( in progress)
When started my previous blog THE FALSE MEMORY TROPE COLLECTION, I found an online picture to use as a heading – a newspaper clip that read ”She has got false memory”. To the right of the text there was a photo of 17 year old girl. I clipped away the picture of the girl because it was actually the text I was after, and I felt uncomfortable about using her image to write about myself
The girl whose image I had clipped away became Virginia Giuffre née Roberts, a 41 year woman and mother of three, who has just died, reportedly by suicide.
When I used that newspaper clip as the heading for my blog, I didn’t understand the history of the photo attached or how it related to what I was blogging about – the so-called false memory people. I understand more now. So this blogpost is my tribute to Virginia Giuffre because in sharing that photo with the world, she gave from her own pain to others. Because it´s a tribute I’ve tried to keep her name in focus and have moved as many other names as possible down to the footnotes.
The picture itself was originally a snapshot she kept private for many years before showing it to a journalist ( 1).
The photographer who first made a copy of the photo for the Mail on Sunday has said
”She handed me the photograph, I just put it on the table in the hotel room and I copied it. I think I took over 30 frames, which is … overkill for copying one photo, but I thought I didn’t want to get it out of focus, or get it wrong, because I knew how important it was. Then I turned the photo over and I took … three frames of the back of the photo. The back of the image showed it was developed on March 13, 2011 at a Walgreens in the United States. It was a normal 6×4 print that you would have got from any developer at the time,” (2)
She also handed the original photo to the FBI (who visited her in the wake of the journalist) in the hope that they would investigate Epstein.
In 2022 a Guardian journalist wrote that that the picture itself had become a symbol for Virginia Guiffre’s case against Prince Andrew.
“She has accomplished what no one else could: getting Prince Andrew to stop his nonsense and side with sexual abuse victims,” (3)
Since Giuffre’s passing, another Epstein survivor, Joanna Sjöberg has said:
”For Virginia, half called her a hero while the other half called her a liar. That’s the risk you choose when you become a public figure. I cannot imagine the battle she had within herself to simply stay sane” (4)
How does this relate to so-called false memory?
When the website of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was in business, their website used to post news alerts every month or so. Their last update was in My 2019. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and after that the FMSF issued no further news alerts. At the end of the year a single sentence appeared which said the organization was no more. (5) This meant that when Loftus was an expert witness for Maxwell, the FMSF was no longer around.
In the UK, the BBC Newsnight broadcast an interview with Andrew in 2019 where he denied having ever met Giuffre. The interviewed was described as a car crash. Andrew said, “I don’t remember that photograph ever being taken. I don’t remember going upstairs in the house,” (6 ) He was not seen as credible and was removed from some of his official royal duties.
A couple of years later when Maxwell tried to use the false memory defence in her trail, Andrew’s spokespeople changed the information they gave to the media. Attention shifted focus from Andrew´s memory of a Pizza Express restaurant to Virginia Giuffre´s possible false memory.
The headline caption that I used a clip of for my blog was from the Sunday Mirror. ”She has got false memory” was blasted across their front page. Above it was a caption about an actress who doesn’t like undressing as part of her work, and another caption offering a 200 pound supermarket voucher. The small print next to the picture of Virginia Giuffre and Andrew reads that the Prince’s defence want to question her psychologist about false memory.
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