It began as I finished Nobody’s Girl, the torturous and devastating account of Virginia Giuffre’s life. It was what I can only describe as a kind of corporeal attack, an existential clutch followed by days of such powerful anxiety my body was taken in bouts of uncontrollable shaking. A sense of not mattering, a virulent dread and dissolving into an all-encompassing nothingness impossible to shake. How many times as a child, after being abused by my father, had I experienced this sense of erasure and disappearance?

Feeling that no matter what I did, what I accomplished, how hard I tried to lift my head above the parapet I would be cast out forever. This attack lasted days. Perhaps it was Virginia’s story, parts of which felt much like my own. Raped as a child by her father, then raped by her father’s good friend, then raped when she ran away, then the years of being raped by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, then being sexually trafficked to powerful and sadistic men to be raped again.

Perhaps it was knowing that after years of working, educating the public about the impact of sexual abuse, the world refused to understand the depth of its consequences. That once you are raped, once your body is taken against your will, once you are invaded and dominated your body ceases to be your own. You become a thing, what Virginia called a toy, to be used and abused and tossed and discarded.

Then the press, repeating infuriating, ignorant questions........

© The Guardian