Virginia Giuffre Carried the Story No One Wanted to Tell
Virginia Giuffre forced the world to confront the truth about Epstein and changed how I report on power, survivors, and silence.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
I just returned from the memorial for my friend, Virginia Giuffre.
Covering Jeffrey Epstein changed my career, but knowing Virginia changed me.
Before I started reporting Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, I had this growing feeling that something about the way the story was being told was wrong. It had become a story about powerful men, about sex, about systems, about wealth but somewhere along the way, it was losing the people at the center of it.
The survivors.
Around that time, I had stepped away from my job as a White House correspondent for ABC News, without a clear plan just a sense that I needed to do something different. I went out to Joshua Tree National Park and remember looking up at the sky and asking what I was supposed to do next and how to do it in a way that actually mattered.
Not long after, I got a call asking if I wanted to host and report a podcast on Epstein. I said yes but only if it was rooted in the stories of the survivors. Not as supporting characters. As the story itself.
That decision is what led me to Virginia.
She refused to be ignored. She refused to let people look away. And she told the truth even when it cost her, because it did cost her.
I saw, up close, how heavy that truth was when we traveled around the country trying to find people who would corroborate her horrific story of abuse. The delays. The disbelief. The relentless efforts to discredit her. The doors that opened just enough to shut again. There was a constant tension between what she knew and what the world was willing to acknowledge.
And still, she had light.
When things got overwhelming, she would blast “Let It Go” in the car and sing it on the top of her lungs with me. It was her way of pushing back against everything that tried to define her by what had been done to her.
Somewhere along the way, she stopped being a source and became a friend. I trusted her. I confided in her. And even with everything she was carrying, she still showed up for the people around her, including me.
She was one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. Not just because of what she endured, but because of what she chose to do afterward: to speak, to insist, to keep going when it would have been easier not to.
I wish I could have done more for her the last time we spoke.
At her memorial, what stayed with me wasn’t just the loss, it was the scale of what she set in motion. Her story didn’t end. It expanded. It lives on in the people she helped empower, in the voices she made harder to ignore.
Virginia used to say that one day the burden of telling these stories wouldn’t fall so heavily on survivors, that it would shift back to where it belongs.
It’s been a year since her death, and she’s been immortalized in ways she might never have imagined. That day isn’t here yet. But because of her, it feels closer.
She was a light. And she still is.
Thank you, Tara. Well said.
😢