Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse, has died by apparent suicide, her family announced Friday. “It is with utterly broken hearts that we announce that Virginia passed away last night at her farm in Western Australia,” her family said in a statement to NBC News. “She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.” Giuffre, who was 41, leaves behind a husband and three children. The family lived in Australia. Giuffre was involved in several legal actions targeting Epstein. She filed a defamation lawsuit against Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, whom she accused of grooming her for Epstein’s abuse when she was a 16-year-old spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach (Trump reportedly later banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 for harassing another member’s teenage daughter). Giuffre said the sexual abuse she suffered included lessons on Epstein’s oral sex preferences. Giuffre also sued Prince Andrew, claiming the British royal sexually abused her when she was 17. The prince has denied the accusations. Last month, Giuffre sparked alarm when she posted a photo on Instagram of herself in a hospital bed, saying doctors had told her she had “four days to live” after a car crash with a school bus. However, she was discharged nearly a week later. Giuffre was one of the first people to call for criminal charges against Epstein, and other Epstein victims credited her with giving them the courage to speak out. “Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. She was the light that lifted so many survivors,” the statement said. “In the end, the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight.” Epstein was found dead at 66 in what was ruled a suicide in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019. He was awaiting trial after being accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls. The lurid details of his alleged sex ring include accusations that he procured underage girls for prominent men on his private island in the Virgin Islands, Little St. James.

I believe that America’s core ideals are very much linked to its Christian faith. So as Easter has just passed, I thought this would be a good time to take a closer look at the state of the American church and then weep quietly and say it was a great country while it lasted. Now, according to a Pew poll, 62% of Americans identify as Christian. This is a slight drop from the 1697 poll which showed 99.9% of Americans were Christian with one heretic hiding in the woods hoping some long-haired guy with a buckle on his hat wouldn’t blow his head off with a blunderbuss. But today’s religious landscape looks different depending on political affiliation. For instance, on the political Left, 43% of those who identify as progressives say they have abandoned Christianity and become Episcopalians. Fourteen percent of progressives say they have renounced the corrupt beliefs of colonizing white men, have returned to the innocent and beautiful natural religion of indigenous peoples, and were preparing to sacrifice a virgin to the volcano God until they realized that by the time they were sure she was a virgin, she wasn’t a virgin anymore, and if they threw her into a volcano there’d be no one left who knew how to make breakfast. Other progressives say they are sick of the sort of restrictive religions that ruined the 1950’s by making everything so great. Instead they have turned to more modern faiths with practices that reflect the moral progress of mankind. These practices include yogic meditation, ritual mindfulness, and tantric sex followed by butchering any unborn babies conceived during tantric sex, then celebrating the mass slaughter by dancing around a pole in a wild blood-drenched frenzy, getting a full body tattoo featuring goat-headed demi-gods with flaming eyes, then running naked through a forest while grunting inarticulately and listening to music that’s mostly composed of drumbeats and shrieking because classic rock is just the best. WATCH: The Andrew Klavan Show Among Christians on the political Right, 17% say they believe in Christ so hard they’ll kill anyone who disagrees with them, 14% say their faith is so strong they might even be willing to go to church as long as porn is provided, and 8% say their worship mostly involves posting unspeakably cruel remarks on social media to people who aren’t as Christly as they are. Four percent of conservative Christians say they have abandoned their own egos for Christ’s sake and have thus elevated their souls into a state of suffering-yet-serene agape love, and are now hiding in the woods hoping some long-haired guy with a buckle on his hat won’t blow their heads off with a blunderbuss. The remaining 57% of Right-wing Christians spend most of their time sobbing and whispering, “Oh God, I suck so bad, please, please, please have mercy on me and don’t send me to hell or California.” As far as other American religions go, 94% of limousine drivers identify as Muslims, 16% of Christian women pretend they’re Buddhists, and 82% of Jews control 90% of everything except which parts of Ivy League campuses they’re allowed to walk on without one of their professors pointing at them and making that awful insect noise like Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Approximately 29% of Americans have no religion whatsoever and they say that makes life much easier because they’re able to rotate their heads 360 degrees and spider walk across the ceiling, which comes in very handy when they’re trying to escape from the exorcist. Around the world, the religious landscape is much more varied. For instance, in Great Britain, while 47% of the people identify as Christian, 70% of them say that Islam is also absolutely great, totally fine, really wonderful and not a problem at all, no, really, it’s fantastic, they’re not just saying that because they’d be arrested for telling the truth. In France, 49% of the population were excited because they thought they belonged to a dark, obscure, mystery cult with elaborate secret rituals until they found out they were actually just Catholics. And in China, 23% of high-ranking Communists identify their kidneys as Uiger. * * * This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “The Andrew Klavan Show.” The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fourth installment, “A Woman Underground.” His most recent nonfiction release is “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.” (May 2025, Zondervan/HarperCollins).

President Donald Trump has arrived in Rome, where he will attend Pope Francis’ funeral Saturday morning in Vatican City, marking the first foreign trip of his second term. The funeral comes six days after Francis passed away, the day after Easter, dying at age 88 of a stroke and heart failure after a battle with pneumonia. Since then, tens of thousands of people have come to pay their respects to the late pope as he lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica. The president and First Lady Melania Trump arrived in Rome late Friday night. They will depart early Saturday afternoon after attending the funeral. Previous Papal Funerals Trump is only the second sitting president to attend a papal funeral. The first was George W. Bush, who attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005. President Joe Biden did not attend the funeral of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2023, despite meeting the former pope as vice president years earlier. Benedict died nine years after resigning as pope in 2013, an unusual move for a modern pope. He was succeeded by Francis. Photos from that visit show three presidents, Bush, his father, President George H.W. Bush, and President Bill Clinton kneeling in the first pew behind Pope John Paul II’s body lying in state. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and First Lady Laura Bush kneel near them. (TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images) Who Else Will Be There? Trump met with Pope Francis at the Vatican during his first term in 2017. Biden met Francis twice: first as vice president in 2016, and during his presidency in 2021. Biden and former first lady Jill Biden will also travel to the Vatican to attend Francis’ funeral. (TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo by GABRIEL BOUYS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Neither former President Barack Obama nor former President George W. Bush will attend Pope Francis’ funeral. Obama hosted Francis at the White House in 2015, marking the first papal visit to the United States since Pope Benedict in 2008. Francis was only the third pope ever to visit the White House. Other world leaders who will attend the pope’s funeral include Javier Milei, president of Francis’ birthplace, Argentina; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Prince William; French President Emmanuel Macron; and Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. As many as 200,000 people are expected to attend the funeral, the Italian government said. How The Funeral Will Go The funeral will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday morning local time, which is 4 a.m. Eastern time in the United States. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re will preside over the funeral Mass and deliver the homily, the Vatican said. He is the dean of the College of Cardinals, which will form a conclave next month to install the next pope. On Friday night, Francis’ coffin was set to be sealed in a ceremony and closed to the public. On Saturday morning, the funeral will begin with a procession in St. Peter’s Basilica, where the coffin will then be brought and set down. The funeral Mass will follow. The cardinals who attend will be recognizable by their purple liturgical garments, the Vatican said. After Mass, the funeral procession will slowly make its way to the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, a little over two miles away, where Francis frequently went to pray before an icon of Mary. Francis is the first pope to be buried outside the Vatican in over a century. Many popes are buried in the underground crypt beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. “The coffin will be welcomed by ‘the last ones,’ a group of poor and marginalized people who always had a special place in Pope Francis’ heart,” the Vatican said. “They will be the ones to give the final tribute before the coffin is carried to the altar of Saint Mary Major.” The burial will be private and is expected to end around 2:00 p.m. local time or 8:00 a.m. Eastern time. The last funeral for a sitting pope, John Paul II, was three hours long. Francis’ funeral looks like it will be even longer, around four hours. The faithful may begin visiting Francis’ tomb on Sunday, the day after the funeral, the Vatican said. The funeral kicks off nine days of mourning for the late pope, with Mass each day before the cardinals begin their work to select a new occupant of the Chair of Peter. How Is Francis’ Funeral Different? Francis’ funeral will look different from his predecessors. That’s because he himself changed the rules for papal funerals. Francis will be buried in just one wooden coffin lined with zinc rather than the three coffins some other popes were buried in, which were made of cypress, lead, and oak. The late pontiff will also be buried at the Basilica of St. Mary Major instead of St. Peter’s Basilica, the first pope in more than 350 years to be buried there since Clement IX. Francis said in his autobiography published last year that a pope should be buried “with dignity, but like any Christian, because the bishop of Rome is a pastor and a disciple, not a powerful man of this world.” He also asked that his tomb be “in the ground; simple, without particular decoration, and with the sole inscription: Franciscus.” Where To Watch The Vatican News’ YouTube channel will livestream the funeral and procession to the burial place. A number of other news outlets and streaming services also plan to livestream the funeral.

President Donald Trump said Friday that Russia and Ukraine were “very close” to a peace deal, and called for top leadership of the countries to “finish it off.” Trump made the comments on Truth Social as he landed in Rome to attend the funeral of Pope Francis. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow on Friday to speak with President Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials and push for a peace deal. “Just landed in Rome,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine. They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’ Most of the major points are agreed to. Stop the bloodshed, NOW. We will be wherever is necessary to help facilitate the END to this cruel and senseless war!” That post came just hours after he called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a mineral deal with the United States, saying that he was “at least three weeks late.” “Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has not signed the final papers on the very important Rare Earths Deal with the United States,” he posted. “It is at least three weeks late. Hopefully, it will be signed IMMEDIATELY. Work on the overall Peace Deal between Russia and Ukraine is going smoothly. SUCCESS seems to be in the future!” The deal over rare earth minerals was supposed to be signed months ago, but came to a standstill in February after Zelensky was asked to leave the White House following a contentious meeting with Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Last week, several Ukrainian officials signaled that the country was coming close to finalizing the agreement. At the same time, Trump has pushed both Zelensky and Putin to stop the hostilities and come to the negotiating table. Witkoff’s arrival in Russia came after Ukraine was hit with a pair of deadly air strikes this week and Russian Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a high-level military official, was killed in a car bombing in Balashikha. Before Witkoff’s arrival, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told CBS News that his country “ready to reach a deal” on Ukraine. “The President of the United States believes, and I think rightly so, that we are moving in the right direction,” he said. “The negotiations continue, and until the end of the negotiations, we cannot disclose what it is about.” As he was leaving for Rome, Trump said that he thought negotiations with the two countries were “coming along,” but added that they were “very fragile” at the moment. While en route to Rome, Trump declined to tell reporters on board Air Force One whether he would be meeting with Zelensky while at the funeral. Trump also said that he would soon be talking to Witkoff about how his meeting with Putin went and said he hadn’t heard about the car bomb assassination of Moskalik. “He’ll be calling me,” Trump said, according to a transcript provided by the White House foreign pool service. “They just left the meeting. I haven’t been briefed yet. But, he had — I hear, a pretty good meeting.”

When it comes to the United States and our allies, one of the great failures of American foreign policy since the end of World War II is this bizarre idea in the United States that if our allies are imperfect, it somehow makes sense to abandon them.  This is what we did in Vietnam. Our allies were imperfect, so we abandoned them, and then the Viet Cong took over. The same thing happened in Afghanistan, where our allies were seriously imperfect. And by imperfect, I mean there were a lot of terrible people involved in the Northern Alliance, along with tremendous corruption in Afghanistan’s government. The Taliban, it turns out, were significantly worse.  So when it comes to determining what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine and what should happen next, the question is less about whether Ukraine is perfect. It certainly is not. The questions are: What exactly does Russia want? What is in America’s best interest? I can tell you what is not in America’s best interest: a larger, more powerful Russia. In determining how to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war that originally broke out in 2014 with the Russian takeover of the Donbas and Crimea, and then was reignited by the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, it’s simply not enough to try to figure out what the “rational middle ground” looks like.  What the Trump administration is currently trying to do is find a solution. Well, you can find a solution, but unless you have a way to actually implement the solution, any solution you propose is meaningless. No matter how hard you try, you cannot impose the solution from the outside in the way the United States would if, for example, we had boots on the ground — and we don’t want boots on the ground. That means you somehow have to get the Russians to the table. Both sides need to be at the table. The Ukrainians are at the table. Right now, however, the Russians are not at the table. America is not the dominant force in the region, nor do we want to be. However, the Ukrainians being at the table means it’s now time for the Russians to come to the table. So, how do you get them there?  As Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned in our interview, he’s already agreed to an immediate three-day ceasefire. The Russians have not. He’s already agreed to a rare earth minerals deal with the United States that is heavily slanted toward the United States. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show We already know what the Ukrainians want. They want the Russians to stop the war. Again, Ukrainians did not start this war — they did not cross the Russian border. They want security guarantees, more durable security guarantees than the ones they gave in 1994 to give up their nuclear weapons. The Ukrainians want security guarantees that are material realities, not just promises. The Ukrainians have already figured out that European and American promises tend to fade over time. They gave up their own nuclear weapons for a promise that the U.S. and the UK would respect Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, and it didn’t work out very well for them. The Ukrainians want the freedom to pursue a closer relationship with the EU and NATO. That makes sense because the Russians continue to press while the Ukrainians want to press back the other way. President Zelensky basically wants what happened at the end of the Korean War: an armistice. In 1953, South Korea and North Korea drew a line and created a demilitarized zone. They agreed to a cessation of hostilities and repatriation of peace. Then the war ended. Officially, the war is still active but in practice the war ended because North Korea understands that if it crosses the South Korean border, it will be obliterated, partially because of the American troops stationed on that border. Now, to be clear, the Ukrainians are not asking for American troops to be stationed on their border, but they’re ready for an armistice today. They do want security guarantees. We know what they want. They’re at the table. The real question in all of this, the question that people do not want to ask, is what exactly do the Russians want? What would bring the Russians to the table? Well, we actually know what the Russians want. According to a speech Vladimir Putin gave last June, he wants: No NATO membership for Ukraine, ever. Ukrainian recognition of Crimea and Donbas as Russian territory. Ukraine’s demilitarization and what he calls “Denazification.” What he really means is he wants the installation of a puppet regime in Kyiv and the lifting of all anti-Russia sanctions. That’s just called surrender. Now, Ukraine can’t surrender her entire government and autonomy and live at the whim of Vladimir Putin, who has literally killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians in an aggressive war and kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia. So again, I ask, what would get Russia to the table? Now, Steve Witkoff is supposedly a magical negotiator. President Trump has deployed him to Iran, Gaza, and now Ukraine, and seems to think that either Ukraine is the problem or that Russia can be wheedled into dropping its core demands, and that if you tweet hard enough at them, Vladimir Putin will suddenly become friendly. Witkoff and the administration are now threatening to walk away from negotiations if the two sides don’t come together. This misses the entire point. Russia would love for that to happen. They want the war to continue, because when Russia says they want negotiation, that’s code for they want a continuation of the war. What they want is either to take giant chunks out of Ukraine until they eat the whole thing over time, or they want the war to continue until the West gives way. Why? Because Ukraine is extraordinarily key to Russia’s entire vision of itself as an empire. And that empire is geared in absolutely irremediable fashion against the United States of America.