NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial adjourned abruptly Thursday morning with the judge announcing that one of the lawyers in the case was ill and needed medical attention.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan said there was no indication the illness was COVID-related. The trial is expected to resume Friday, with the last witnesses for the prosecution testifying.
The government’s case is ending well ahead of schedule, and the defense is expected to open its case Thursday, Dec. 16, after a break.
Maxwell, 59, faces charges of recruiting and helping Epstein sexually abuse and traffic underage girls. In some cases, she is accused of participating in the abuse. She has denied all charges.
Maxwell’s lawyers maintain that the British socialite is being persecuted for the crimes of her ex-boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, a New York financier who sexually exploited and assaulted more than 100 girls and women over three decades. Epstein, 66, died in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in New York. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple, women have been blamed for the bad behavior of men, and women are often villainized and punished more than men ever are,“ defense attorney Bobbi Sternheim told the jury on the first day of trial.
“The charges against Ghislaine Maxwell are for things that Jeffrey Epstein did, but she is not Jeffrey Epstein, she is not like Jeffrey Epstein, and she is not like any of the other men, powerful men, media giants, who abuse women.”
But the accusers who testified thus far in the case have described Maxwell as a critical player in Epstein’s sex crime scheme — as someone who helped find vulnerable girls who needed money, then grooming them to be abused by Epstein.
The narrative presented by prosecutors is that between 1994 and 2001, Maxwell was Epstein’s “No. 2” — the person who facilitated his obsession with middle- and high-school girls and women barely out of their teens. She and others who worked for Epstein told the girls that they were being hired to give Epstein, a multimillionaire, massages in his Palm Beach, Florida, home.
In reality, the massages were a ruse to lure girls to be molested and assaulted by Epstein.
The case is complex, in part because the events charged in the case happened decades earlier, and the victims’ recollection of them has faded over the years. Maxwell’s defense has repeatedly pointed to inconsistencies between their trial testimony and statements that they gave years before to the FBI and in civil depositions.
In some cases, the victims admitted that they failed to even mention Maxwell’s name in their first interviews with law enforcement.
Experts say it’s common for victims of sexual abuse to not recall exact details of events, and for them to initially even deny that the abuse happened.
Two of the alleged victims in the case — who say they were 14 when they were abused — said they were ashamed to admit to authorities what had happened, or that they were afraid. In time, however, they grew to trust prosecutors with the full story of the abuse.
Earlier Thursday, prosecutors called a FedEx employee who verified shipping records for packages that one of the accusers in the case, “Carolyn,” claimed she received from Epstein when she was 14. Carolyn, who is using only her first name, said she received lingerie from Victoria’s Secret from New York and a book called “Massage for Dummies.”
Tracy Chapell of FedEx testified that the packages were sent to Carolyn from Epstein’s FedEx account — and were sent not by Maxwell, but by two of Epstein’s assistants, Cecelia Stein and Sarah Kellen.
That opened to door for defense attorney Jeffrey Paglicua to point out to the jury that Maxwell didn’t send the packages, even though Maxwell had access to the FedEx account and was sending packages to other people around the same time.
Still, Carolyn had testified that it was Maxwell she gave her home address to — and that it was Maxwell who often called her to come and give Epstein massages.
Spencer Kuvin, a Palm Beach defense attorney who has represented numerous Epstein victims, said he wasn’t surprised that some of the accusers failed to mention Maxwell in early interviews with law enforcement.
“It just means that the police were focused on Epstein,” he said. “They were less focused on asking questions about Maxwell.”
Jill Steinberg, a former federal prosecutor and official at the Department of Justice with experience in child exploitation cases, said that during early proceedings prosecutors have struggled to reinforce the notion that Maxwell was truly Epstein’s top deputy.
“It almost makes her seem not terribly important,” Steinberg said.
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