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By Kerrie O'Brien
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Despite extensive coverage of the sex trafficking committed by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley says there is a far darker, much bigger story yet to be told.
She is determined to reveal what is probably “the biggest sex-trafficking operation in a century”.
”I have names of multiple people who have never, ever been associated with Jeffrey Epstein, household names, people you would have heard of but who have never been tainted by association with him – who victims have told me that they were trafficked to, or that [they were] around and knew what was happening,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to report that because these very wealthy, very powerful people would sue for defamation in every jurisdiction the book is published in.”
Not surprisingly, her publishers weren’t willing to spend the money required to defend that.
It’s an example of how the law works differently for certain people, says the Australian-raised, London-based Osborne-Crowley. “If you have the money to sue for defamation in 50 different jurisdictions, then you essentially have the power to silence public-interest journalism. So there are lots of forces at play here that have kept this story very, very quiet.”
Each day of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in New York in 2021, the writer set her alarm for 1.30am to ensure she would get a seat in the court. Osborne-Crowley details the experience in The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, recently long-listed for the Walkley Book Award.
The 32-year-old was determined to bear witness and record proceedings, hoping to see justice served. Her observations about the trial, together with her own experience of abuse and its ongoing impact, as well as how victims of sexual abuse are perceived more broadly, are compelling.
Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Maxwell was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Epstein over a decade. In December 2021, she was found guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex-trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor.
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What we know about the high-profile case is highly sanitised, according to Osborne-Crowley: it was much more violent and many more people were involved. “All of those people – everyone except Ghislaine Maxwell and obviously Jeffrey Epstein who escaped his own trial in a different way – [are] walking free and living their lives, and not only living their lives, but living some of the best lives on earth because they’re some of the wealthiest people [in the world].”
Prince Andrew, who Maxwell introduced to Epstein, and Bill Clinton are two of the high-profile individuals who flew on Epstein’s private planes – as documented in the aircraft logs – as did Donald Trump, who was a friend.
Court documents from the first civil suit against Maxwell by Australian Virginia Giuffre in 2015 allege that Maxwell acted as a recruiter, an instructor, and in some cases, a participant in the abuse Epstein practised.
“The training started immediately,” Giuffre said in a video interview with the Miami Herald. “It was everything down to how to give a blowjob, how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants. A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself. Being a woman, it kind of surprises you that a woman could let stuff like that happen. Not only let it happen but to groom you into doing it.”
As revealed in The Lasting Harm, many women other than those who appeared at Maxwell’s trial spoke to the FBI about the couple’s offending but their accounts were ignored, with evidence of rape and abuse dating back years before the dates in the charges.
Cases like this are an opportunity to have important conversations about grooming, coercive control, predatory tactics, manipulation and the building of trust that goes on, Osborne-Crowley says.
It’s a process she knows only too well. Her gymnastics mentor started speaking to her about sex when she was aged nine, telling her he loved her like a daughter, and then escalating the abuse. She was raped at knifepoint by a stranger when she was 15.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO LUCIA OSBORNE-CROWLEY
- Worst habit? Definitely true-crime documentaries. Someone help me/someone please psychoanalyse this addiction for me.
- Greatest fear? Failure.
- The line that stayed with you? “The only way out of this is through it.”
- Biggest regret? Not using my voice to speak up for other survivors sooner.
- Favourite room? My writing room!
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? I Can Do It With A Broken Heart by Taylor Swift. No competition.
- If I could solve one thing... The way the criminal justice system is stacked against victim-survivors at every single stage of the process.
She would not reveal either of those experiences until a decade later. This is common. People who have been abused take a long time to disclose the crimes committed against them. There are many reasons for this, as she outlines in her book.
“Because I lived in a world that taught me I had done something wrong. Because I believed it was my fault …” she writes. “If you have kept a secret out of shame and fear of punishment, this does not mean it didn’t happen. If anything, this is evidence that it did.”
When she did finally disclose, she discovered specialists, doctors and therapists who had dedicated their lives to the science of trying to recover from trauma. “This was a world that I had absolutely no idea about,” she says.
“I just had no sense of the fact that something can happen to you as a child or a teenager and can live in your body and parts of your mind, even if intellectually you think that you’ve moved past it or suppressed it.”
“The neurobiology, the neurochemistry of that really fascinated me... I couldn’t believe how wrong I’d ben about something that was so present in my life.”
Osborne-Crowley’s life experience underpins her extraordinary coverage. Her first memoir, I Choose Elena, was published in 2020. It was followed by the Somerset Maugham Award-winning My Body Keeps Your Secrets in 2021, for which she interviewed 100 women and non-binary people about bodies, sex, self-harm, suffering, and survival in the aftermath of abuse.
Her intention in The Lasting Harm is to honour the women who were trafficked, who stood up and told their stories in court: theirs are the voices we’ve not heard.
“The victims feel that it is so unfair that the public has such a limited understanding of just how dark and sadistic this was, just how wide-ranging it was, and just how little political will there was from any of the authorities to actually expose the extent of this criminal ring,” she says.
“I really wanted to give them what they wanted, which was space and time to actually speak about what happened back then and how it felt and then also how it carried them into adulthood and how it affects them now.”
After the trial, one of the jurors revealed to Osborne-Crowley that he had been abused as a child. When she reported this news, Maxwell’s legal team seized on it and tried to have her conviction scrapped, arguing that the juror had not disclosed that information, and that they were biased because of that experience.
Having spent six hours with the juror, Osborne-Crowley says it was clear he was impartial and had gone over the evidence very carefully. “That’s what we want from jurors. He did such a good job … and then, because of this thing that happened to him ... he was all of a sudden being accused of some kind of moral failing.
“It shows just how quick we are to associate being the victims of this kind of crime with some degree of moral failing, either being liars or being non-credible or untrustworthy.”
The judge subsequently ruled that to say the juror was biased just because he had a personal experience of childhood sexual abuse would be tantamount to saying we cannot ever see people who had experience of abuse on juries for abuse trials. That is not the law, she said, nor should it be. That call was later affirmed unanimously by the Court of Appeal.
The issue of power is central to this story – power and money enabled access, and afforded secrecy. Maxwell grew up surrounded by very wealthy, powerful people. Her father was the media magnate Robert Maxwell, and she grew up in a world of extreme privilege.
“She probably did pick up a lot of information about how well-protected people in those circles are. Even her own father was committing crimes and stealing pensions from his employees and he was never brought to justice while he was alive,” says Osborne-Crowley. “She probably had an understanding that if you are the type of person that she is, you can get away with a lot more.”
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As for why Maxwell did what she did, that’s a far more difficult question. Throughout the trial, the prosecution argued the socialite genuinely thought these teenage girls were worthless.
The lawyers went on to say something Osborne-Crowley thinks about almost every day: “What the defendant didn’t count on was that those teenagers who she felt were beneath her would grow up to be the incredibly strong, resilient, brave women that you have heard from today.”
“Maxwell thought so little of these children and teenagers that she underestimated them and she underestimated them at her own cost,” Osborne-Crowley says. “That’s the best answer we have about why this happened, that she really felt because of the way she grew up and how she was treated and the people that she was around that she was so much better than these girls and that she couldn’t really see their humanity.”
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