Partners in crime; Ghislaine Maxwell ‘groomed girls to satisfy Jeffrey Epstein’
As Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial opens, a court hears she enforced a ‘culture of silence’ to ensure Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minors never came to light.
Ghislaine Maxwell enforced a “culture of silence” in Jeffrey Epstein’s houses to ensure that his crimes never came to light, a jury was told today (AEDT) at the opening of her trial in Manhattan.
“Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend and right hand,” said Lara Pomerantz in an opening statement for the prosecution.
The daughter of the British press baron Robert Maxwell was not merely an aide to Epstein’s abuse of minors, Pomerantz said. “She was essential to this scheme. As an adult woman she was able to provide a cover of respectability.” Maxwell helped Epstein to recruit, befriend and groom victims, Pomerantz said. She said the teenagers targeted by Maxwell and Epstein were drawn from poor families and that the two preyed particularly on the children of single mothers.
Epstein was the owner of palatial homes in Manhattan, Paris and Palm Beach, as well as an entire island in the Caribbean, she said. She suggested that Maxwell acted to keep her erstwhile partner happy, “to ensure that Epstein’s sexual appetites remained satisfied.” She added: “These girls were just a means for the defendant to support her lifestyle.”
Maxwell, 59, is charged with conspiring to lure and “transport” four teenage girls between 1994 and 2004, encouraging them to travel to Epstein’s properties in New York, Florida and New Mexico. She also faces charges of sex trafficking in relation to one of those alleged victims, who says she was recruited in 2001 at the age of 14 and was paid to engage in sex acts with Epstein and to recruit other girls. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking in 2019 and took his own life in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial. Maxwell was arrested nearly a year later in New Hampshire and has been held in a Brooklyn jail, without bail, for 16 months. She denies all the charges.
The case opened with the story of a teenage girl who was given a pseudonym to protect her identity.
“I want to tell you a story about a young girl named Jane,” Pomerantz said, speaking from inside a Perspex cubicle with an air filter, allowing her to address the jury without her mask in the courtroom. “It was 1994 and Jane was spending her summer at a camp for talented kids.”
Pomerantz said a man and a woman were strolling past a picnic table where Jane was sitting with friends when they stopped; the man introduced himself as someone who gave fellowships to students. When they discovered that Jane was from Palm Beach, they asked for her phone number, Pomerantz said.
“What Jane didn’t know was that this meeting in summer camp was the beginning of a nightmare that would last for years. That this meeting would pull her into a relationship with a man and a woman who were each more than double her age. What she didn’t know then was that this man and woman were predators. What Jane didn’t understand then but what you will learn at this trial was that this meeting was the beginning of that man and woman targeting Jane for sexual abuse.”
She said Maxwell and Epstein won the trust of a series of teenagers. “They learnt about each girl’s hopes and dreams,” she said. “The defendant and Epstein promised these girls the world.”
She said Maxwell groomed them for abuse by befriending them and later by “normalising” sexual abuse by Epstein, by undressing in front of them and sometimes taking part herself. Maxwell encouraged them to give Epstein massage “which escalated as he turned over and touched the girls,” Pomerantz said. “The defendant helped Epstein find these girls. She helped him recruit girls for so-called massages, she manipulated the girls, groomed them for abuse.”
Once, during her opening, she turned in her small cubicle and pointed over her shoulder at Maxwell, who sat at the far end of the defence table in a cream jumper and a white mask. “The defendant and Epstein were partners in crime,” she said. Not only did Maxwell walk them into the massage rooms at his homes, which were decorated with pictures of naked women, “sometimes she was even in the room”.
Anticipating arguments from Maxwell’s lawyers, that she knew nothing of the abuse, Pomerantz said that they were “in her own words the best of friends” and that Maxwell was also his “second in command”.
“The defendant was the lady of the house. She ran Epstein’s properties.” Employees were instructed not to speak directly to Epstein. “Employees were to see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. There was a culture of silence. That was by design.” For “behind closed doors the defendant and Epstein were committing heinous crimes”.
Pomerantz said the operation grew more sophisticated, turning into a “pyramid scheme” in which young girls were paid to recruit others. Maxwell “knew exactly what she was doing. She was dangerous,” Pomerantz said.
Rising to give a statement for the defence, Maxwell’s lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, insisted that her client was being wrongly blamed for the acts of Epstein, and that the memories of her accusers had been “manipulated”.
“The charges against Ghislaine Maxwell are for things that Jeffrey Epstein did, but she is not Jeffrey Epstein,” Sternheim said.
Maxwell arrived in New York 30 years ago, an emissary of her father, who had just bought the New York Daily News. Before the year was out his body was found in the sea off Tenerife, the family had been consumed by a scandal and the tycoon’s youngest child, was adrift in America. She fell in with Epstein, who hired her to manage his homes, she has said in a deposition, while becoming a fixture in Manhattan society. Now she faces a possible sentence of up to 80 years and four women who say that she was complicit in Epstein’s abuses. Twelve New Yorkers will decide her fate.
Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, was at the court yesterday (Monday), though she is not expected to testify. “I never thought this day would come,” she told reporters. Ransome, who was born in South Africa to British parents, alleges that she was raped by Epstein on his private island.
The trial continues.
The Times
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