, and we describe this in the book, had been girls who Epstein and Maxwell abused, but they had aged out. And so now their full-time job was procuring. They were not having sex anymore because they were in their early 20s and they were old. So there was a model.
23:28Emily Maitlis:It wasn't a hypothetical scenario. You could look over here and see, well, this woman who I have breakfast with every morning, she procures full-time. And I don't want to do that. I mean, Virginia's very clear that she wasn't particularly good at it. Again, not an excuse, but she was so conflicted as she did it that she wasn't a very persuasive procurer. And it made her feel awful. And so she didn't want to do it at all. And she was realizing if she stayed in this world, that was her future, was that was going to be her full-time job.
24:03Amy Wallace:We also know from this memoir now that there was a time when Prince Andrew re-met Virginia Dufresne on Little St. James Island, Epstein's Island, and had sex with her and eight other girls and Epstein as well. Clearly, I'm not asking you to name the women, but do you know who they are? Is there a chance that they will want to come forward now this has all been made public? Are they talking to you?
24:35Emily Maitlis:The eight other women are a mystery. So to be just direct about my answer, I do not know who they are. The key thing about them was that they were very young and they didn't speak English. Her impression was that they were from perhaps some Eastern European country. And she was told that they had been procured by Jean-Luc Brunel, who was the French agent who had discovered some big name models, but also was one of Epstein's closest associates, was one of the people who procured girls for him around the world. At one point, Virginia was told he sent triplets, I believe, who were 12 years old from France, and then he abused them, and then they were flown back to France.
25:21Emily Maitlis:This is an evil dude. And the other key thing in that scene is that Epstein and Prince Andrew joke that these girls who don't speak English are the best kind of girls because you don't have to talk to them. So she didn't know who they were. She couldn't communicate with them because she didn't speak their language and they didn't speak hers.
25:44Amy Wallace:But just to stand back from that, you are clear that there are at least eight other women now who could testify, if they chose to, that Andrew had been on that island having sex with underage girls.
26:01Emily Maitlis:If they are still alive, they could do that. When Virginia Dufresne finally sues Prince Andrew,
26:10Amy Wallace:it's just short of her 38th birthday, and it's under the Child Victims Act in New York State, she says that in her claim she alleged that Prince Andrew had raped and battered her when she was a minor, causing her severe and lasting damage. It's a very chilling phrase that. Will you just explain to us what that means, raped and battered? My sense of that phrase, it's a sort of term of art.
26:36Emily Maitlis:I think that battery, and I'm not a lawyer, but that includes sort of mental anguish.
26:42Amy Wallace:So it doesn't mean physical assault?
26:44Emily Maitlis:I have no knowledge that he hit her in any way or hurt her physically, other than the hurt of being raped. There were three incidences. One, you know, in London, the first time she meets him thinking she's meeting a charming prince, then told to service him. Then there's another time in New York at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. And then the orgy scene you described, which is on the private island.
27:12Amy Wallace:And when she is finally suing him, there is this description in the book of a game of hide and seek with the authorities. He runs off to Balmoral. He tries to bar himself behind the palace gates. He doesn't want to come forward. What is your sense now of the correct actions that Prince Andrew should be taking? Would you like to see him stand trial?
27:33Emily Maitlis:Well, that's going to be up to the authorities. And again, I think the challenge here is that often in a court of law, you need to have an accuser and she is no longer alive. We have her account. We have those who she told about it. I don't know all the intricacies of that.
27:51Amy Wallace:So do you think that his life has been made easier by her death?
27:55Emily Maitlis:Well, I don't think it's easy right now. And I think that's entirely appropriate. I would say maybe in the minutes after she died, it was made easier. But then, whoops, she left a book behind. And I guess here's what I would say about Prince Andrew. There was a time that he asserted that he was willing to help U.S. authorities in the investigation of Epstein. And he stated that through his lawyers more than once, and it never materialized. What I would say about Prince Andrew today is that I know he continues to deny, even though he settled with her for a great sum of money, that he didn't do anything wrong.
28:47Emily Maitlis:Fine, let's leave that there for the moment. But he was on the island. He was in the Manhattan townhouse. He was on the jets. And remember, those jets aren't just jets with seats like we all live in when we travel. They're jets that are retrofitted with bedrooms so that you can traffic girls there. So he saw inside the world of Epstein and Maxwell. And if he really means it when he says, as he did in his settlement with Virginia, that he feels it's awful what these girls endured, it's a travesty, then he could come forward right now. He could say, I'm not going to talk about me or what I did or didn't do because I didn't do it.
29:37Emily Maitlis:But I do want to validate the experience of those women. I do want to say what I saw because I was there a lot. And I saw they aren't lying. They tell the truth. I saw the coterie of girls. I saw the men who came in. He could name names. You think you should name the names that were complicit in Epstein's crimes? I am not holding my breath that that is going to happen. But I'm just reminding people that that is an option. And if he sort of took the measure of his own moral compass and felt as strongly as he says he does, as the father of daughters, as a person who theoretically cares about other people, there are things he could still do.
30:25Emily Maitlis:Is it possible that he didn't see anyone else, that he didn't notice any other man? I wasn't alongside him in those homes, but I know from Virginia and from reading the accounts of other victims, it was like a parade of people were constantly going through. There were dinner parties. There were cocktail parties. There were all kinds of events that these girls were basically the little garnish that was sitting on the side table as actual people spoke to each other. And so the four-day visit that you interviewed him about in your amazing BBC Newsnight interview, where he says, I went there to tell him the friendship was over.
31:10Emily Maitlis:And he stayed in his house in order to do that. And he'd stayed there for four days. There were parties that went on then. And we know some of the names of the people of those parties because it was reported at the time. So he absolutely saw.
31:26Amy Wallace:Do you think he ever had that conversation with Epstein that he told me about where he alleges he broke off the friendship?
31:32Emily Maitlis:Do you think he ever did that? Well, emails are coming forward, it seems, every other day this past week that indicate that he was not, that friendship had not ended. I mean, the emails are pretty damning. We're in this together? Does that sound like something you'd say to someone you'd already told you didn't want to be friends with anymore? I mean, again, I don't have any, you know, any more access to those than you do, but I'm reading them in the press. Clearly, things he said to you, there are more than one thing that have been proven to be a lie. And so who knows? I don't know the extent that we'll find more of those things being lies.
32:11Emily Maitlis:But he wasn't forthcoming with you as much as we had hoped.
32:14Amy Wallace:Do you think we'll ever see more of those complicit in Epstein's actions brought to justice? I mean, do you think there is an appetite, not just amongst the global public, but actually amongst those who can make a difference to bring these people to justice?
32:32Emily Maitlis:I wish I thought that that was true. I mean, in the United States, we've watched numerous career prosecutors, people who live lives of service working for the Department of Justice, making far less money, frankly, than they could if they worked in private practice. One by one, those people are being forced out of our Department of Justice at the moment. And people who are replacing them are people who are being directed to prosecute where the administration wants them to prosecute. So I don't know the inside of either President Trump's mind or his administration's plans. But again, I think this is why the Epstein files and the release of them becomes such a pivotal issue.
33:17Emily Maitlis:I mean, normally, investigative files are not released to the public. I understand that. But in the absence of action, in the absence of any indication that they're going to try to make this right, people are like, well, then we want to see for ourselves. You're calling this a Democratic hoax? It's not a hoax. This happened to these women and girls. So the game is kind of getting complicated here because Trump campaigned on releasing the files. I'm not sure why he did it, if he wasn't planning to actually do so, but he did that. And now people are like, well, you made a promise, make good on it.
33:55Emily Maitlis:And I think that the files relate to whether any prosecutions could go forward. And I just don't know the full extent of what's in them.
34:04Amy Wallace:I mean, we've seen the birthday book in the last few months, this kind of collated book that Glenn Maxwell put together, contributions from 150 people in there saying how close they were to Epstein, how much they loved him. There are these seedy pedo pictures in there. Does that change anything? Does that bring us any closer to knowing what questions to ask or who to ask?
34:28Emily Maitlis:Well, I think it does just show what I think we've all been piecing together for years is that prominent people who you might think were upstanding people making jokes about having young women around, you know, how young they were, hand drawings of women's breasts. It's like it opens this window. Is this how these people actually talk to each other when we aren't looking? And apparently, yes, it is. and that his influence, that his power, or at least the power he indicated to people that he had, he was a huge braggart, was working and that people wanted to stay in his circle.
35:09Amy Wallace:And do you include President Trump in that or do you believe him when he tells us that it's not his signature and it wasn't his drawing?
35:15Emily Maitlis:Well, you know, I think journalists, the New York Times has done an analysis of how many times he signed his name with that same signature. So we're getting into kind of a weird land where people say this isn't true and it's like obviously patently true. So I don't need to take on President Trump personally and I'm not privy to any, I don't have a copy of the birthday book. I mean, I guess the other thing that I really want to say about Virginia's book is that obviously a lot of the worst things that you went through are getting a lot of attention right now, and for good reason. But the book is not just a catalog of horrors.
36:02Emily Maitlis:It is an attempt to show you what it feels like to be brought into the world of these powerful people as a teenager, and then to find a way, sort of amazingly to escape and then to become a mom and then to become an advocate. And we all know that her life ended tragically, but I would hate for the takeaway there to be, it's just too scary to come forward. Don't come forward. I'm hoping that they're actually, even with the sad end of her life, that there is inspiration in this book, which is there are people still in this world who will stand up for the rest of us. And Virginia was one of them.
36:46Emily Maitlis:She was a galvanizer. She was a hero. And there is uplift here in the sense that she's an icon for us all to aspire to be more like.
36:57Amy Wallace:I mean, it's so interesting you say that because at the end of the book, we see her looking at a family photo that suggests she could have taken another path, a path to self-healing and sort of self-care, I guess, rather than trying to find retribution or trying to find justice. she called herself a warrior you know the mom who fought bad guys but it killed her I mean I wonder whether she ever admitted to you privately that she she wished she had taken the other path that she wished she'd just never come forward you know never actually fought that that fight
37:33Emily Maitlis:she no she never did say that to me and in fact I think that she had looked at it differently And she said this to me several times. She felt like she had experienced such awfulness and she wanted to turn it into something good. And if she could turn it into something good, that would make it less awful for her.
37:56Amy Wallace:Yeah, yeah. And at the end of the book, she tells us how I think you both sat down to watch a very royal scandal, the three part drama that we did about the Prince Andrew interview. And the bit that chimed with her was where the actor Ruth Wilson was saying, why is it always incumbent on the victims to repeat their stories again and again? I wanted to remember how it felt to be interviewed about something that wasn't my fault. Like what happened to Epstein's victims wasn't their fault. Yet they still had to be witnessed. They still had to, you know, parade their pain in the hope of even the slightest justice.
38:38Amy Wallace:And yeah, I'm not saying what happened to me was even, you know, remotely similar. Of course it wasn't, but just the parading, the endless bloody talking about it to get anyone to take it seriously. Do you remember that?
38:51Emily Maitlis:Yeah.
38:53Amy Wallace:And that's true of every woman who ever complained about any kind of harassment. Always uphill, always against the tide, always a battle against the unspoken. You know, the look in their eye that says, you know, really? Did he really? It really moved me to read that. and I wonder whether you think that also contributed to her pain after the abuse, after the physical pain, just having to prove yourself again and again. Was that what drove her, do you think, to take her own life?
39:30Emily Maitlis:Well, obviously I can't speculate another person can't be inside anyone. I was very close to her, but I can't tell you exactly what made her take her own life. but yes there was an irony that we discussed between the two of us that she was trying to take back her own story her own narrative tell it in full warts and all honest accurate and that ironically the idea was that for the first time she would be able to stop talking about the past we would put it between the covers of a book it would be on a bookshelf and from that point forward she could say to anyone who asked, read my book. I so respect your need to know about it.
40:14Emily Maitlis:I've been very careful. Read that best version right there. And I'm going to talk about the present for me. I'm going to talk about my future. I want to talk about protecting all of our children. I want to spend more time with my children. She had this idea that if we could get to the pub date, which is today, she could then start a part of her life that would be very different from the entire time between 2011 when she came forward and today, she's had to repeat, as do all victims. It was incredibly painful for them and for her to constantly be demanded to repeat this. And ironically, basically in writing the book, she had to do it one more time, but it was with the goal of never having to do it again.
40:58Amy Wallace:You did say that it would be a victory for her to see the response that this has had and to see that Prince Andrew has now lost his dukedom, his title. Would you like to see his title of prince removed?
41:17Emily Maitlis:I guess I'm less hung up on the titles. I think that, and technically he is a prince. He is the son of the queen. I understand that. I think what's important is that we're watching a man have his life diminished because of his past experience. And that is just. It should be diminished. And even if I think in the United States, you know, Duke of York titles, people are like, isn't that just a weird gesture? Like, who cares? But it's important because it's a step in the right direction. it shows that somebody said to him, we won't know exactly whom, there are theories, enough is enough. Like, you did these things, you need to step away.
42:10Emily Maitlis:And that's appropriate. And it's been a long time coming. My hope, I guess, is that we see more of that happening, not just with Prince Andrew, but with others. And again, we're only going to know if that's going to be able to happen once the Epstein files are released. But she would feel this was a victory. And it's to her great credit that she came forward and that she wrote a powerful book that helped drive public sentiment and even royal family sentiment, it appears, to say, this is not okay. And we are done. Like, step back, you still get to live in a fancy house, but don't be out here anymore.
42:53Emily Maitlis:Don't come to Christmas. Like that's going to be a lonely life he leads and he deserves it. Amy Wallace, thank you so much.
43:02Amy Wallace:You're welcome. Thank you.
43:13Amy Wallace:The News Agents. Well, as we said at the beginning, the memoir is called Nobody's Girl, But the subheading is a memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye for now.
From the publisher
Amy Wallace, the co author of Virginia Giuffre‘ s memoir - which is published today - has told Emily it’s possible more women will now come forward to reveal what they know about Prince Andrew’s actions on Epstein’s island. She calls on Andrew to “name names” of other abusers around Epstein. And she speaks for the first time about what Virginia believed happened on the night Epstein died.
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