The slut-shaming – or something very much like it – of the four key witnesses against Ghislaine Maxwell and her late lover, Jeffrey Epstein is, almost, a thing of beauty, a dark wonder to behold. You’ve got to admire the way Maxwell’s multimillion-dollar attorneys break her accusers on the rack of their own human frailty. No one dare call it torture: we’re watching justice at work, the Ghislaine Maxwell defence team way.
In order of appearance witness “Jane” was challenged as a drug user from a wealthy but deeply unhappy home; witness “Kate” was a drug user with a troubled mother; witness Carolyn – to give her some privacy the court accepted her request to use only her real first name – had a single parent mother who was an alcoholic and a drug addict, who became an alcoholic and a drug addict herself, who left school when she was 14, who did not, said her ex-boyfriend Shawn “have the reading ability” to say Ms Maxwell’s first name, Ghislaine. So Carolyn called her Maxwell. Witness Annie Farmer – her full real name, was 16, the child of a divorced single mum but not herself broken, not at all.
The ages of the women when they say Maxwell helped Epstein sexually abuse them were Jane: 14, Kate: 17, Carolyn: 14 and Annie: 16. You might say there’s a pattern of behaviour by Maxwell and Epstein right there.
Carolyn said of the woman whose first name she couldn’t articulate, Ghislaine, that she booked her for sex massages with her lover and once came into the massage room in the Epstein mansion in Palm Beach and molested her: “I was fully nude and she [Ghislaine] came in and she felt my boobs and my hips and my buttocks and said that … I had a great body for Mr Epstein and his friends.”
Carolyn said that she gave Epstein about 100 massages, all of them sexual, all of them ending with him masturbating.
Shawn said of Carolyn, one of three girlfriends he says he pimped out to Maxwell and Epstein: “She was a child”, one who, “only had two jobs ever. She worked at Arby’s [a US fast food combine] and she worked for Jeffrey” [Epstein]. Carolyn’s grandfather raped her when she was four years old. Ten years later, she said she was sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell.
Enter a second Jeffrey, this one bearing the surname Pagliuca, one of the defence team at the Manhattan federal court trying Ghislaine Maxwell on six charges of, effectively, grooming girls and very young women to sate her millionaire lover’s paedophilia. Ghislaine Maxwell denies all six counts.
Pagliuca had great sport, crushing Carolyn’s spirit so that at one point proceedings had to stop while Carolyn just uttered heart-rending sobs. Pagliuca, with his bouffant grey curly hair a spitting image for another great American, Jerry Springer, read out Carolyn’s surname by mistake. Funnily enough, he’d got previous for this, also reading out the true first name of the first female witness, “Jane”. A famous actor in a long-running Hollywood TV soap opera, Jane had told the court she feared public disgrace if she gave evidence under her own name: “I’ve always just wanted to put this past me. I moved on with my life. I work in the entertainment industry and victim shaming is still very present to this day.”
So Pagliuca made the same mistake of helping anyone in court with half an eye work out the true identity of anonymised witnesses, twice.
What was striking about these serial verbal mishaps is that, on song, Pagliuca is extraordinarily fluent, brutal even, when flaying the skin of a woman who left school at the age of 14. He brought up a 2007 interview Carolyn had given to the FBI, before the infamous sweetheart deal that saw Epstein serve a farcically short time in prison for being a serial paedophile. The mechanics of this are worth noting: time and again Pagliuca would rattle out the bundle number, the document number “0005”, the page, the tab, the paragraph and then stick it to Carolyn, kind of suggesting that when there was a discrepancy in her evidence, suggesting without the articulation of it, that she had been lying then or was lying now.
Lost in the legal weeds, Carolyn started to retreat into her own misery, sometimes saying “I don’t recall”, sometime barking at him like a cornered animal, sometimes muttering a mute sob. Despite Pagliuca at his worst, she kept coming back at him: a wholly authentic human being.
The defence case proper will start this week but it’s obvious that their strategy is to paint Maxwell as a victim of the wicked Epstein. Pagliuca noted that Carolyn had been paid $3.25m from Epstein’s estate after the paedophile’s suicide. Pagliuca prodded Carolyn if there was an “incentive for you to stick to your story” after she got her money. Carolyn shot back: “The only thing Ms Maxwell was involved in was fondling my breast and my buttocks, and for that my soul is broken and so is my heart. Money will not ever fix what that woman has done to me.” And then she was lost in grief.
Not long afterwards, the prosecution put up a JP Morgan banker who set out that Maxwell had received $30m from Epstein when he was very much alive. A victim, perhaps, but a very rich one.
Shortly before the trial Rachel Johnson revealed how at Oxford she once saw “shiny Glamazon” Ghislaine Maxwell resting her “high-heeled boot” and fixing her “naughty eyes” on her brother Boris, now prime minister. Rachel concluded that it was “hard not to pity” Ghislaine.
I feel twice-sorry for Ghislaine Maxwell: first, because her father Robert was a monster; second, because the conditions in the jail in which she is being held on remand are grim beyond belief. But watching how her defence lawyers earn their big money, how they use their wits to trash sad and broken women, my pity for Ghislaine Maxwell shrivels with every passing day.
The trial continues.
John Sweeney is the host of two podcasts, Hunting Ghislaine, and Hunting Ghislaine, The Trial. His book, also called Hunting Ghislaine, will be published next year.