Virginia Giuffre is Gone. We’re Still Knocking on Doors for Her.
She spent her life asking people to look at her. Now the survivors are asking the senators who can stop Todd Blanche. I'm counting how many say no.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
Dani Bensky cornered Thom Tillis in a hallway in a Senate office building, which is where you have to go to reach people with pins on their lapels nowadays.
Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, is one of two deciding votes on confirming Todd Blanche — President Trump’s former personal defense lawyer — as Attorney General. Bensky, who was sexually abused as a teenager by Jeffrey Epstein, asked him for a meeting. He said yes. He said it while pressing the elevator button, while explaining that he had to run, that Chuck Grassley was waiting.
I’ve seen that scene before. It was 2020.
Virginia Giuffre died last year. I have been thinking about that all week, because the thing she started is still going on without her.
In 2020, I was making a podcast called Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, which is how I ended up in a car with two of his survivors, Virginia Giuffre and Marijke Chartouni, knocking on strangers’ doors.
Understand what 2020 was. Epstein had just died. Ghislaine Maxwell had not been arrested — she was in hiding, and few people knew where. Almost nobody was demanding the files. There were no votes to count, no political side to take.
There was just Virginia knocking on doors, asking people to say out loud what they had seen.
We were looking for anyone who could corroborate what had been done to her as a teenager, by men whose names you now know. We needed the witnesses — the chef, the pilot, the houseman. One of them talked, briefly, in a way that shielded him from liability. Most looked away.
At one house, a woman who had been in her thirties while Epstein was abusing Virginia refused to come to the door. She put her head out of an upstairs window and yelled at Virginia to get off her property. Virginia yelled back: It’s Virginia Roberts. The window slammed. She called security, and we were escorted out of the gated community.
“Grown men and women, ducking for cover from a victim of abuse.”
That is what it looked like six years ago. Now it looks like a senator hitting an elevator button.
I understand why the survivors keep doing it. The forward motion, the confrontation, the I exist moment — it gives them somewhere to stand in a scandal everyone wants to be over, in which they are treated as peripheral to a crime committed against them. Looking someone in the eye and being acknowledged is half healing and half re-traumatizing. And at the same time these people look away, keep moving.
Marijke was in that car in 2020. She is in the Senate hallways this week. She told me this morning about Bensky asking Senator John Fetterman for a meeting.
The Pennsylvania Democrat threw his hands in the air: “I’m not in the files.”
“She said ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re in the files or not,’” Marijke recalled. Fetterman stepped away, as if he had no power.
Why do these people believe there is nothing they can do? They are United States senators. There is almost nothing they can’t do.
Eight survivors, along with Virginia’s brother Sky and sister-in-law Amanda Roberts, are in Washington asking to meet the Judiciary Committee members who could stop Blanche from reaching the Senate floor for a confirmation vote. They have specifically requested meetings with John Cornyn and Tillis — two retiring Republicans who have nothing to lose and have already crossed Trump by slowing this down. They met with Cornyn’s staff. Neither senator has granted them a one-on-one meeting. Both offices were contacted for this piece.
They are doing exactly what she did. Show up where you are not wanted. Ask to be heard. Get told to come back later. Come back anyway.
It reminds me of Adam Perry Lang.
Perry Lang was Epstein’s longtime chef. Virginia actually had fond memories of him feeding her pizza when Epstein controlled her diet. So we went to his West Hollywood restaurant to speak to him — Jon Hamm and Joel McHale were having dinner inside. She left a letter asking him to sit for a deposition, to describe the abuse he witnessed. Asking him to be a hero. She left voicemails. We went to his home in Manhattan Beach. We went to his best friend Jimmy Kimmel’s house. Eventually he left a message saying he would be happy to sit. Then his lawyers took over, and she never heard from him again.
It feels like 2020 all over again. Only now it’s politicians.
Thursday morning in Washington, Marijke and I caught up and she was defeated. Why are we here, she said. Nobody cares.
We had been there before, when the doors kept closing and the phones kept clicking. It was impossible not to be angry at the people who looked away. They felt like enablers.
But here is what I have thought about since.
Nobody looked away in 2020 because of politics. There was no politics. They looked away because it was easier, and because there was no cost to it.
What has changed in six years is not that people started caring. It is that the most powerful man in the world wants this scandal gone. Fighting for the survivors became a position you can be sorted into — and once a thing is a position, looking away stops being cowardice and becomes a stance. It gets a constituency. It gets defended.
Which is how you get Tillis rubber-stamping it. He posted on X that Blanche had done something no attorney general before him had done — met with the survivors. That meeting was a precondition for his vote to advance the nomination out of committee.
According to my reporting from inside that room, Blanche was dismissive. He told them it was not his problem that the FBI had dropped the ball. He suggested they start over and sit for depositions again. And he was combative.
That is what got celebrated. Not the meeting the survivors wanted. The photograph of it.
They left that room more certain than when they went in that he cannot be confirmed.
The nomination has stalled. Tillis and Cornyn both have grievances with this president, but what they say they care about is the $1.8 billion slush fund, the IRS settlement for Trump and his children, the charges dropped. It isn’t about Epstein. Both are also on their way out, and men building a legacy want things. Withholding a vote is how you get them.
So no, the delay is not a moral stand.
And it may not stay a delay. Trump threatened to pull the nomination altogether — keeping Blanche in place as acting attorney general and sending him back for confirmation in the next Congress, rather than risk the settlement now.
Think about what that would mean. Rather than give up the assurance that he and his children are shielded, the president would leave his own former defense lawyer running the Justice Department without ever being confirmed — and bet that a Congress arriving with the headwinds against his party will be friendlier to Blanche than this one.
That is not a strong hand. That is a man running out of ways to win the vote in front of him.
But I told Marijke something I believe. Attorneys general get confirmed. That is the ordinary outcome. It is not happening on schedule, and the pressure she and the others have applied is part of why. In politics momentum is everything, and a month is a long time in Trump world.
It had me thinking about Juan Alessi.
Alessi was Epstein’s houseman. In February 2020 we knocked on his door in Florida and he answered. What he gave us was not much. But while we sat on his couch, the FBI called him — and he told us he had not heard from them since July 2019.
A reporter and a survivor in a car reached a key witness in the Maxwell prosecution at roughly the same moment the federal government did. He testified. She went to prison.
One door out of dozens. That was enough.
On Wednesday the House Oversight Committee released the transcript of its closed-door interview with Kathy Ruemmler, the former Obama White House counsel who went on to be Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer. She had also become a confidant of Epstein’s, advising him on how to attack Virginia’s credibility ahead of her ABC News interview that never happened.
Asked about Virginia’s account, Ruemmler said it “lacked inherent credibility.” Asked directly whether she believed Virginia was a victim of Epstein and Maxwell, she said she didn’t know.
Her reasoning is the part I can’t get past.
“Typically, when someone says, ‘I was sex trafficked to someone,’ they say who, when, where, not multiple world leaders, multiple foreign presidents.”
The men Virginia named were too powerful. That is what made her less believable.
That is not a legal standard. It is the reason nobody opened the door in 2020, said out loud by a former federal prosecutor, on the record, to Congress.
And it was said about a woman who cannot answer it.
A representative for Ruemmler said she was not broadly dismissing Virginia’s allegations, but responding to specific claims that had not been substantiated. Andrew has consistently denied the allegations. Virginia’s family called Ruemmler’s remarks reprehensible.
Which is what makes the next part so hard to watch.
Oliver Darcy is reporting that CBS’s Trump friendly editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is screen-testing correspondents to interview Ghislaine Maxwell. She runs a newsroom full of people who could do that interview properly. I don’t expect the person she picks to be one of them. Weiss has told The Hollywood Reporter that Maxwell is a dream interview, alongside Xi Jinping, John Roberts and Mojtaba Khamenei. “They have been testing for a mock interview with someone like her,” a person familiar with the process told me. This person said they have yet to secure the interview.
Maxwell has already had her turn at the microphone with a softball interview. She was just finding masseuses for her boyfriend. Trump was a gentleman. And we know now, from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman’s Regime Change, that the administration weighed offering her a pardon in exchange for that interview.
So she gets another one. Another chance to be humanized in prime time.
People forget what Maxwell was good at. She was a genius at making the abnormal feel normal. She talked about sex openly, casually, in front of people — that was her thing. It made some of them uncomfortable, and that was the point. She was not only grooming girls. She was grooming the adults in the room into believing the whole arrangement was ordinary. The bacchanal as a dinner party.
Now she would have the country in the room.
And this lands on a week when Megyn Kelly said Anthony Fauci “hurt a lot more people than Epstein did. A lot more, amazingly.”
That is the thing I keep coming back to. The normalization of Epstein is not a risk. It is happening, in public, on a schedule.
And the way it works is simple.
Ghislaine Maxwell is booked. Dani Bensky gets an elevator door.
I have been watching people close doors on this story for six years — back when there was nothing to be gained by opening one and nothing to be lost by not. The only difference now is that they have reasons.
The only way any of it holds is if the survivors stay quiet.
Virginia knocked on doors for years and most of them never opened. She died before the files came out. And this week eight people who did not have to be in Washington were in Washington, standing outside offices that will not let them in, saying the same things she said, to men who cannot look at them.
She is gone. The knocking isn’t.
The trauma Virginia had to suffer is inconceivable. The stress she endured was unimaginable. Take note of all those who vote for confirming Blanche. This has nothing to with politics, but justice to be served. Protecting men over abuse? What have we become in America? Shame on all of you!
Do. Not. Relent. Keep hammering away. Smash this insanity and let the truth roll down like thunder for all to read. Thank you to ALL of you for being far, far, FAR better leaders than the radical majority elected Cowards in Congress. Godspeed.