Prosecutor: Maxwell, Epstein were ‘partners in crime’
NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were “partners in crime” in the sexual abuse of teenage girls, a prosecutor said Monday, while Maxwell’s lawyers said she was being made a scapegoat for a man’s bad behavior as the British socialite’s sex trafficking trial got under way in New York.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said at the start of Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial that Maxwell and Epstein enticed girls as young as 14 to engage in “so-called massages” in which sex abuse came to be seen as “casual and normal” after they were showered with money and gifts.
The prosecutor sought to make clear to a jury of 12 that there was no confusion about whether Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion, was his puppet or accomplice. She described Maxwell, 59, as central to Epstein’s sex abuse scheme, which prosecutors say lasted over a decade.
“She was in on it from the start. The defendant and Epstein lured their victims with a promise of a bright future, only to sexually exploit them,” Pomerantz said.
Even after Maxwell and Epstein stopped being romantically involved, the pair “remained the best of friends,” Pomerantz said.
The prosecutor spoke from an enclosed plastic see-through box that allowed her to take off her mask as Maxwell, in a cream-colored sweater and black pants, at times wrote and passed notes to her lawyers.
Defense attorney Bobbi Sternheim said her client was a “scapegoat for a man who behaved badly.”
“She’s not Jeffrey Epstein. She’s not like Jeffrey Epstein” or any of the powerful men, moguls and media giants who abuse women, Sternheim said.
Sternheim said the four women who would testify that Maxwell recruited them to be sexually abused were suffering from quarter-century-old memories and the influence of lawyers who guided them to get money from a fund set up by Epstein’s estate after his August 2019 suicide in a Manhattan federal jail as he awaited a sex trafficking trial. “Accusers have shaken the money tree, and millions of dollars have fallen their way,” she said.
Maxwell — who once dated the financier — is accused of acting as Epstein’s chief enabler, recruiting and grooming young girls for him to abuse. She has pleaded not guilty and vehemently denies wrongdoing.