Defending a client charged with crimes modern society finds more terrible than murder, who might face the rest of her life in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence in New York opened with a nice lady who hadn’t seen anything, a travel agent who booked flights years after they mattered and a professor of BugsBunnyology – and none of them cut the mustard.
At the end of the defence’s first day, Maxwell was seen holding her hands up in despair at her fancy attorneys who have cost her, according to her own estimate, some $7m. Juries in US federal trials must be unanimous and there are legal grounds for knocking out some of the charges, but it looks bleak for Maxwell.
First on was Cimberly Espinosa, who had worked in Jeffrey Epstein’s Madison Avenue office from 1996 to 2002. But the key witnesses, “Jane”, who says she was then 14, “Kate”, then 17, Carolyn, then 13 or 14, and Annie Farmer, then 16, who say they were groomed by Maxwell leading to sexual abuse by her paedophile one-time lover, Epstein, never said anything happened in that office. Much of it was in his Palm Beach house, one he shared with Maxwell for years. In their cross examination, the prosecution asked Espinosa: “Have you ever been to Palm Beach?” “No.” “No further questions.”
The second witness was a travel agent who booked flights for team Epstein from 1999 onwards. Jane, Kate and Farmer all flew on Epstein’s dime in the mid-1990s – ie, his evidence could not knock out what they had to say. (Carolyn never flew because she was, in her mother’s view, too young at 14 to get a passport.) So the travel agent was irrelevant to the killer point a good defence would seek to make, that the victims and/or Epstein and Maxwell were in a different place when the abuse was supposed to have taken place.
The third witness was Professor Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and specialist in false memory. An expert witness in perhaps as many as 300 trials, she asserted that fake facts could be implanted in people: “False memories … can be very vivid, detailed. People can be confident about them, people can be emotional about them, even though they’re false.” She told the jury “emotion is no guarantee that the memory is authentic”.
Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz noted that Loftus was being paid $600 an hour by the defence and that she’d written a book, Witness for the Defense.
“You haven’t written a book called ‘Impartial Witness’, right?” said Pomerantz, whose voice is so high-pitched she sounds like a very scary bat.
“No,” said Loftus, glumly.
Pomerantz moved on to Loftus’s research. She got the professor to cite the catchphrase of a figure in one of her studies– “What’s up, Doc?”. Loftus had shown that 16% of people said they’d seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, a false memory because the fictional rabbit is a Warner Bros character, correct? Correct, the witness had to agree. Hanging in the air was the thought that 84% didn’t see Bugs Bunny at the wrong theme park. Next, we were on a second study, where Loftus and co had tried to implant the false memory of people having had a rectal enema. No one did so, the point being that people remember trauma clearly. False memory did not have a good day in court. No wonder Maxwell seemed distraught.
The second day was no better. The key witness for the defence was Eva Dubin, a former Miss Sweden, ex-girlfriend of Epstein and still good friend of Maxwell.
Jane had said that she had taken part in orgies with a woman called Eva. One of Maxwell’s lawyers, Jeffrey Pagliuca, asked: “Have you ever been in a group sexual encounter with the person that we are calling Jane?”
“Absolutely not,” Dubin replied.
Prosecutor Alison Moe asked, her voice oozing sarcasm: “Do you know the first names of everyone Jeffrey Epstein has ever met?” No, she replied.
Maxwell spoke to the court to say that the prosecution had not proved their case beyond reasonable doubt, so there was no reason for her to testify. And that was the end of the defence case.
In the lift on the way out, I was holding forth to some other reporters, saying that the reason there is no defence is because there is no defence: that is, Ghislaine Maxwell is guilty. Then the lift door opened and her sister Isabel Maxwell got in and we all fell silent. The trial – and the tragedy – continue.
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.