From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, April four, twenty twenty five. Anthony Albinizi is planning to stockpile Australia's precious critical minerals deposits as a negotiating chip. That's after US President Donald Trump announced ten percent tariffs on all Australian products. It's part of his so called Liberation Day war on foreign made goods that
has sent markets into a panic. The Museum of Contemporary Art has deleted its own websites praise for controversial artist Colored Subsabi. Subsabi was chosen and then dumped as Australia's representative at the Venice Bienali after The Australian revealed previous artworks depicting the nine to eleven attacks and late Hesbala leader Hassan Nazrala. The MCA has now removed its own reference to Subsabi's Nazraella portrait as suggestive of a divine illumination.
You can read that exclusive right now at The Australian dot com dot au. Virginia Roberts Giuffrey became globally famous as the woman accusing Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein of collaborating in abusing her when she was a teenager. She's been living a quiet family life in Perth until this week she became the central character in a real life
medical mystery today, What's going on with Virginia Gufrey. Virginia Giffrey was sixteen and working in the spa at Donald Trump's Mara Lago Club in Florida when she crossed paths with Gilaine Maxwell.
She was like this really bright Mary Poppins kind of a figure, and she goes, Oh, you know what, I know this guy, there's an opportunity. Actually, if you want to become a real massage therapist, we can get she trained.
Her name was Virginia Roberts then, and that guy was billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, vices from the TV mini series Surviving Jeffrey Epstein.
Within the next few weeks, Jeffrey Gilande told me that I need to quit my job with mar al Iago because I'll be traveling with them as they're traveling massuse.
Virginia Giffrey alleges she was sexually assaulted by both Epstein and Galline Maxwell on that first meeting, subsequently trafficked and abused for years.
It was abused straight away from both of them. I got paid two hundred dollars and the butler drove me home.
Epstein was found dead in a New York prison cell in twenty nineteen, where he was waiting to stand trial on sex trafficking charges.
The medical examiner has ruled his death a suicide. Attorney General William Barr ordered an investigation into his death after officials uncovered irregularities at the prison.
Giffrey claims she was assaulted by the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, who counted Epstein and Maxwell among his close personal friends. Andrew's always denied the allegations against him, but settled with Giffrey out of court for an undisclosed PSALM in twenty twenty two. Here's Geffrey in an interview with the BBC's Panorama program.
I'm calling BS on this because that's what it is. He knows what happened. I know what happened, and there's only one of us telling the truth, and I know that's me.
In the years since, Giffrey has become an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking.
I implore the people in the UK to stand up beside me, to help me fight this fate. To not accept this as being okay. This is not some sordid sex story. This is a story of being trafficked.
She's also made a life for herself far away from it all in Perth, Western Australia. She married Australian martial arts instructor Robert Giuffrey in two thousand and two and they have three children.
Virginia's kept a really low profile in Perth. Actually she doesn't give interviews. She had been living quietly in the northern suburbs of Perth with her husband and children.
This is The Australian's West Australia Bureau Chief Page Taylor.
We knew that she had bought a lovely house in a beachside suburb, but it wasn't like there was news about her in the media daily or she didn't go seeking it either. I think a lot of people were quite delighted that she had found some kind of peace and then you stop.
In the early hours of Tuesday, this post appeared on Virginia Juphry's Instagram fade. We've used an AI voice to raid Virginia Jupry's post.
This year has been the worst start to a new year. But I won't bore anyone with the details, but I think it's important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving one hundred ten kilometers as we were slowing for a turn, that no matter what your car is made of, it might as well be a tin can. I've gone into kidney renal failure. They've given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology. I'm ready to go, just not
until I see my babies one last time. But you know what they say about wishes, shit in one hand and wish in the other, and I guarantee it's still going to be shit at the end of the day. Thank you all for being the wonderful people of the world and for being a great part of my life. God bless you all. Virginia.
While I was up late finishing a story, was about two am on Tuesday, Perth time, and I thought, I'm just going to do a bit of scrolling now before I go to sleep, and I saw this really confronting image of Virginia in what looked to be a hospital bed. She had declared she only had days to live. It was such a shock.
In the picture, Giffrey looks very unwell. She's lying on something that looks like a hospital bed with medical equipment in the background. She has brown marks on one side of her face that looked like they could be bruising.
This is not a terribly big city, Perth, and if a school bus had cleaned up a car, the TV crews would be there, it'd be all over social media, the parents would have been contacted, the school would have had to make a statement. There was none of that, which was a bit unusual. And then I thought, oh, I'll read that again. Maybe she's saying one thing happened after the other. Maybe she's not saying they're connected. I
couldn't quite understand what was going on there. But then I also did think, perhaps this is also a person who's very sick and possibly a bit dazed and confused in that process, and she might not be even understanding what's happening to her.
Journalists, including page from around the world, started asking questions, when had this road accident happened, where, Why hadn't it made The news page found out that yes, Virginia. Giffrey had been in an ambulance which picked her up from a tiny town north of Perth. It arrived at Sir Charles Gardener Hospital at about two thirty am on Tuesday, April one.
That's a really big tertiary hospital in Perth. It does everything except major trauma and complex burns. You can't have a baby at Sir Charles gar A Hospital, but they do everything else. They do organ transplants and they deal with surgeries of all kinds. I have confirmed that she arrived about two thirty am on the Tuesday, which suggests to me that perhaps that photograph was taken in the
back of the ambulance. She had been in the rural area of near Gabby, which is a tiny hamlet, doesn't have a town square or a shops or anything, and the ambulance service got a tripoo call round midnight. Some volunteers came from the beachside suburb of Two Rocks and they took her to the Two Rocks depot. That's not even a nursing post or a medical center, it's literally where they keep the ambulance. And then a professional crew from the city came and picked her up and in
normal road conditions. They drove her to Sir Charles Garden Hospital, about seventy kilometers south. They didn't use the sirens, which suggests it's not an emergency but serious enough to warrant an ambulance transfer.
So the ambulance right happened on Tuesday this week, that's April one. But the authorities in Wa have told Page the incident between the school bus and the car that happened last week on the twenty fourth of March.
It was relatively minor, and it did happen in near Gabby Up, near where Virginia was picked up in the ambulance six days later. But it was so minor that the police said there was only two thousand dollars worth of damage to the car and no major injuries. We know the ambulance did not attend that incident either.
In a statement, Virginia Deuphray's agent said she'd been injured in the crash, but it had returned home and it wasn't until her condition worsened after several days that she called the ambulance and then it emerged. Virginia Euphras facing a criminal charge in the Wa courts on March fourteen, Ten days before the road accident, she'd appeared at the magistrates Court in joodle Up, in Perth's northern suburbs. She
was charged with breaching a family violence restraining order. She hasn't had to enter a plea and the matters listed for court on April nine. Also facing charges is her husband, Robert Giffrey. In February, he was charged with an inadequate storage facility for firearms. He's also been in trouble for a driving offense. He was fined twelve hundred dollars and lost his license for six months for reckless driving exceeding the speed limit by forty five kilometers an hour or more.
Back in September. On the twenty second of March, she posted some photos of her children and some words that suggested that there was something going on in the family. She said her heart was shattered and that every day that passes her sadness only deepened. Did that attract attention at the time or did that kind of go a bit unnoticed until she made the post about being in hospital.
I never saw that post, and I never saw any media about it either. I sort of wondered if that when under the radar because she had not been in the media for such a long time, maybe people had taken their eyes off her. When I did see it, it struck me as so tragic, just horrible.
And then another twist. We've used a voice actor to read a statement released by Virginia Geffray's agent overnight on Wednesday this week. There are some sensitive personal issues mentioned in the statement, so we've redacted some of it.
On January ninth, twenty twenty five, and Virginia was hospitalized for her serious injuries and he was granted a restraining order. Virginia looks forward to defending herself. She is deeply concerned about her children. Virginia continues to be hospitalized in serious condition.
We heard that she'd been in a hospital as early as January. The fact that she'd been in hospital multiple times this year was a surprise and a big cause for concern. She has been charged with one count of breaching what is known as a family violence restraining order. What I know about those orders is that there are ways of breaching them that are minor, and there are ways of breaching them that are major. So a person can breach a family violence restraining order by sending a
text or an email. And there have been cases in the past, the recent past where a man has been fined a small fine for breaching one of these orders by sending an email that asked to see his children. But people have also been jailed because they breach the order with an act of violence. So we actually don't know what's gone on here, and it could be any of those things that the police are alleging.
Coming up. What are the ethics of covering a complex story where the subject seems to be in such distress. This is such a delicate thing to cover, isn't it. Page This woman has made allegations of really horrendous abuse against three people, Jeffrey Epstein, Gilaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew. She's accepted a settlement, a payout in some form of acknowledgment of her abuse. She's been trying to live a private life in wa and it sounds like the media
has really left her alone. How do you navigate the delicacy of stepping your way through covering this story.
She's an important thing to a lot of people because she's been a hero actually campaigning for victims of sexual abuse, and so I think there's a lot of care and concern for her. But you're right, it's so difficult to tell this story when this is a person whose life is obviously in a lot of turmoil. I get a sense she's a person who's lived through a lot of pain. I think that she was genuinely trying to have a
quiet and good life. And if you're going to live in Australia, in a capital city, Perth's probably the place to do it. She's going to appear in court now as a result of this family violence restraining order charge, and that, of course, is going to attract a lot of media attention. That's going to be hard to watch. It's going to be difficult for her, and it's going to be quite the spectacle.
I think Virginia giuphrase Agent's initial response to this page was to say in a statement that her intention had been to post it in a more private way, perhaps on a face book closed group, rather than publicly on Instagram. What should we draw from that, given that the statement is still there on Instagram.
I've been wondering if it hasn't been removed because Virginia is so unwell. As far as we know, she's still an impatient she may be under the influence of pretty strong painkillers. She might not even be in a position to communicate well with her spokesperson or pass on her passwords. I don't know what to take from that. This is a person who's obviously sick, or else she wouldn't have been taken by ambulance to a hospital and she wouldn't still be there. What her illness is we don't know.
But I know that public hospitals are not in the habit of keeping people on the ward if they're well enough to leave.
Ah Taylor is The Australian's wad Your Chief. You can follow this developing story at the Australian dot com dot au