Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty of aiding sexual abuse by Epstein

Ghislaine Maxwell, the former companion to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted on Wednesday of conspiring with him over a decade to recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls.

A federal jury in Manhattan found Maxwell (60) guilty of sex trafficking and four other charges against her. She was acquitted of one count of enticing a minor to travel across state lines to engage in an illegal sexual act.

The trial was widely seen as the courtroom reckoning that Epstein never had because he was found dead in a Manhattan jail August 2019 while awaiting his own trial.

The verdict came late on the afternoon of the jury’s fifth full day of deliberations. After the jury sent a note saying it had reached a decision, Maxwell, wearing dark clothes and a dark-coloured mask, was ushered into the courtroom and sat at the defence table. She poured water from a plastic bottle into a cup and took a sip.

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The jurors filed into the room at 5.04pm. “Madame foreperson, has the jury reached a verdict?” Judge Alison J Nathan asked. “We have,” the forewoman said.

The judge then read the verdict aloud: guilty on five out of the six counts. Maxwell touched her face, poured water again into a cup and again took a sip. She rose as the jurors left the room and left the courtroom quickly without speaking to her lawyers.

Four women

Once expected to last up to six weeks, Maxwell’s trial moved quickly as the government pared its witness list and presented a case over 10 days that centred on four women who testified they had been abused by Epstein as teenagers. Two of the women testified that Epstein started engaging in sex acts with them when they were only 14 years old: One said Maxwell was sometimes present in the encounters, and the other said Maxwell had molested her directly by touching her breasts.

The accusers depicted Maxwell, a former socialite, as a kind of mentor and big sister – a picture of elegance and sophistication, one recalled – who took them shopping and to the movies in what prosecutors said was a ploy to build trust. Then she played a key role normalising sexualised massages with Epstein that, in some cases, led to years of sexual abuse.

“Ms Maxwell was a sophisticated predator who knew exactly what she was doing,” a prosecutor, Alison Moe, told the jury in closing arguments last week. “She manipulated her victims and groomed them for sexual abuse.”

The verdict was largely a rejection of Maxwell’s defence, which centred on an argument that government’s case was based on flimsy evidence, prosecutors’ animus toward Epstein and the inconsistent accounts of women who were motivated by money to point the finger at Maxwell.

Defence strategy

Throughout the trial, Maxwell’s lawyers sought to raise doubts about the testimony of her accusers, emphasise the distance between her and Epstein and criticise how the investigation was conducted.

“The government wants you to speculate, over and over,” a lawyer for Maxwell, Laura Menninger, told the jury during closing arguments last week. She said Maxwell was on trial because of her relationship with Epstein. “Maybe that was the biggest mistake of her life, but it was not a crime,” she said.

Epstein (66) was found dead in a jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and the New York City medical examiner ruled he had taken his own life. Even in death, however, he has loomed over Maxwell's trial.

His name surfaced repeatedly in testimony and exhibits, and her lawyers spent much of the trial trying to distance their client from Epstein, who was once also her boyfriend and is now seen as one of the most notorious sex offenders in modern American history. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times