Who is Ghislaine Maxwell and what charges did she face in her trial?

One-time British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell spent her 60th birthday, Christmas Day, in one of New York’s most squalid and dangerous jails, as far from her privileged origins as one can imagine.

Maxwell arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn on July 6, 2020, but her trial for federal sex crime charges did not begin until November 29, 2021, after several bids for bail were rejected because the judge was persuaded that she was a flight risk.

The trial wrapped up sooner than initially expected, on December 21, and the jury’s deliberations stretched into the last week of 2021, although members of the jury were allowed to return home for the Christmas weekend.

Maxwell was charged with six counts related to what prosecutors argue were her actions in grooming and exploiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein, a disgraced billionaire hedge-fund manager and convicted sex offender, had pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges and was awaiting trial when he died in prison on August 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.

Maxwell pleaded not guilty to six federal counts: sex trafficking of a minor; enticing a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity; transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; and three counts of conspiracy.

She will face court on separate perjury charges at a later date.

The charges stem from testimony from four women who say Maxwell enabled and sometimes participated in their sexual abuse more than a decade ago when they were under 18.

But her defence lawyers argued at the start of the trial that Maxwell is a scapegoat for prosecutors denied an Epstein conviction.

“Ever since Eve was accused of tempting Adam with the apple, women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men,” lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said in her opening remarks.

“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.”

Who is Ghislaine Maxwell?

Born on December 25, 1961, Maxwell grew up in a 53-bedroom Italianate mansion in Oxford, England, the daughter of media baron Robert Maxwell. She went to Marlborough College School and later Oxford University. But in 1991, when she was 29, her life became embroiled in scandal. Her father disappeared from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of Spain’s Canary Islands. His body was later recovered in the Atlantic. His death was ruled an accident.

But investigators later discovered that Robert Maxwell had raided more than £460 million ($836 million) from his companies’ pension funds. His family was reportedly left broke.In 1992, Kevin Maxwell was reported to have declared the then-largest personal bankruptcy in United Kingdom history, with debts of £406.5million ($A739 million).

Ghislaine, left with a reported trust fund that paid $US100,000 a year, moved to New York City in 1991 to start anew.

She sold real estate, and was soon seen in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, who, according to The Telegraph Magazine, she had seen referenced in her father’s private papers as having been “particularly helpful to him in squirrelling away misbegotten funds offshore”. Epstein and Maxwell were reportedly boyfriend and girlfriend in the early 1990s.

Epstein described her as his “best friend” in a 2003 Vanity Fair profile: Maxwell was not on Epstein’s payroll but she moved into a $US4.95-million New York townhouse in 2000 bought by an anonymous limited liability company with an address matching the office of J Epstein & Co, and seemed “to organise much of his life”. This reportedly involved her managing his various homes around the world: a Paris apartment, a New York mansion, a ranch in New Mexico and a 72-acre private island, Little St James, in the US Virgin Islands.

She introduced Epstein to powerful friends, including former president Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. Together, the pair socialised with Donald Trump.

She reportedly distanced herself from Epstein after 2008, when he began serving an 18-month jail sentence for soliciting prostitution of a minor. She founded an ocean conservation program, The TerraMar Project, in 2012, which she closed down in 2019, following Epstein’s death. The project’s website described her not only as the project’s president and founder but also, “a licensed helicopter pilot, certified EMT, and a Deepworker submersible pilot”.

Maxwell was arrested by the FBI on July 2 in a mansion in New Hampshire.

What are the legal proceedings relating to Maxwell?

She was accused of helping the late Jeffrey Epstein to “recruit, groom and ultimately abuse” multiple girls, including one as young as 14, between 1994 and 1997, according to a federal indictment. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York charged her with six counts, including enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, two counts of perjury, and transporting of a minor, with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.

Maxwell’s separate perjury charges stem from statements she made in connection with a now-settled defamation suit against her, in which she denied knowledge of Epstein’s abuse of girls.

The Mann Act charges

Maxwell was charged with two counts of violating the Mann Act, which bars transporting people across state lines for illegal sexual activity.

Those charges relate mainly to the testimony of a woman known by the pseudonym Jane, who testified that Epstein first abused her when she was 14 in 1994, and that Maxwell participated in some of their sexual encounters.

Jane said that she travelled from her home in Palm Beach, Florida, to Epstein’s homes in New York and New Mexico, where she had sexual encounters with him. She said she travelled on Epstein’s private plane and on commercial flights, and that Maxwell assisted with the travel arrangements.

Maxwell also faces two charges of conspiring to violate the Mann Act.

The sex trafficking charges

Maxwell also faced one charge of sex trafficking of a minor and one charge of sex trafficking conspiracy. Federal law bars recruiting or transporting anyone under 18 to participate in a “commercial sex act.”

Those charges relate mostly to the testimony of Carolyn, the first name of a woman who said she was 14 in 2002 when she first had sexual contact with Epstein. She testified that Maxwell sometimes paid her hundreds of dollars after she gave Epstein erotic massages.

She also said Maxwell would call her to schedule massage appointments for Epstein and would sometimes send a cab or a town car to come pick her up at home and bring her to Epstein’s estate.

What is Maxwell’s defence

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. Her lawyers have argued that prosecutors are treating her as a scapegoat for Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on sex abuse charges.

They say the accusers’ memories have been corrupted over the decades and that the women only implicated Maxwell because they thought cooperating with prosecutors would help claims they made to a victims’ compensation fund run by Epstein’s estate.

Did prosecutors have to prove Maxwell knew what Epstein was doing?

In her closing argument, Maxwell defence attorney Laura Menninger said Epstein kept many secrets, arguing that prosecutors had not proven that Maxwell knew that Epstein was having sexual encounters with teenage girls.

In her rebuttal, prosecutor Maurene Comey countered, “Of course she knew”.

Still, prosecutors are not required to prove that Maxwell had specific knowledge of any crimes Epstein committed if they show that she deliberately took steps to avoid confirming key facts, according to an instruction US District Judge Alison Nathan gave jurors before they began deliberations.

What happened during the trial?

The prosecution: In her opening statement, prosecutor Lara Pomerantz called Maxwell a predator who manipulated girls and groomed them for abuse by Epstein, her employer and onetime boyfriend. Maxwell saw recruiting girls for Epstein to have sex with as a means to maintain a luxurious lifestyle, Pomerantz said.

“They were exploiting kids,” Pomerantz said. “They were trafficking kids for sex.”

The defence: Maxwell defence lawyer Bobbi Sternheim began her opening statement by citing the biblical story of Adam and Eve to argue that Maxwell, like many women before her, was being blamed for a man’s bad behaviour. Epstein killed himself in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell.

“Epstein’s death left a gaping hole in the pursuit of justice for many of these women,” Sternheim said. “She’s filling that hole, and filling that empty chair.”

The key witness: A woman known by the pseudonym Jane testified that Epstein first abused her in 1994, when Jane was just 14.

Maxwell sometimes took part in sexual encounters with Jane and Epstein, and acted as if it were normal, Jane testified.

“It made me feel confused because that did not feel normal to me,” she said. “I’d never seen anything like this or felt anything like this.”

The cross-examination: Jane acknowledged under questioning from Maxwell lawyer Laura Menninger that she did not initially tell the FBI everything about Maxwell’s involvement. She said later under further questioning by prosecutors that she was not comfortable sharing all the details.

“I was sitting in a room full of strangers and telling them the most shameful, deepest secrets that I’d been carrying around with me my whole life,” she said.

The massage table: Prosecutors displayed for the jury a green massage table that was seized from Epstein’s Palm Beach estate in 2005. Three of the four accusers said they gave Epstein massages that escalated into sexual activity.

Pomerantz called the word massage a “ruse designed to get young girls to touch Epstein”.

The photographs: Prosecutors showed the jury images depicting Maxwell’s and Epstein’s intimate relationship during the 1990s. The never-before-seen digital photographs showed Maxwell kissing Epstein on the cheek or rubbing his bare foot.

The testimony: A woman known by her first name, Carolyn, testified that Maxwell once touched Carolyn’s breasts and buttocks while Carolyn was nude and told her she had a “great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”

“Money will not ever fix what that woman has done to me,” Carolyn said, sobbing on the stand.

Jeffrey Pagliuca, a lawyer for Maxwell, asked Carolyn why she did not mention Maxwell in her initial discussions with law enforcement but implicated her later in a claim to a victim’s compensation fund run by Epstein’s estate. The questioning was part of Maxwell’s efforts to paint the accusers’ accounts as unreliable.

“You know that if any information you submitted is false, you can be in criminal trouble?” Pagliuca said, referring to the fund.

False memory syndrome: Elizabeth Loftus, a prominent psychologist, testified for the defence that people can confidently recount events that did not happen. Her testimony was part of the defence’s effort to argue that the accusers’ memories had been manipulated over time.

“When you have post-event suggestion or intervention, people get very confident about their wrong answers,” Loftus testified.

Maxwell’s only statement: Minutes before the defence rested its case, Maxwell stood up, and with Sternheim’s arm around her lower back, told US District Judge Alison Nathan that she was declining to testify in her own defence.

“Your honour, the government has not proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and so there is no need for me to testify,” Maxwell said.

Why do we keep hearing from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who is not among the alleged victims of Maxwell’s criminal trial?

That’s because a US federal court judge allowed the release of documents from a 2015 civil defamation case that Giuffre brought against Maxwell. Giuffre, an alleged victim of Epstein and Maxwell’s, claimed that Maxwell defamed her by calling her a liar for accusing Epstein and Maxwell of sexual impropriety. The case was settled out of court in 2017, in Giuffre’s favour, but Maxwell’s lawyers have been fighting to prevent the release of documents from it.

However, some 2000 documents from the Giuffre defamation case were released in 2019 – the morning before Epstein was found dead in his cell. The documents made headlines for, among other revelations, a list of powerful people who had travelled with Epstein, including then-president Donald Trump and renowned US civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz. (Dershowitz has said that he flew on Epstein’s plane a number of times but never in the presence of an underage person.)