A Promise Not to Kill Yourself Proves Very Little: a Note on Virginia Giuffre

Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s best-known victims has died at 41. As you may have heard, the cause of death was suicide. As you may have also heard, particularly if you lurk a lot on social media, many people don’t believe Giuffre killed herself. They cite this 2019 tweet:

To put it simply, that proves nothing.

I am prepared to believe that Virginia Giuffre meant those words when she wrote them. I also know how suicidality works. Many people who end up dying by their hand do so after having made it very clear that they are committed to living. The longing to take one’s life is not a constant state. It is not always a daily battle that is finally lost. Quite frequently, it is a sudden surrender to impulse, as if a window long shut is thrown briefly and terribly open.

I have lost many friends who told me to my face that they would never do what they did in fact end up doing. You can no more promise that you won’t die by suicide than you can declare that you will never succumb to cancer. You imagine that you have total control over your urges, and you think your commitment to living, or your love for your children, or your deep faith in God will hold you back from self-destruction. Perhaps you are right. Statistically, you are not likely to die by suicide. Statistically, you are not likely to die of stomach cancer either. The unexpected sometimes happens, though, and it happens to our minds as well as to our bodies. We assume we exercise total control over the former, if not the latter. We assume wrong.

Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t suicidal either — until he found himself facing the rest of his life behind bars, with all that he valued gone forever. I cannot prove that he didn’t kill himself, but as anyone who has ever been to jail can tell you, the experience of incarceration is profoundly disorienting and destabilizing. Things that were unthinkable become… thinkable. That is true for the powerful who are suddenly thrown down, as Mr. Epstein was thrown down, and it is certainly true for abuse survivors.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we say we have a “daily reprieve (from drinking) contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” No one is magically healed forever. No one is so healthy and well and recovered that it becomes unthinkable that they should drink again. And no one is ever so filled with joy or defiance or mental health that they are perpetually immune from self-harm. Sometimes, the tragedy of a suicide is not that they finally “lost” the battle, but that they won so many fights, on so many other days, for so very long.

I understand your need to believe in vast conspiracies of powerful and evil people. I understand the temptation to see most suffering as the consequence of intentional acts by demonic, malevolent forces. I understand your suspicion and your frustration. I do not, however, think a five-year-old tweet proves a damn thing other than the fact that Ms. Giuffre was not suicidal on a December evening in 2019.

The poet Anne Sexton struggled just as Virginia Giuffre struggled. At one point, released from a hospital, she wrote a poem declaring that she was no longer suicidal, that she had made a different, glorious, happy choice:

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize -
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.

I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

Sexton was soon back in the hospital. And eventually, she did kill herself, despite her insistence that she was committed to living. Our declarations — be they in poems or tweets or reassuring phone calls to loved ones — capture only transitory feelings, no matter how heartfelt they are at the moment they are written or uttered. The reality is that a social media post insisting that one will never commit suicide is no different than declaring on one’s wedding day that one will never be unfaithful. Imagine being accused of cheating on your spouse, and in your defense producing a text message from years earlier, one in which you declared you would never stray, and offering it as evidence of your unshakeable fidelity. It is lovely if someone can stay faithful, and we all agree it is best if people do not take their own lives, but old certainties are often no match for changing brain chemistry — and changing circumstances.

May Virginia Giuffre know peace and rest, and may eternal light shine upon her. And may those heartbroken and dispirited by her death find comfort.