NEW YORK — “You’ve got a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends,” Ghislaine Maxwell told one of the financier’s accusers when she was an underage teen, the woman testified Tuesday.
The woman, now in her 30s and using the name “Carolyn,” said it was Maxwell who greeted her at Epstein’s Palm Beach, Florida, mansion the first time she visited at age 14.
She told the jury in Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial that she was driven to Epstein’s house by a friend, Virginia Roberts, who told Carolyn that she could make “a lot of money” by giving Epstein, a rich man who lived on Palm Beach island, a massage.
In emotional testimony, Carolyn described how Maxwell introduced herself upon their arrival, instructing Roberts, today known as Virginia Giuffre, to “bring her upstairs and show her what to do.”
Carolyn was led upstairs to a large bathroom where Roberts proceeded to get naked, and asked Carolyn to do the same, she said.
Feeling uncomfortable, Carolyn said she took off everything but kept her bra and panties on.
Epstein then appeared and positioned himself face down on a massage table. The two girls massaged him for a time, and then Epstein flipped over on his back, and Roberts got on top of him and the two began to have sex.
“What did you do?” prosecutor Maurene Comey asked.
“I was just sitting on the couch,” Carolyn said, breaking down.
Carolyn said she didn’t have sexual contact but she was still paid $300 in $100 bills.
Afterward, Maxwell asked her for her phone number and often called her to schedule her for Epstein’s massages. It was Maxwell who sometimes paid her, Carolyn said.
Maxwell also urged Carolyn to confide in her about her troubled home life. She told Maxwell that she grew up with an alcoholic and drug-addicted mother and that she had been raped by her grandfather from the time she was 4.
Carolyn tearfully recounted how, with each visit to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, she was asked to do more lurid sexual acts, including group sex with Epstein, two of his “friends” and two girls whose names she couldn’t recall.
She estimated she was there “hundreds” of times from 14 to 18. By the time she was of age, she said it was clear Epstein didn’t desire her anymore because she was too old for him. Over the years, she said she brought him a handful of other girls, earning $600 for each one she recruited. But by then she was having trouble finding him young enough girls.
By that time, she said, she was routinely using the money she made to buy cocaine and pain pills, “anything I could take to block out” the sessions with Epstein.
Her testimony was damaging to the case of Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate who is accused of helping him sexually abuse girls and young women from 1999 to 2004.
More than any prior witness, Carolyn put Maxwell in the center of Epstein’s sex pyramid scheme — in which girls were recruited to give massages, and to find other girls to do the same — showing the trajectory of how it allegedly began with Maxwell and then continued under another female scheduler, Sarah Kellen, who has not been charged.
Carolyn said that Maxwell clearly knew how young she was because at one point the older woman wanted her to get a passport to travel with her and Epstein and she told Maxwell she couldn’t get one because of her age.
“I told Maxwell that my mom was messed up but there was no way she was going to let me leave the country,” she said.
She also described how Maxwell once walked into a room where she was naked and marveled at her body, touching her breasts, hips and buttocks. She excitedly told Carolyn that Epstein said she had a good body for him and “his friends.”
During cross-examination in the afternoon, Carolyn broke down sobbing as one of Maxwell’s lawyers, Jeffrey Pagliuca, grilled her for nearly three hours about statements she made during her court testimony and those she made to the FBI in 2007 and in a civil complaint she filed against Epstein in 2009. Pagliuca pointed out that Carolyn failed to mention Maxwell’s role in the abuse when she was questioned by the FBI and she didn’t name Maxwell in her civil complaint.
Carolyn said she was too ashamed to tell the FBI all the details — and she felt that the agents were focused only on Epstein, not on Maxwell at the time. She told the FBI that she did meet a woman with short black hair and an accent she didn’t recognize, but she didn’t tell them the woman was Maxwell.
“That was a bad day for me,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting the FBI to come to my house.”
She said she suffers from trauma and schizophrenia and sometimes hears voices that send her into a panic because she fears that someone may kidnap and traffic her children.
Pagliuca suggested that years of drug use had affected her recollection of events and he implied that she only recently named Maxwell as an accomplice to Epstein’s abuse because she wanted to collect on his estate’s Victims’ Compensation Fund. She received $2.8 million from the fund.
“Money will never fix what that woman did to me,” Carolyn cried out, stunning the jury. “What she did was wrong and she picked vulnerable young girls and trafficked them. I’m so petrified my daughters will be trafficked.”
Earlier, an FBI agent testified that more than 20,000 photographs were found on hundreds of computer discs seized during a July 2019 raid at Epstein’s New York mansion.
About two dozen photographs showing Epstein and Maxwell in loving embraces were shown to the jury. But other images said to be of naked women and girls were not shared with jurors.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges after a series of stories in the Miami Herald, "Perversion of Justice," sparked new interest in the long-dormant case. A month later, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, the victim of what was classified as a suicide by hanging.
After that, federal authorities turned their attention to Maxwell and she was arrested the following year. Her trial is in its second week.
Late Monday, prosecutors indicated that they would probably end their portion of the case by Thursday, and the defense will present its case starting Friday. There is no court Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week so testimony will resume Thursday, Dec. 16.
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