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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am

When Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to twenty years jail for sex trafficking crimes, journalist and writer Lucia Osborne Crowley was there in the courtroom.

She watched on as Ghislaine Maxwell – a British socialite, and close associate of Jeffrey Epstein – waited to hear her fate. And she listened, as her victims testified to the harm inflicted by Maxwell’s predatory actions.

But the more Lucia learned, the more she came to understand the trial as a sham, with many other unnamed, powerful accused perpetrators associated with Epstein and Maxwell still protected, to this day.

Today, Lucia Osborne Crowley, author of The Lasting Harm, on the survivors of the crimes of Ghislaine Maxwell, and those who got away with it.

It’s Wednesday, July 31.

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RUBY:

Lucia, when people think of Ghislaine Maxwell, it's often Jeffrey Epstein who comes to mind and the flight logs and all of the power and the money that surrounded them. We actually don't often hear about the victims, the girls who Maxwell trafficked. Could you start by telling me what it is that drew you into their story?

LUCIA:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was really struck when I was at the trial because I was in a press gallery with people who were filing stories every day. So I'd get back to my hotel room every night and I'd read the coverage of the day, and there was just so little coverage of what the victims had actually said. We just end up being really focussed on perpetrators and trying to figure out who they are and why they are the way they are. And whether we mean to or not, you are by necessity taking that oxygen away from victims. So I really wanted to write something to counterbalance that.

RUBY:

Okay well, tell me then what it is that the victims actually said in that courtroom.

LUCIA:

Yeah so, they all told such a similar story about grooming and about coercive control and about how they were kind of hand-selected by Ghislaine based on their vulnerability. So a woman called Carolyn, she testified under only her first name to protect her identity, and her testimony was unbelievably powerful and she was completely raw with the jury. So she is a kind of paradigmatic example of what Ghislaine and Jeffrey would do. They would find people like Carolyn. So Carolyn grew up in a trailer park with a single mother who was a drug addict. She was in middle school when they recruited her. She was not being looked after at home. And also they didn't have much money coming in. And she had been abused by another adult male starting from the time that she was four years old. Ghislaine and Jeffrey would often talk to the girls and find out if this kind of thing had happened before, because they know it's much easier to victimise someone once they're already in that cycle. So all of these, kind of, biographical facts about Carolyn's life show you exactly what Ghislaine did. She found people who were not having their needs met at home, and that was often emotional and psychological and financial, and then they would come in and offer to meet those needs. So firstly, by kind of befriending them and gaining their trust, but also, of course, by helping them financially. And that's the thing that is so awful and so confusing about sexual abuse in childhood, and grooming in particular, because it leads us to feel incredibly confused because we finally trust an adult authority figure who swoops in and promises to save us and then they end up hurting us as well. That damage does not stop in childhood, and it continues all the way through adulthood and all the way through, in Carolyn's case, all the way through a person's life.

RUBY:

And so, sitting there in that court room over the four weeks of the trial, what did you learn about Ghislaine Maxwell and her motivations?

LUCIA:

Well, as I said, I decided really early that I wanted the book to focus on the victims. But what I will say is that just from being there, we did learn a lot about her, in part just from observing her. I mean, she was incredibly relaxed. She really did not appear, on a single day, of the five and a half weeks, like she was at a serious sex trafficking trial. It felt a bit like she didn't really think she should be there. She was just very blasé about the entire thing. And that was really jarring to me. And she was quite strange in the way she interacted with us. Like she drew me at one point on her legal pad and then kind of was kind of locking eyes with me and trying really hard to engage. I mean, she wasn't she wasn't allowed to speak to me, but she was trying really hard to engage with me in any other way that she could in this kind of charming way. And again, she was doing this at times while witnesses were testifying. It's like she wasn't even really paying attention sometimes to her own trial. So that kind of told me a lot about her lack of remorse and the fact that she really didn't feel like she had to be there. And then the other thing that we learned is what she didn't say in her defence. So it was open to the defence to make an argument that she was kind of pulled into this by Jeffrey Epstein and also that she had a history of having an abusive father and that that made her vulnerable to being drawn into this. She chose not to make that argument. She chose instead to just attack the credibility of the victims. That was her only defence. Her defence was, these women are lying and now they think they're going to get money from Jeffrey Epstein's estate. So they've made up a story about me being involved when I wasn't involved. Thirdly, we also learned about her character at sentencing because a defendant is allowed to speak at sentencing. It doesn't often happen, I didn't expect it to happen. And then all of a sudden she just got up in her shackles and she started walking towards the podium and we were really surprised. She spoke for 5 or 10 minutes and she completely failed to apologise.

RUBY:

Right so, what did she say?

LUCIA:

She said, I'm sorry for what Jeffrey did to you. It felt really unbelievable. I mean, she'd just been convicted of several counts of federal sex trafficking of underage girls, and she still wasn't able to acknowledge that she played a role in it.

Often when defendants speak, it counts in their favour, because often it means they're willing to get up and say that they're sorry. And Judge Nathan said, ‘I'm actually taking into account the fact that you decided to stand up here today and you still failed to express any remorse at all’, so it ended up counting as an aggravating factor rather than a mitigating factor.

RUBY:

And after the trial, you spent a lot of time with the women who gave evidence. And I wonder, after all of the time in the courtroom and with those victims afterwards, if you think that ultimately justice was served in this case.

LUCIA:

Great question. No, is the short answer.

RUBY:

After the break, the people using money and power to evade justice.

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RUBY:

Lucia, in your book about the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell you say that every single piece of your reporting over the last 12 months led you to believe that the Maxwell trial was a show trial. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

LUCIA:

I think it's very important that there has been at least one conviction in this case. You know, it would have been a much worse outcome if Ghislaine wasn't convicted, particularly given that the evidence was so strong and that that would have been a serious miscarriage of justice. But that's not to say that this is what justice actually looks like for this case because, what I learned in my investigative reporting, for the kind of three years after the trial and getting to know the victims so well, is that there are so, so many people who are implicated in this, either who knew about it or who enabled it, or who actually participated in abusing these girls, who have never been charged, who've never been indicted. Some of them are names that I can't say on air but you all know, because they've been associated with Jeffrey in the media, but some of them are names that have never been associated with Jeffrey.

They’ve never even had their lives tarnished by association with him. And they did do this. So, you know, this story's so far from over. This went on for three decades. This was a sex trafficking ring. At the moment, there's one person in prison who enabled the trafficking. But at the moment, under the justice system, there is no one that these girls were technically trafficked to.

RUBY:

Have you come to any conclusions about why there haven't been cases made against any of these other people who you're thinking of?

LUCIA:

I mean, I asked the FBI about this, because there are lots of allegations against the FBI in the book about failing to present evidence at the trial that they had access to. And they didn't deny any of the allegations, they just declined to comment on them. So I got nothing from them by way of explanation. It seems to me that there is enough evidence out there to indict several people, so I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is political will to do so. There are so many co-conspirators out there who really, really want to live out the rest of their lives without this being found out. So they have a lot of money, and they have a lot to lose. So they can do things like send a private investigator to follow me around for days and days and days. Which is what happened when I went out to see Carolyn. I was tailed, I was followed, I was threatened, and you know, the thing that Ghislaine used to always tell these women when they were teenagers was, if you ever speak about this, if you ever come forward, we will find you. We will be watching you and we will find you. And she has followed through on that promise.

RUBY:

Yeah. One small counterpoint to what you're saying, I suppose, is what you wrote in the book about how Maxwell didn't expect those teenagers who she trafficked to grow into the women who would then be capable of testifying against her in the way that they did. So that offers some hope, surely?

LUCIA:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of my favourite moments of the trial. It was so, so powerful. And it was in the reply closing submissions. And one of the prosecutors just said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but, you know, Ghislaine Maxwell thought these girls were beneath her, thought they were nothing. But what she didn't count on is that they would grow up. And that they would grow up into these brave survivors who are willing to come here and sit in front of you, the jury, and talk about the worst things that have ever happened to them. And that really encapsulated, I think, so much of what we're seeing in the world at the moment is that these perpetrators who prey on children, these cowardly perpetrators who prey on people who are so much more vulnerable than them, what they never, ever realise is that we do actually grow up, and we do have the power to come forward and speak up about what they did to us. And in Australia, we have so many brave people doing that. You know, I’m thinking about Grace Tame and Harry James and Brittany Higgins. And, you know, we have so many people proving that exact point, which is that those perpetrators were wrong when they underestimated us.

RUBY:

Lucia, thank you so much for your time.

LUCIA:

No, thank you so much. Thank you for your wonderful questions.

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RUBY:

Also in the news…

Australia’s third largest airline REX has stopped selling seats and appointed administrators, according to media reports.

The airline cited escalating costs as partially responsible for recent losses, with the airline posting a 3.2 million dollar loss in the first half of the 2023 financial year.

On Monday, the Australian stock exchange suspended REX’s shares following the news that Deloitte had been brought in to advise on the airline’s financial situation. REX is a vital airline carrier for Australia’s regions and the federal government says it is keeping a close eye on the situation.

And,

Forced marriages, forced labour and sexual exploitation are on the rise in Australia. The AFP has reported a 12 per cent increase in reports of human tracking and modern slavery over the last twelve months, with 390 reported cases compared to 340 the previous year.

While human trafficking of both adults and children was the most common crime reported, the data released by the AFP included four reports of slavery and one report of organ trafficking.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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