Virginia Giuffre is dead. I have very little doubt that in the next couple of months we are going to hear awful things about how mentally ill she is and that her life has been spiraling out of control. I would not be surprised if we see both Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell use this incident and the fall out from it to make all kinds of claims about Giuffre’s character and accusations against them. This might just be the pessimist in me, but there is a reason why Harvey Weinstein is pushing to have his case retried now and why I think most wealthy perpetrators of sexual violence see this moment in time, with Donald Trump as president and a massive backlash against women’s rights and gender equality, as the time to reclaim their freedoms and clear their names. After all, the left is about at their wits end trying to hold on to the idea that courts have power outside of empowering and protecting the executive branch of the government. Democrats in the US have basically just become moderate Libertarians who are hoping to win back mainstream voters by waving around the constitution, as if anyone in history actually valued the ideals of democracy espoused in that document and not just the power they could claim in its name.
Trump and the patriarchal misogynists he has empowered will go on and on about how out of control the Me Too movement got in leveling accusations against innocent rich men to steal their money, while the reality is that women who have stepped up to call out their perpetrators have been bullied, harassed, doxed, and had their lives ruined while the perpetrators have risen to the highest levels of power and authority in society. Hopelessness and misplaced guilt seem like terrible, sad, and predictable consequences of how badly society has failed believe survivors, support them, and hold perpetrators accountable. But the sadness and anger I feel over learning of Giuffre’s death isn’t just about past crimes or battles. It makes it clear to me that people like Elon Musk, a known sexual predator is using his own social media platform to send unsolicited messages to women trying to manipulate them into having his children, offering obscene amounts of money and manipulation of the visibility of their social media platforms in exchange for signing NDAs and keeping quiet about this plot.
This really would sound like a supervillain plot, or a bad joke, except fairly rightwing media sources, like the Wall Street Journal have been reporting about it, and yet in the grand scheme of “how are these monsters abusing their power and authority to ruin the lives of others,” I think a lot of people who would/should care about this, are overwhelmed by other events, and perhaps feeling like standing up for right wing social media influencers that are also part of many other problems just isn’t something they can spare energy for. It is really hard to have to fight everything all at once, I am not pointing any blame fingers about this.
However, when people do start looking deeper into the idea of billionaires buying popular social media platforms and using them as a personal sex trafficking service to create a legion of new angry white men with women who might take decades to realize how fucked up Musk’s deranged fantasy of essentially Genghis Khan-ing himself into US right wing politics. In what will probably amount to just about as much incest as European Monarchies, I fully expect generations of Musk-spawn to grow up and dominate the Republican Party for decades to come. I fully recognize how much this sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, but Musk is actually pretty terrible at hiding his secrets and the closer he comes to success, the more he will feel compelled to brag about it. Maybe with groups like the WSJ starting to look into him, and some of the women he has tried to manipulate and coerce into his harem coming forward and sharing these details as they realize just how abusively and uncaringly he treats them, and they start to experience the hatred that the Right will always have for the women who their leaders use as sex toys, just for existing as evidence of their own hypocrisy and lies, well maybe the budding collapse of his economic empire and his reckless failure to bring efficiency to the government will peel back some of the social armor that has protected him from past accusations, and his whole imperial fantasy will crumble around him!
Or maybe we have to look at the fate of Virginia Giuffre and recognize that patriarchal misogyny is ready to levy an unimaginable amount of violence and threats of violence against anyone that tries to stand up and call out abuse from the powerful elites of society.