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 underway in New York.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said at the start of Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial that the British socialite 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 vulnerable victims 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, as U.S. Attorney Damian Williams looked on from a spectator bench.
Maxwell “was involved in every detail of Epstein’s life,” the prosecutor said. “The defendant was the lady of the house.”
Even after Maxwell and Epstein stopped being romantically involved, the pair “remained the best of friends,” Pomerantz said.
She said Maxwell “helped normalize abusive sexual conduct” by making the teenagers feel safe and by taking them on shopping trips and asking them about their lives, their schools and their families.
When she finished, attorney Bobbi Sternheim said her client was a “scapegoat for a man who behaved badly,” just like so many women all the way back to Adam and Eve.
“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.
She called Epstein “the proverbial elephant in the room.”