Reading the extract from Virginia Giuffre’s tragic memoir in the Guardian this week, I was struck again by the fate of each of those people involved in that infamous photograph taken at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London house.
The teenage girl at the centre of the picture is dead, having taken her own life at a remote Australian farmhouse earlier this year, unable to outrun her trauma. The person who took the photograph is dead, having somehow killed himself in a New York jail while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking. The grinning woman in the background is in prison herself, exalting Donald Trump’s impeccable purity in the hope of getting moved to a nicer jail or even pardoned. And the smiling lunk with his arm round the teenage girl – who he denies he had sex with later that evening – is living in a 30-room mansion on a 98-acre estate (which even his monarch brother reportedly doesn’t know how he pays for), joshing away at family funerals, and just sort of … riding it out, each time another of his lies about this story is exposed. That, truly, is the royalty bonus. Don’t call it a doghouse! It’s a dogpalace.
