The trial laid bare the family's dark secrets. Eva's lawyer delivered a scathing indictment of the photos, asking, "How can one open the legs of a four-year-old girl and take a snap?" and argued that the child was presented not as a child, but as a "disguised prostitute". In a heartbreaking defense of the indefensible, Irina's lawyer argued that the 1970s were simply a "more permissive" time.

For Playboy , the legacy of its October 1976 issue remains a stain. While founder Hugh Hefner often argued the magazine represented a sophisticated, liberated view of sexuality, the case of Eva Ionesco is a stark reminder of the dangers of the era’s permissiveness. The fact that an 11-year-old child was presented as a sexual object in a mainstream publication—and that the images were taken by her own mother for profit—remains one of the most disturbing footnotes in modern publishing history.

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In 2011, Eva Ionesco turned to cinema to process her upbringing and publicly reclaim her life story. She wrote and directed the critically acclaimed French drama My Little Princess ( Une petite princesse ), starring Isabelle Huppert as the eccentric photographer mother and Anamaria Vartolomei as the young daughter.