As women, we are made the scapegoats for all of society’s woes, and it has been this way since the dawn of time. 

As in the bible, Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, it has always been women who are dubbed ‘problematic’, responsible for lust, temptation, seduction, and, of course, sinfulness.

The reaction far too many women receive in response to rape is evidence of this… 

But what were you wearing though?, 

as though it is the woman’s fault, it’s always the woman’s fault, for being the ‘temptation…

We are the casualties of a society created and controlled by powerful men. We are the casualties of the patriarchy.

In the Middle Ages, the prejudice women had held against them by men was more overtly displayed.

Women could be publically executed under accusations of being a ‘witch’ (just another word for a woman who doesn’t submit to patriarchal power).

Like the word ‘whore’, a woman who ‘transgresses norms of female sexuality’, the word ‘witch’, a woman who transgresses norms of female power, was used to shame women into socially prescribed behaviour.

This incorporated any and all women who were independent thinkers or lived in ways that might challenge the patriarchal order, and their punishment would accomplish two things: 

1. Eradicating the ‘threat’ (what threat?) &
2. Making others afraid to follow in their unruly footsteps…

‘They stood out and did not conform with the rest of society.’

Often those accused of witchcraft displayed behaviour that was seen as ‘argumentative’ or ‘antisocial.’ This might have involved being sharp-tongued, being critical of others, or getting involved in arguments because… ‘How dare a woman have the audacity to speak up for herself!!’

Women should be submissive, not too loud, and they certainly should not attempt to stand out or influence society in some way…

Such women who would step outside of their prescribed roles would subsequently become targets, and they were often blamed for the failure of crops, etc, with their execution being an effective way to remove any power or influence they had in society via the rolling back of women’s rights (the biggest one being… Their right to life)…

Witch hunts = An opportunity to persecute the powerless.

Whilst women are no longer being burnt at the stake anymore (thank god), ‘witch hunts’ are still taking place against women who are labelled as being ‘attention-seekers’ for doing anything that poses a threat to the patriarchy…

‘YOU’RE A WITCH’, then.
‘YOU’RE AN ATTENTION-SEEKER’, now.

When a woman with a voice is deemed to be a ‘threat to the patriarchy’, to ensure that people don’t take our words seriously, we are brandished as being ‘arrogant.’

‘You’re just doing it for attention…’

Rooted in misogyny, the idea that self-expression is ‘attention-seeking’ is often used to dismiss women by labeling them as being ‘too much’, ‘you’re showing off’, for going against societal standards of beauty…

Wear a short dress or you’ll come across as frigid,
(but not too short, or people will think you’re a slut)…

Be confident or you’ll be walked all over,
(but not too confident, or men will be intimidated by you because they won’t be able to walk all over you)…

Womanhood: It’s full of contradictions, the expectation being that everything that we do is for other people (notably, men).

‘You shouldn’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley’, they say about my tattoos…

‘You shouldn’t remove the gag from the bigot’, I say about their abuse…

Telling women that they shouldn’t get tattoos, for example, because they’re ‘offputting’ to some men, a ‘turn-off’, is like me saying, as a lesbian, ‘Get rid of all men- they’re offputting’ to me…

Men don’t exist for me, just like women don’t exist for men.

Our bodies are not objects- we do not exist to satiate the male gaze.

If you post about your successes, you’re ‘showing off.’ If you post about your struggles, you’re ‘attention-seeking.’

A woman who refuses to submit to patriarchal ideals, who demands to be seen, will always be deemed ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ by people who feel threatened by the power of her voice.

And unfortunately, it’s not just men either, but women too. Women who have bought into the rhetoric that women are ‘to be seen (if they must), not heard’ otherwise, ‘you’re just doing it for attention…’

‘Attention’ being something that the patriarchy has determined that men give (men ‘pay us’ attention), and women take (women are ‘attention seekers’).

We can’t win…

The expectation is always there that we’re doing it for someone, or something, else but, here’s a thought, what if we’re doing it for ourselves?

Radical, I know!!

When attention is freedom, attention is POWER.

Upon commanding attention, we command power, and that’s why men fear it. That’s why men fear us. 

A ‘threat to the patriarchy’, men find it easier to call us ‘witches’, ‘whores’, and ‘attention-seekers’ than admit the power that we hold…

Too much of a threat.

Last week I was in Camden, London, and it was like walking through a shrine for Amy Winehouse.

Graffitied walls adorned with her face, 
her signature ‘beehive’ taking pride of place
in record shops, her name scrawled across the walls, 
so much talent 
yet all we remember is her downfall-
bittersweet.

Multiple Grammy Award-winning album Back to Black released at the age of just 23.

Dead at the age of just 27-
alcohol poisoning,
her talent tainted by addiction,
her musicality matched only by her talent for self-destruction.

With all of Amy’s success came pain, her struggles magnified at scale by the British tabloids that even the hardiest of characters would find impossible to maintain.

Catapulted to fame in her early twenties, Amy was relentlessly hounded by the British press day after day, and then left to deal with the fallout of it all on her own, her life sold as though it were nothing more than an Eastenders episode,
‘light entertainment…’

Yet when Amy Winehouse died, the headlines soon changed, the tabloids in a frantic rush to hide their blood-stained hands.

At the height of her addiction, the headlines all read:
‘Amy Winehouse on crack’
(sensationalist).

VS

When she died:
‘A troubled star gone too soon’
(false concern).

From sinner to saint, joining the ‘27’ club, Amy’s death was romanticised by the media as though they had suddenly developed a conscience, one headline too late.

It’s a shame that the press couldn’t have thought more about the ‘troubled star’ while she was still alive… 

When never has there been, I would argue, someone as desperately and painstakingly obviously in need of help than Amy Winehouse, yet instead of help, all she got was ridicule.

Profiting from her declining mental health, the press didn’t want her to get help because, if she did, then who would become the next scapegoat?

‘Who can we take the piss out of and dehumanise if not Amy?!’

It’s disgusting, the way the media treated her, to the extent that she had to take out a court order to stop the press from camping outside her house to photograph her.

It’s disgusting that the press then had the audacity, when she was gone, to pretend that they actually ‘cared’ about her.

And it’s not just Amy Winehouse, either, we have seen it happen time and time again. People ‘cancelled’ by the media, villainised, their every movement scrutinised by the tabloids that are hungry for attention, willing to chase it at whatever cost…

We have the misconstrued belief that by virtue of being a celebrity, people waver their right to privacy. That if they choose to be in the public eye, then they must be prepared for constant scrutiny.

To be thrown into the spotlight at such a young age, it’s unsurprising that so many artists become addicts- addicted to substances that allow them to escape, to feel something ‘other’ (or to just not feel anything at all)…

Whereas a ‘regular’ person struggling with addiction would get the help and support they need, thrust into the limelight, public figures have no escape. And so they take more substances, chasing the escapism that never comes.

An endless cycle- they take more to escape, the media hounds them more, and on and on and on it goes until the body can’t sustain it anymore. And at that precise moment, messages of condolences come flooding in…

‘Our Amy,’
‘Amy was a ‘national treasure’,
as though the press actually cared about her/as though they wouldn’t have tipped those last drops of vodka into her mouth if they thought it would make them money. Their humanity overshadowed by their thirst for a world exclusive, always.

Cruelly mocked by the British press, always.

Amy was raised up for her songs only to be brought crashing down, made into the punchline for exhibiting the very struggle that inspired those songs.

Crying along with her songs of suffering, laughing at her signs of suffering, as Lady Gaga spoke about in this interview a week after Amy’s passing;

‘You can’t have it both ways. You can’t enjoy listening to someone sing sad songs about the blues and heartbreak and not expect them to be truly heartbroken.’

‘You get a pen and slash it into your arm and bleed all over the pages.’

So committed was Amy to writing music for her fans that one of her most famous songs of all time, Rehab, was about her not wanting to accept help in fear that it would ‘affect her creativity’, as heard by Winehouse’s GP, Dr. Christina Romete, in a statement read out at the inquest into her death. Yet the same ‘fans’ who she devoted her life to, blindly bought into the narrative that the media sold of ‘Amy the Junkie.’

The media that loves nothing more than to watch a young woman fall to pieces, as if to say; ‘this is what will happen if you try to make something of yourself…’ Media coverage only serving to feed into the stereotype of the ‘hysterical’, ‘overly sensitive’ woman.

Unlike a male celebrity struggling with his mental health who can just disappear for a while, going ‘off the radar’ to take some time out, a female celebrity has no such privilege. Unable to disappear, she receives more media coverage for her declining mental health than for her actual career…

During her final ever performance in Belgrade (footage shown above), Amy can be seen being booed off the stage for being drunk. 

Where was the compassion from her so-called ‘fans’ when she needed it the most?

Because, don’t misconstrue it, as much as Amy said she didn’t want help, the night before she died she explicitly told her doctor, ‘I don’t want to die.’

Yet what did we do? We all sat by and watched her kill herself, with every new paparazzi shot of her blood-stained shoes, disheveled hair, open wounds, and then acted surprised when the news broke that she had died.

Anything to sell a story, the same occurred with Britney Spears, too. Her breakdown in the early noughties making headline news, the press cashing in on her pain.

What did Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse have in common? They didn’t fit the ‘be seen and not heard’ image that women are expected to be- not ‘innocent’ or ‘pure’ enough, too ‘wild.’

‘Crazy’, ‘unhinged’, ‘she’s gone off the rails.’

Despite publically struggling, like Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears became the punchline.

In a 2008 episode of the US game show, ‘Family Feud’, contestants were asked to name ‘something Britney Spears has lost in the past year’, for which winning answers included, ‘her hair’, ‘her children’, and ‘her mind.’

How about naming something that we have lost? I’ll go first… 

Our HUMANITY.

Villainising the vulnerable, a woman’s success is always deemed as being ‘lesser than’ her struggle.

On her own with the whole world watching, why is a woman’s success always overshadowed by pain?

Don’t let all their success be in vain.

Capitalism preys on our insecurities. It’s how a capitalistic society is upheld.

They dictate our insecurities to us, via the media, and then they sell us the proposed ‘solutions’ to those insecurities…

Our ‘knight in shining armor’, ‘I’ll save you’, they tell us, ‘if only you buy this very pointless, completely useless product’, as though they were not singlehandedly responsible for creating our insecurities in the first place,
as though we can be saved from that which we need saving from…
society.

It’s no coincidence that the ‘solutions’ to our insecurities always come with a high price tag. 

They drag us down with their constant bombardment of diet culture and unrealistic beauty standards, and comparison after comparison every time we switch on the TV, scroll on social media, see a billboard on the street…

The solutions are pricey because they get us to a place where we are willing to pay whatever it takes for ‘redemption’, and don’t they know it…

But obviously, ‘redemption’ never comes, as they also know for, as soon as we have bought the ‘solution’, they pin another insecurity onto us, and then round and round (and round) the cycle goes…

• They tell us what to feel insecure about.
• They sell us the ‘solution’ to said insecurity.
• We feel momentarily okay about ourselves.
• Only for them to tell us the latest ‘trend’ in what we should be feeling insecure about next, proposing to us the next ‘must have’ solution…

Constantly chasing that which can never be caught, as quickly as one thing goes ‘out’ of fashion and we change up our whole wardrobe, our whole face even in the era of cosmetic surgery and implants to live up to the new ‘trend’, it comes back ‘in’ again… So then we’re forced to go out and rebuy all the clothes we just got rid of/forced to go back to the salon to have those implants we were told we ‘needed’ to be worthy last week, dissolved…

---

Last week:

‘Thick thighs are in.’

This week:

‘Thick thighs make you look fat. Haven’t you heard? Heroin chic is back.’

---

Where beauty is a social construct, nothing more than a money-making exercise, they dangle the carrot in front of us keeping it always just…beyond…reach, a constant cycle that can never be escaped from, when we think that we’ve finally got it only for it to be yanked away again… Because, again, the redemption that we seek can never be sought. To seek it at all is a futile endeavor when the only thing that can redeem us- society- is the very thing that oppresses us, telling us all the things that are ‘wrong’ with us, just to make more money from us…

‘You’re too fat. Buy this very expensive health food- It contains half the calories of the original and will get you the *perfect* body!!’

(Leaving out the part where they tell us that it’s half the calories of the original because it’s half the size of the original. How ridiculous that we pay 50% more for something that is 50% smaller)…

A real-life example to give you here on these marketing tactics:
Fibre one brownies…

When I was in the depths of Anorexia, they were one of my few ‘safe foods.’ Marketed as a ‘healthy’ brownie with ‘90 calories and 30% less sugar.’

Now, there’s no denying that fibre one brownies contain fewer calories than ‘normal’ brownies, but there’s also no denying that they are literally gone in one mouthful. They’re one-third of the calories of a normal brownie, because they’re one-third smaller than a normal brownie, weighing a pathetic 24 grams.

(For comparison, a standard brownie from the famous high street coffee shop, Costa Coffee, is 60 grams. You could buy a normal brownie for half the price, cut it into three, and have your 90-calorie brownie (x3)- mindblown)!!

It really is that simple. But, unfortunately, people are blinded to the marketing tactics that are so plainly being used, their minds too plagued with all the insecurities that have been sold to them, for which they are willing to try anything just to ease that constant burden that is coming from their own brain…

It’s how diet companies work; Slimming world and their ‘syns.’ Attaching morals to food- good vs bad- to instill shame in us surrounding our food choices…

The greater the insecurity, the greater the profit…

‘Thou shall not eat pasta or thou shall burn in hell’ 
(unless it’s got the slimming world logo and a hefty price tag on it in which case, the rules don’t apply)…

A ‘normal’ spaghetti bolognese from Iceland costs £1. In contrast, a ‘slimming world’ spaghetti bolognese from the same shop, Iceland, costs £4.25, with, get ready for this, the ‘slimming world’ version actually containing more calories than the ‘normal’ version (522.5 calories vs 404 calories)*…

*Granted, the slimming world version does contain fewer carbohydrates than the ‘normal’ version, but that *might* have something to do with the fact that the ‘normal’ version is made up of 44% spaghetti (as you would expect considering it is SPAGHETTI bolognese…), whereas the ‘slimming world’ version is made up of just 27% spaghetti, the rest being a lot of indecipherable ingredients with; minced beef, puree, and, most mind-blowingly, ‘seaweed granules’ thrown in for good measure…

Yes, ‘seaweed granules..’

It’s giving:

Seaweed granules in a spag bol/grapes in a sandwich: same difference.

All jokes aside though, it’s hard to sit by and comply with a society that so blatantly thrives on our insecurities, pretending that they care about us…

Like in 2022, when the British government unveiled a new policy to make calories mandatory on restaurant menus, apparently to, ‘solve the obesity epidemic.’

This policy was (/is) a prime example of how society claims to want to ‘save us’, yet does everything it can to oppress us. The policy is not about ‘leveling up the nation’s health’ (what does that even mean?) as claimed by Britain’s then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, it’s about making money, otherwise, why only make it mandatory for calories to be displayed on food and soft drink items? Why exclude alcohol from the policy when all the research points to the massive strain that alcohol poses on the health of our nation?…

When the government’s own former chief drug adviser, David Nutt who was, hilariously, sacked for claiming that ‘ecstasy is safer than riding a horse’, told the Guardian in 2019, three years prior to the policy being introduced, that, ‘The industry knows alcohol is a toxic substance, (a claim backed up by the Alcohol Health Alliance: ‘NHS hospitals admit 980,000 patients each year for treatment of diseases directly linked to drinking’, was alcohol not added to the policy?

‘If alcohol were discovered today, it would be illegal’, Nutt went on to say, as well as, ‘The safe limit of alcohol, if you apply food standards criteria, would be one glass of wine a year’…

And it’s not just former government officials who are posing daming evidence against alcohol consumption, either, but the government itself, as in this report from 2020…

It is not just food that adds to our energy intake, alcohol is highly calorific too. It has been estimated that for those who drink alcohol, it accounts for nearly 10% of the calories they consume. We know that each year around 3.4 million adults consume an additional day’s worth of calories each week from alcohol (an additional 2 months of food each year).

So, to pose the question again; 

Why then, when the government has done all the research themselves, as is proven in the extract from the government’s own report above, did they not include alcohol in the policy?

I think I can tell you why…

Because it’s not about health, as they claim it to be, and that’s the point. It’s about money.

They’re not concerned about our health but about lining their own pockets.

It’s why their policy, which is supposedly to ‘level up our health’, only makes it mandatory for calories to be displayed next to food items and [soft] drink items, but NOT next to alcohol, (despite alcohol-containing, in most cases, significantly more calories than soft drinks)…

A 750ml bottle of wine, for example, (which isn’t required to have its calorie content disclosed) contains, on average, 564 calories. In contrast, full-fat Coke (which is required to have its calorie content disclosed), contains 323 calories (per 750ml)…

More calories but also, more profit, what the policy is REALLY about…

If restaurants were to display the calorie content of alcoholic drinks on their menus, then they would lose money. So they don’t…
Simple.

And so, you see? It’s all about money. Not ‘health’, otherwise alcohol wouldn’t be celebrated as it is. It would have the same shame attached to it that fast food has garnered over the years…

‘Unhealthy.’

‘Dangerous.’

‘Toxic.’

Except, it doesn’t, does it?…

When something goes right, the first thing we do is hold our glasses up, ‘Cheers.’

When something goes wrong, the first thing we do is hold our glasses up, ‘Cheers.’

To celebrate, to drown our sorrows, we’re sold alcohol as the go-to for literally anything and everything, asked what we want to drink before anything else when we go to a restaurant (for food). And, God FORBID we answer with a soft drink when they come to take our order!! We may as well have gone out with ‘BORING’, ‘PREGNANT’, or ‘RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC’ taped across our forehead…

A sad state of affairs when being sober has more stigma in our society than being an alcoholic… Not that this should come as a surprise though when alcoholism is so rife in the UK, so commonplace, with an estimated 10 million people in England regularly exceeding the Chief Medical Officers’ low-risk drinking guidelines, including 1.7 million who drink at higher risk and around 600,000 who are dependent on alcohol…

But, who cares when it’s good for the economy?

When it makes the ‘big boys’ money?

‘Our policies might be completely hypocritical and against all the scientific evidence but, who cares?’

‘Certainly not us when we’re running to the bank with our wads of cash,
celebrating in Maccy D’s with a Big Mac,
watching the group of women on the table next to us
scrutinising the menu for the lowest calorie option available’…

‘Ah, found it.
Bowl of air, please.
Oh and, make it organic.’

CHEERS
xx

Sexual violence has long been used in wars as a way to inflict terror upon the enemy, a way to assert power and control over the opposition.

According to feminist activist Susan Brownmiler;

Wherever armed conflicts have been fought on the land, women have been raped.

Dehumanising, rather than taking a gun to one’s head- aim, shoot, and it’s over, rape overwhelmingly leaves victims with both mental scars (PTSD), and physical scars, as they’re forced to live within the crime scene that is their body, for the rest of their lives… 

In some cases, women are raped by soldiers as part of the genocide itself, as this BBC report suggests…

‘About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant. Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.’

Because wartorn countries where such violations take place are often LEDCs (less economically developed countries), and therefore its citizens tend to be poorer, most women who do fall pregnant in such countries have no choice but to have the baby. (Abortion isn’t an option, in many cases, like it is in the West). This adds even more pain to an already excruciatingly painful situation…

Women are forced to mother children whose fathers raped them. Women are forced to be reminded of that fact, every single day, something which doesn’t just have an emotional impact on the mother, by the way, but so too on the child when/if they grow up realising how they were conceived.

And in many cases, it’s no accident (that they were conceived)…

As the BBC report above states, Russian soldiers raped women, ‘to prevent them from having Ukranian children.’ 

Rape is used, not just to inflict terror, but also to contribute to genocide. How so? By forcibly changing the ethnic makeup of a population.

The Russian soldier who raped the Ukrainian woman, for example, who subsequently fell pregnant and gave birth to a half-Russian, half-Ukrainian baby… Whilst this doesn’t mean anything, whilst the baby will most likely grow up having no association, no knowledge even, of their Russian roots, psychologically, in the Russian’s mind, it is ‘one-upmanship.’

‘If we’re not going to win the conflict with guns, invading Ukraine through airstrikes, we will win it through rape, invading Ukraine by forcing Ukrainian women to give birth to our (Russian) babies.’

And it’s not just Ukraine where this is happening, either, it’s happening globally, and has been happening globally, for decades…

In Rwanda, between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped during the three months of genocide in 1994.

Furthermore, recent conflicts in Africa have also seen terrible sexual violence. Up to 120,000 women and girls were reportedly raped or sexually abused during the 2020–2022 Tigray war in northern Ethiopia, and this year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of women and children are said to have been raped by M23 rebels.

And, for a more recent example, as this Guardian article reports, there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe sexual assaults including rape and gang-rape took place during the 7 October attacks by Hamas.’

‘Based on the first-hand accounts of released hostages, the mission team received clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity. In some cases, rape was conducted in front of an audience, such as partners, family, or friends, to increase the pain and humiliation for all present.’

Despite being classified as a war crime since 1998, a UN report, also published in 1998, highlights how armies have long considered rape, ‘one of the legitimate spoils of war’, ‘unavoidable’, ‘just one of those things…’

The question then, is why?

Why is rape used as a war crime?

Why has war become, not soldier against soldier, but soldier against civilian?*

*Against unarmed, eternally harmed civilian…

‘Rape is no accident of war, but a tool of terror.’

Rape in war is about power, not sexual desire.

Soldiers aren’t ‘selective’ about who they will or won’t rape. Whilst women and girls are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual assault, men and boys are not excluded either. Because, when it’s all about power, power (them) vs vulnerability (us), their only goal is to inflict the maximum damage on ‘us.’

As quoted from the Guardian article linked above, the aim of rape is 
‘to increase the pain and humiliation for all present.’

An example of just how far soldiers will go to inflict the maximum damage can be seen in Russia when, last year, a Russian soldier forced a four-year-old girl (yes, four years old)… to perform oral sex on him whilst her parents watched. The mother, 22 years old, was raped, and her husband sexually assaulted. They were then forced to have sex with each other in front of the soldiers.

^ ( Clearly, this was not about sexual desire, but about power).

As an Amnesty International campaign from 2009 highlights;

Rape is cheaper than bullets.

(and that it is).

Cheaper and far, far more damaging.

Rape might not kill you as a gun to your head would, but it does take life away from you, making it impossible to live… And so, ultimately, you end up swapping living for surviving, with every day feeling like Groundhog Day as you’re left to go over and over what happened to you in your head, over and over and over it, with no escape…

---

Written below is a poem, based on research I have conducted into victims of rape as a war crime, that I hope does them justice. It’s called;

‘When I talk to God, but the sky is empty.’

When the war has ended
and the soldiers have gone home,
when they tell us to smile,
but we can’t,
so we don’t.

Because the birds might be singing
but all we can hear
is the sound of him breathing,
pounding,
round,
down,
in,
out,
of our fucking ears.

again.

reliving it.

again.

This isn’t living,
this is just surviving,
every day that passes
wishing that we could throw the towel in

…

‘I can’t do this anymore’

…

Getting down on our hands and knees praying,
heart feeling like it’s breaking
(can’t escape it)
‘cuz we’ve got kids at home playing,
innocent kids,
just as much the victim
(they can’t help who their dad is).

And that makes us feel guilty for feeling like this.

We feel guilty
that every time we see them,
we see him,
hear him,
breathing,
pounding,
round,
down,
in,
out,
of our fucking ears.

again.

reliving it.

again.

This isn’t living,
this is just surviving,
every day that passes wishing that we could throw the towel in

…

‘I can’t do this anymore’

…

Getting down on our hands and knees praying,
asking God;

‘Why couldn’t it have been me instead?’

A gun to the head
would’ve been easier
than this.’

‘God.’

Ha,
what God?

You must be taking the fucking piss.

In 2009, Virginia Giuffre, a former masseuse at Epstein and Maxwell’s mansion, alleged that she had been groomed by Jeffrey Epstein, the now deceased (he committed suicide in 2019) sex offender, and his then-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell (who is currently 2 years into a 20-year prison sentence for grooming and trafficking underage girls). She claims the pair abused her in the early noughties when she was just a teenager (aged 17), and paid her to have sex with powerful men including the Queen’s son, Prince Andrew, whom reports indicate Giuffre was paid £12,000 to sleep with (pictured below).

A pyramid scheme of abuse within which ‘dozens’ of underage girls were abused, Giuffre and Maxwell would ‘reward vulnerable girls who brought someone new with extra cash.’

Giuffre’s lawyers alleged that the Prince sexually assaulted her three times, once in London, again in New York, and a third time on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Andrew has denied all allegations against him over the years, most notably in a BBC Newsnight interview which aired in 2019, in which he laid out his defense, claiming that he did not even remember meeting Giuffre.

‘Giuffre must be suffering from false memories’*, was one excuse used to dismiss Giuffre’s claims…

*Says the man who has consistently denied having even so much as met Giufree, counter to photographic evidence of the pair together which the photographer himself has weighed in to confirm isn’t fake…
‘The stamp on the back reads ‘000 #15 13Mar01’, the year the assault was alleged to have taken place.’

The interview was so ridiculous that it has been made into a newly released (05/04/24) Netflix drama, ‘Scoop’, with Rufus Sewell playing Andrew (the nonce), and Gillian Anderson playing Emily Maitlis (the interviewer).

Andrew’s proposed ‘get out of jail free cards’/his comments of:

1. Not being able to sweat
2. ‘It couldn’t possibly have been me because I remember precisely where I was 23 years ago, at a Pizza Express in Woking!’
   were so ridiculous they’d be funny if there wasn’t a woman, (several dozen women), whose life/lives had been destroyed on the other side of it all…

Like the Amy Winehouse movie, Back to Black, which is also out this week (12/04), when it comes to stories/films that are based on real-life events, we must remember that there are people whose lives have been changed forever based on the very ‘story’ which is being told…

Not just a Netflix dramatisation to them, but their reality.

Giuffre’s reality.

2021 saw Giuffre beginning civil proceedings against Andrew under ‘New York’s Child Victims Act’, a 2019 law allowing victims of childhood sexual assault to pursue compensation for abuse that happened too long ago for criminal charges to be brought.

Despite Andrew’s lawyers trying to get the civil case thrown out several times, it was to no avail…

In 2022, to avoid the case going to court, a settlement was reached for which, although the exact fee was never released, is estimated to have been around £12 million…

‘How to say you’re guilty without saying you’re guilty 101.’

Andrew continued to visit Epstein, with him even staying in Epstein’s home just 18 months after he had completed a prison sentence for ‘soliciting a minor for prostitution.’

Yet, despite Andrew’s pedophilic connections, because of his status, he was STILL given a platform to deliver the spiel he delivered in the form of ‘that’ interview*.

*(^Albeit, not that the interview did anything to help his cause. What Andrew thought would be, in effect, ‘pouring water over the fire’ to put out and quell the controversy was, in fact, ‘pouring petrol onto the fire’, making it all blow up)…

But, despite the disastrous interview in which Andrew dug himself into a hole, massively, because of his wealth, Andrew was able to reach a settlement fee to stop the case from going to court.

Because he’s a powerful man, like all powerful men, Andrew was able to get away with it.

‘Power corrupts.’

& evidently, as is proven (again), that it does…

Money and power: turning guilty men innocent.