Lasting Harm

In the last couple of years, I’ve read a lot on sexual abuse and trauma. Among the most impactful of the non-academic, trade books I’ve read are the two volumes pictured, both, coincidentally, relating to Epstein. I read Lucia Osborne Crowley’s The Lasting Harm  (2024) back in the summer, and I’ve just completed Virginia Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl (2025).  Both were harrowing reads and invaluable for an understanding of the psychological consequences of sexual abuse over time. 

Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre and The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist and a writer of narrative non-fiction. Her first book, I Choose Elena (2019), chronicles the impacts of the violent rape she experienced in the toilets of a MacDonald’s at the age of 15. Her second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets (2021), explores different experiences of both grooming and abuse, her own and that of others. These books impressed me in many ways, not least for the way they unpacked the evidence-base for a relationship between trauma and autoimmune conditions, a topic I’d become interested in having read Bessel Van der Kolk and Gabor Maté in pursuit of answers about my own health issues. Osborne-Crowley’s most recent book, The Lasting Harm, is in part a record of the author’s service as one of the few journalists permitted in the courtroom during the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, trafficker of young girls and women to the paedophile and rapist, Jeffrey Epstein, and co-participant in their abuse. It is also a study of the lives of four of the women who were trafficked, raped and abused by Epstein, Maxwell and others in their circle. 

All of her writing is shaped by the immense effort Osborne-Crowley has expended to process and understand the impact of her own experience of sexual abuse. She writes with the compassionate authority of an advocate, balancing the demands of careful research, intelligent inquiry and the even-handedness of quality journalism, with the emotional authenticity afforded by a life shaped by the dreadful unfolding of first-hand traumatic experience.  In The Lasting Harm, she subjects the legal arguments made in the trial which resulted in Maxwell’s conviction in 2021 to sustained consideration in the light of the psychological and emotional dimensions victimhood. 

In the narrative that runs alongside the account of the trial, she explains how the lives of victims evidence the well-known, but rarely properly acknowledged, fact that abused people are also silenced people. Trauma research has long since established that abused people often take their experiences to the grave. If they do disclose, they may only do so with a romantic partner, and they may only do so decades after the abuse was perpetrated. This fact has significant ramifications. Those who question the credibility of sufferers coming forward with accounts of abuse because of the length of time it took to open up, simply do not understand the dynamics of abuse. They do not understand it, most likely, because they, thankfully, have never experienced it. The cost, however, of a public discourse underpinned by a lack of understanding, is that it tends to position victims in such a way that diminishes them, and shores up the perpetrators.

It is remarkable, for example, how often stories of victims are told with reference to benefits received, be that money, gifts, lifestyle, or opportunities. When victims are cast as receiving something, abuse can look transactional, and victims can appear to have agency that they absolutely do not. Such has been the noise around the high-profile cases, and part of why, culturally, it has taken so very long (and is STILL taking so long) to bring down the edifices of protection around the community of the rich, famous and powerful associated with Epstein’s operation. The truth is that victims face multiple internal and external barriers to coming forward, regardless of a perpetrator's wealth. All perpetrators are powerful, whether religious leader, teacher, rich financier, or family member. Any victims’ narratives can be, and are, retold in ways that serve perpetrators. Victims face immense difficulties in getting their voices into the public square, and once there, in maintaining control of their narratives in the face not only of those who would seek to discredit them, but of a culture that prefers to look away.  

Osborne-Crowley explicitly focused her account on the lives, experiences, and internal thought processes of those abused by Epstein and Maxwell. She tells their stories from their point of view. Most mass and social media tend not to present victims as rounded human beings, but Osborne-Crowley humanises them with empathy and realism. Furthermore, she unpicks the psychological outworkings of abuse and considers the disturbing implications of that knowledge for legal process. Victim accounts, she tells us, are often dismissed, both in the court of public opinion and in legal cases, because these victims have, for example, histories of drug and alcohol misuse. She argues that such histories, far from discrediting them, stand as testimony to the truth of their accounts. She argues that it's grotesque to imagine that victims were willing participants based on the fact they received gifts from their abusers. This gift-giving should itself be taken as evidence of the heinous exploitation of the victims’ poverty, be that material or emotional. It is proof positive of grooming. She argues that statues of limitations, legally set -- often shockingly short, depending on the jurisdiction -- time-periods during which it is possible to bring a case against a perpetrator, should not exist at all.  As she says, ‘[i]t goes against all the trauma science we know, and it denies victims justice again and again and again.’  And she argues that,

We need expert psychiatrists who can explain to juries why memories of childhood abuse are difficult to narrativise, to put in an order. We need a commitment to actually understanding how grooming and the consequent abuse works - both inside and outside the courtroom. p323. 

For me, the contribution Lucia Osborne-Crowley has made, in this book and in her other work, is best captured in the title of the book - the Lasting Harm. Abuse cannot be dismissed as ‘something unpleasant that happened a long time ago.' It cannot, because its effects continue to be felt decades later. While the filaments of cause and effect might be invisible to the naked eye, the truth is that the crisis of a nervous system forced into survival mode and a psyche forced into shame and self-hatred, is a crisis with lasting consequences. It shapes, for evermore, habits, relationships, self-esteem, even personality. Its effects reverberate in the body over time, resulting in many kinds of ill-health. Decisions are made and events unfold in the lives of abused people that would not have unfolded otherwise, and the damage deepens. The original harm spawns further harm. The harm lasts.  

The difficult life and tragic death of Virginia Roberts Giuffre can be taken as an instantiation of precisely that message. 

I did not expect to be as affected as I have been by reading Nobody’s Child.  Of course, all Giuffre’s allegations were already in the public domain. It is an interesting, and profoundly shocking cultural fact that only now are these allegations being acted on. The victims have been speaking up for decades. Hard though they were to read, none of the facts of the abuse described by Giuffre were new or surprising to me, nor to any other reader who has followed the Epstein case. However, before reading the book, I definitely did not know how Giuffre’s life had fatally unravelled in the months before she took her life. 

Her strange Instagram post in March this year about a car accident that she claimed resulted in end-of-life injuries, and the police presented as ‘not serious’, had at the time, if I’m honest, made me angry. I felt she was undermining the credibility of the Epstein victims and, by extension, all victims. In truth, I’d always felt a little conflicted about her. Although I thought she was a brave advocate, I also found what looked to me like relentless publicity-seeking to be in rather poor taste. Afterall, she had engaged in procuring girls for Epstein herself. I understood the dynamics of that, and did not hold her responsible, but the fact that it came into my mind at all makes me realise now, how I too, am prone to unconsciously buy in to the idea of a ‘morally pristine’ victim. I remember saying to myself, ‘Yeah, I always found Dr Annie Farmer the more impressive of the victims.’ (Wow. Who is your favourite Epstein victim? Sick, huh?).

And, of course Farmer appears (and is) impressive. Educated and articulate, she has significantly more social capital. Giuffre, on the other hand, sometimes came across to me as a kind of tabloid ‘trad wife.’ Having now read Nobody’s Child, I can see the error, and, I’m ashamed to say, the misogyny and classism, in that comparison.  

What I learned from reading Nobody’s Child was mostly in the posthumous note from Giuffre’s collaborator, Amy Wallace. Wallace tells us that what does not appear in Giuffre’s harrowing memoir is her experience of long-term domestic violence at the hands of the man she married at 19, and with whom she escaped from Epstein. Throughout the book, Giuffre describes her marriage as saving her life. Any marital problems are presented as minimal and caused not by her heroic and long-suffering husband, but by her own commitment to activism and her poor mental health. 

In the last months of her life, she was living under a restraining order that prevented her from seeing her children. No reader can be in any doubt about how important to her motherhood had been, how much she loved her children, and how much being a mother, especially of a daughter, had motivated her quest for justice, not only for herself and other survivors, but for the protection of minors in the future. Of course, we do not know the circumstances in which she received a restraining order, nor do we know anything about the strange account of the car accident. But we do know that Giuffre had experienced domestic violence, at the hands of a man she adored, and that she, seasoned accuser of violent men as she was, chose not to name that in the book of her life. Abused people are silenced people. Abused people are shaped to take and accept abuse, and they go to desperate lengths to cope. Giuffre struggled with drugs, self-harm, and suicidal ideation throughout much of her life. When a psyche carries as much weight as hers did, we should not be surprised when it breaks, nor when that breakage is not pretty.  

Her life, and, ultimately, her desperately tragic death, are proof of what Lucia Osborne-Crowley so rightly calls out as the ‘Lasting Harm’ of sexual abuse. 

I’m watching events unfold these days with a sense of immense gratitude to people like Annie Farmer, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, all the incredibly brave and persistent Epstein victims, and anyone, anywhere, who has ever spoken up. It costs so much to do so.

The brothers of Virginia Giuffre often talk about her ‘bringing down a Prince’. For me, that doesn’t quite capture the immensity and value of what she has achieved, though of course when you consider how immorally protected the Royal Family are, it is undoubtedly an incredible achievement. But she has done so much more. She has brought to light the complexity of abuse dynamics. She has exposed its hard-wiring to power. She has shown just how deep a revolution in justice and culture is needed for the prevention of future abuse.

And she has relentlessly held up all victim-survivors of abuse with appropriate dignity and respect.