Yahoo Finance A cocktail party from hell: in court with Ghislaine Maxwell, the society princess
Week one of the much anticipated New York trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-lover saw her big-money defence lawyers trying to outmuscle an underpowered prosecution.
The lady in the white mask is quite the gracious host, mwah-mwahing her pals, hugs-a-go-go, writing thoughtful little Post-it notes, blessing her set with her exclusive attention. Only this is not a gathering of socialites over canapés, but a child sexual abuse trial, and her friends are fancy lawyers, and the people who once served and allegedly serviced her and her ex-lover Jeffrey Epstein, body and soul, seem to be in no mood for mwah-mwah.
Welcome to the cocktail party from hell, or to give the proceedings their proper name, the trial of the United States of America v Ghislaine Maxwell. Staged in the grand US federal court building in a half-empty Manhattan, it is a grimly fascinating study, if you side with the defence, in false memory syndrome and gold-digging.
Or, if you favour the prosecution, how power and money robbed a whole series of victims – each more child than woman – of their innocence and pretty much got away with it. Until, perhaps, now.
Maxwell’s defence lawyer Bobbi Sternheim pooh-poohed the prosecution as nonsense from the get-go, grabbing the best zinger of the opening bout: “Ever since Eve has been blamed for tempting Adam with an apple, women have been blamed for things men have done… She is not Jeffrey Epstein. She is not anything like Jeffrey Epstein.”
Her lawyers are good: they swagger well for the big money she is paying them. The prosecution are younger, thinner, paler, mostly women. Their prose is flatter.
To set the scene, here is the backstory to the trial. Maxwell is the daughter of the late Robert Maxwell – mad, rich and a monster who abused everyone around him, including his ninth child, Ghislaine.
Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, on 5 November 1991. Disgrace followed when it emerged that the tycoon had stolen about £400m from the Mirror Group’s pensioners.
Overnight, Maxwell lost her access to private jets and helicopters and limousines and fancy dinner parties. She fled London to New York and found Epstein. He was the second monster in her life. She got it all back – the private jets and helicopters and limousines and fancy dinner parties with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump etc. And in return, all she had to do, the prosecution alleges, was to find him fresh children.
Maxwell loved Epstein from when they first met in 1991 to the late 1990s when they split up but she carried on running his life for some years after. The last known photo of the two of them together is in 2005.
After Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019, she ran for the hills, to avoid the prying media, her friends said. To the US authorities, she was hiding from them, and after almost a year they tracked her down to the “boonies” in New Hampshire.
She has spent the last 500 days or more in prison awaiting trial in a cell 6ft by 9ft, the lights on, the peephole clicking open every 15 minutes or so and no one at all to mwah-mwah.
Was Maxwell a handmaiden to child sexual abuse? Her defence is both that she had no idea what was happening and that it never happened at all.
The first witness in the case for the prosecution was Epstein’s pilot Larry Visoski, a deep-voiced come- fly-with-me who recalled high-profile passengers such as Andrew Windsor, Bill Clinton, the astronaut John Glenn and actor Kevin Spacey.
Visoski was pretty artful in his answers, saying he never saw any sexual abuse or any signs of it whatsoever. But the man who flew the Boeing nicknamed the “Lolita Express” did say that he saw two very young women in the company of Epstein and Maxwell, one of them being Virginia Roberts. She in 2001, when aged 17, was photographed by Epstein next to Maxwell and Windsor, his arm around her bare waist, in London. Windsor is also known as Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. Roberts – now Virginia Roberts Giuffre – is not going to be a witness in this trial, nor Windsor charged.
The second very young woman the pilot identified was the next witness, anonymised as “Jane”. More than two decades on, she is still a woman of stunning beauty and elegant detachment. Her evidence was that she first came across Epstein and Maxwell in the summer of 1994, when she was eating an ice-cream at a holiday camp in Michigan.
Her father had died the previous year, her family was poor, her relationship with her grieving mother troubled. She lived in Palm Beach – trailer-park land – and Maxwell and Epstein were delighted at the coincidence because they, too, had a home in Palm Beach (where the rich people live). Maxwell acted the role of an “older sister”, took her to the movies, went swimming with her in Epstein’s pool, joked about sex, asked whether Jane had a boyfriend.
Soon Epstein made his move: “He pulled me on top of himself and proceeded to masturbate on me. I was terrified and felt gross and I felt ashamed.” She was 14.
Once induced into what, to me, sounds like a child sex cult, Jane did as she was told. She said that Maxwell and Epstein would lead her up the circular stairwell in their Palm Beach home and demonstrate how Epstein liked to be massaged. Maxwell sometimes touched her breasts, Jane said: “I felt ashamed.”
As Jane spoke, Maxwell, restless, would put on and take off her reading glasses, lean forward and pass Post-it notes to her lawyers.
Then it was their turn to pull the wings off this awkward butterfly. They say that Jane and other accusers received big money from a $121m (£90m) fund set up by Epstein’s estate to compensate victims, implying the more the victims squeal, the more money they get. Sternheim called Jane a “very successful actress” who never accused Maxwell of wrongdoing before Epstein’s death.
When Maxwell attorney Laura Menninger asked whether she told family members and close friends about Maxwell’s alleged sexual abuse, Jane said: “I don’t know. I was very reluctant to give details. I didn’t want to share it with them in the first place.” Challenged by the defence team on why her memory of Maxwell’s abuse only occurred after Epstein’s death, Jane said: “Memory is not linear.” Jane is a famous actor in a big US soap opera. Menninger asked Jane: is an actor “someone who plays the role of a fictional character … someone who takes lines borrowed from a writer?” “Yes,” said Jane.
Menninger asked if Jane had played someone stalked by serial killers, an overly protective mother, a car-crash victim and a prostitute. “Not my favourite story line,” replied Jane bleakly.
Towards the end of several hours of cross-examination, Jane seemed to retire into herself. She kept on saying “I don’t recall”, as if she was being tortured and she just wanted it to be over. At the very end she was challenged once again about the $5m she got from Epstein’s estate. She replied: “I wish I would have never received that money in the first place.” She was crying.
Jane’s story struck every reporter I spoke to as entirely compelling, of somebody who does not tell the authorities until it is too late because she feared falling out with her mother over bringing the family name into disrepute. It does not mean what she is saying is not true but that she had a very good reason not to go there. Still, her seeming withdrawal into herself on the second day would have been seen by the defence as a “win”.
The third witness was “Matt”, a former boyfriend of Jane, who backed up her story; the fourth witness was a butler, Juan Alessi.
A squat, thick-set rubber ball of a man, in a black suit, yellow tie and grey suit, he worked at the Palm Beach house from 1990 to 2002. He, too, identified Roberts Giuffre and Jane as being at the house – and scores of other very young women over the years. He said that Maxwell told him: “Mr Epstein doesn’t like to be looked at in his eyes. Never look at his eyes, look in another part of the room and answer him.”
Alessi said Maxwell introduced a 58-page booklet titled “household manual”, a book on etiquette. The defence said: “You know they hired a countess to write the book?” Alessi replied: “I don’t know that, sir.” One bit read: “Do not eat or drink in front of Mr Epstein, Ms Maxwell and their guests … Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing except to answer a question direct to you. Respect their privacy.”
Alessi understood that to be “a kind of warning” and implied that Maxwell was a tough taskmaster: “It was slavery.” He confirmed he first met Jane in 1994. “I don’t know exactly how old she was but she appeared to be young. I would say 14, 15.” (Jane had said she was picked up and driven to Epstein’s house by a chauffeur – a “sweet Latin-American man”. Alessi is from Ecuador.)
Alessi recalled that he occasionally found sex toys on Epstein’s massage table. When the defence came to rip his wings off, Alessi fought back, hard. Challenged that he had stolen $6,000 from the house after he quit, he admitted it, but he stuck firmly to his guns that he never arranged sex massages for Epstein, only drove girls to and from under order. But no one complained? he was asked.
“I wish they had complained,” he said. “Then I could have done something about it.” The crooked butler had got his dignity back.
US law says that federal trials like this can’t be televised, and Covid restrictions mean that space in the court room proper is limited. I watched proceedings beamed live into an annexe at the court along with members of the world’s media.
Before the jury was brought in on Friday, Judge Alison Nathan – as sharp as tin tacks – heard legal argument, the defence asking for photos of ‘small’ schoolgirl uniforms not to be shown to the jury because they had been taken in his New York mansion and so irrelevant. The judge ruled in favour of the prosecution, finding that the photos proved his interest in underage girls.
What is striking about the prosecution case is that there are no tapes, audio or visual, of abuse, despite a lot of reporting suggesting Epstein was a blackmailer. What remains is the evidence of the individual witnesses – such as Jane, who claim they were abused – which can be pulled apart, and the circumstantial evidence of witnesses such as the pilot and the butler. Three more women who say they were abused when they were very young will take the stand as the trial proceeds.
Related: First week of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial gives look into Epstein’s life of luxury
But what will the jury make of all this? The #MeToo generation of young women does not appear to be represented at all, a result, perhaps, of the defence gaming the jury selection process. The jurors appear to be largely young men of colour and elderly, not well-off white women – the kind of people I see on my subway train. You can see the trick the defence has played, and then you reflect that these are exactly the kind of people who have spent their whole lives cleaning up rich people’s shit. If so, that does not bode well for the mwah-mwah princess in the dock.
That said, on Friday lunchtime I hurried off to get a bite to eat in a nearby coffee shop. Sitting at another table, on his own, was Maxwell’s brother Kevin. I last saw him in the flesh in 1996 when, reporting for the Observer, he and his older brother, Ian, were found not guilty of helping their father, Robert, steal £400m from the Mirror Group pensioners. They had fancy lawyers too. The Maxwells have a history of getting off and – all over the world, but especially in the US – money can trump justice.
The trial continues.
John Sweeney’s podcast is Hunting Ghislaine. His book of the same name will be published in the spring.
