At Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, it’s all about Epstein, Epstein, Epstein...
In the first nine days of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, one name has been uttered more than any other: Jeffrey Epstein.
He is, as Maxwell’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said in her opening statement, “the proverbial elephant in the room.”
The disgraced financier who was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell in August 2019 had been mentioned one-third more times than his former girlfriend, according to a Miami Herald analysis of court transcripts leading into Thursday’s resumption of the trial.
In total, Epstein was mentioned more than 2,200 times as prosecutors made their case against Maxwell, who faces six charges related to the sex trafficking of minors. The British socialite was mentioned just under 1,700 times in that same period, including references to her as the defendant and solely by her first name.
Maxwell is accused of recruiting and grooming girls as young as 14 between 1994 and 2004, but Epstein is the one accused of committing most of the acts of sexual abuse that form the basis for the six charges she faces. And his mansions in Palm Beach and New York, private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, New Mexico ranch and private jets are the settings for many of the sexual encounters described during the trial.
The disparity in mentions doesn’t come as a surprise to former prosecutors.
“There’s a concept in criminal defense known as the empty chair defense,” said Barbara McQuade the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. “It’s always convenient for the defendant to point to the empty chair and say ‘He’s the real bad guy.’”
Maxwell’s lawyers wasted no time in doing exactly that, drawing a distinction between the two immediately in Sternheim’s opening statement.
“The charges against Ghislaine Maxwell are for things that Jeffrey Epstein did, but she is not Jeffrey Epstein, she is not like Jeffrey Epstein, and she is not like any of the other men, powerful men, moguls, media giants who abuse women,” Sternheim said. “Epstein is not on trial, but his name and his conduct,as you have already heard, will be mentioned throughout this trial.”
Maxwell’s team has continued to make the argument throughout the case, drilling down on prior statements by the four accusers who have testified in the case in which they hardly mentioned Maxwell, or didn’t mention her at all.
But it isn’t just Maxwell’s lawyers.
In her opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz mentioned Epstein 94 times compared to five references to Maxwell by name and 80 references to Maxwell as the defendant.
While the prosecution’s case has included searing testimony from four accusers who described Maxwell’s efforts to befriend them and normalize them to sexual activity with Epstein, prosecutors have also struggled at times to establish the importance of Maxwell’s role in the alleged sexual trafficking enterprise in which Epstein sat at the top.
“She has been portrayed in the media and in opening statements as his right hand,” said Jill Steinberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Department of Justice official with experience in child exploitation cases. ”I think some of what’s coming out is not entirely reflective of that. It almost makes her seem not terribly important.”
But Steinberg points out that while Maxwell’s case seems extraordinary — a picture of Maxwell and Epstein visiting Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral estate was introduced as evidence, for example — her role in the alleged enterprise is very ordinary.
“It’s actually not uncommon to have women in this role in a sex trafficking operation,” she said. “It makes sense to have someone like Ms. Maxwell, who can relate to the victims.”
Sometimes female recruiters are what is referred to as “bottoms,” says Meredith Dank, a research professor at New York University who studies sex trafficking.
These women often start out as victims and then work their way up the ladder, particularly in situations in which multiple women are part of the sex trafficking network.
“That’s where they’ll typically have a bottom who takes care of the day-to-day management,” Dank says.
While some of these so-called “bottoms” point to their past victimization as a mitigating factor in criminal proceedings, it doesn’t seem as though that would apply in Maxwell’s case.
Sternheim suggested that Maxwell was taken in by Epstein, who she described in her opening statement as “like a 21st century James Bond,” radiating charm and charisma, but Maxwell’s defense has stopped short, so far, of painting her as one of Epstein’s victims.
As Maxwell’s team began its formal defense, one thing was certain: Epstein’s name would continue to ring out through the Manhattan courtroom.
This story was originally published December 16, 2021 at 10:45 AM.
