Epstein's Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell is an
American-British Documentary miniseries revolving around Ghislaine Maxwell and
her association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It consists of
three episodes and premiered in the United States on June 24, 2021, on Peacock
and in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2021, on Sky Documentaries.
Episodes
No. Title Directed by Original
air date [2]
1 "Episode
1" Barbara Shearer June 24, 2021
2 "Episode
2" Barbara Shearer June 24, 2021
3 "Episode
3" Barbara Shearer June 24, 2021
As Ghislaine Maxwell’s Trial Begins, Epstein’s
Shadow Looms Large
Ms. Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial in Manhattan,
which starts on Monday, is widely seen as a proxy for the courtroom reckoning
that her longtime partner never received.
Benjamin
WeiserRebecca Davis O’Brien
By Benjamin
Weiser and Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Nov. 29,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial.html
On the
first floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan hangs an unusual art
exhibit: framed courtroom illustrations of terrorists, mobsters and corrupt
politicians with names like Yousef, Gotti and Silver who had all appeared
before judges there.
For a
while, one of the most notorious faces on display, in a corridor near a room
where prospective jurors gather, was that of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced
financier and sex offender.
But at a
recent hearing in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, whose trial on charges she
helped Mr. Epstein recruit and ultimately abuse young girls begins on Monday,
the government and the defense each asked that Mr. Epstein’s picture be removed
from the wall.
Judge
Alison J. Nathan agreed to have it done. But Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide
more than two years ago, will not be so easily erased from the trial of Ms.
Maxwell, his longtime partner.
“The shadow
of Epstein is going to loom large here,” said Moira Penza, a former federal
prosecutor in Brooklyn. “The case is obviously going to be about Maxwell, but
he’s going to be right at the center of it as well.”
Ms.
Maxwell, 59, the daughter of a British media mogul and a longtime fixture on
New York’s social scene, had been linked to Mr. Epstein as a girlfriend and
later helped him manage his homes and his social relationships.
Her lawyers
now face the challenge of trying to disentangle her from the allegations
against Mr. Epstein — even perhaps portraying her as his victim, legal experts
said. But the government will also have to tread carefully before the jury.
“The
prosecutors are certainly going to want to paint a picture of Epstein as an
evil man, because that’s necessary for the jurors to understand and be outraged
by her role in the scheme,” said Arlo Devlin-Brown, a former top federal
corruption prosecutor in Manhattan.
“But they
really have to walk a fine line,” he added, “between setting that stage and
going overboard — making the trial too much about Epstein and his conduct, and
not enough about Maxwell.”
Mr.
Epstein, 66, was arrested on July 6, 2019, and charged with recruiting dozens
of girls to engage in sex acts with him at his mansion in Manhattan and his
estate in Palm Beach, Fla. He paid them hundreds of dollars in cash for each
encounter, a federal indictment said.
Just over a
month later, Mr. Epstein hanged himself in his jail cell while awaiting trial,
the medical examiner ruled.
In
announcing charges against Ms. Maxwell in July 2020, prosecutors said she had
been a critical facilitator of Mr. Epstein’s conduct.
“Maxwell
enticed minor girls, got them to trust her and then delivered them into the
trap that she and Jeffrey Epstein had set,” Audrey Strauss, then the acting
Manhattan U.S. attorney, said at the time.
Ms.
Maxwell’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment on her client’s
behalf, but in a recent hearing, Ms. Maxwell told Judge Nathan, “I have not
committed any crime.”
A federal
indictment charged Ms. Maxwell had groomed girls to lower their defenses,
befriending them by asking about their lives, their schools and families and
taking them to the movies and shopping. The term “grooming” describes a
strategy that predators use to try to break down a potential victim’s
resistance to abusive conduct.
Having
developed a rapport with a victim, Ms. Maxwell would try to normalize sexual
abuse by discussing sexual topics, undressing in front of a victim or being
present for sex acts involving the girl and Mr. Epstein, the indictment said.
It said
that her presence “helped put the victims at ease because an adult woman was
present.”
Ms.
Maxwell’s lawyers have not publicly discussed their trial strategy, but shortly
after her arrest, when she was unsuccessfully seeking bail, they wrote to Judge
Nathan: “Sometimes, the simplest point is the most critical one: Ghislaine
Maxwell is not Jeffrey Epstein.”
Rachel E.
Barkow, a professor of criminal law at New York University School of Law, said
it will be a challenge for Ms. Maxwell “to try to somehow separate herself from
him, and make the case that she’s a different person and just because she has a
relationship with him does not mean guilt by association.”
Ms. Penza,
who led the prosecuting team that won the 2019 racketeering conviction of Keith
Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, said Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers might try to
suggest that she was a victim of Mr. Epstein, blaming him without fear that he
could rebut the assertion — a kind of “empty chair” defense.
“You
couldn’t have a bigger empty chair than in this case,” Ms. Penza said.
“Everyone in the room is going to be navigating the fact that Epstein is not on
trial and Maxwell is.”
Mr.
Devlin-Brown added that “the defense will need to be deft in their portrayal of
Epstein.” If her lawyers want to portray Ms. Maxwell as a dupe, he said, they
may focus on Mr. Epstein’s “manipulative traits, his ability to charm and fool
high-profile individuals from the worlds of politics, academia and commerce.”
Prosecutors
have already pushed back on a potential Maxwell-as-victim defense, calling such
an argument “baseless” and asking that her lawyers be precluded from making it
without first showing the judge how they would prove it.
“The
government’s yearslong investigation has not developed any evidence that the
defendant was victimized in any way by Jeffrey Epstein,” the government
recently wrote in little-noticed court papers.
The
prosecutors said that even before they presented Ms. Maxwell’s case before the
grand jury, they listened as her defense lawyers made various arguments trying
to dissuade them from charging her.
An Epstein
confidant. Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of a British media mogul and once a
fixture in New York’s social scene, was a longtime companion of Jeffrey
Epstein, who killed himself after his arrest on sex trafficking charges in
2019.
The trial.
The highly anticipated trial of Ms. Maxwell began on Nov. 29, 2021, in
Manhattan. Her sex trafficking trial is widely seen as a proxy for the
courtroom reckoning that Mr. Epstein never received.
The
charges. Ms. Maxwell is accused of recruiting and grooming minors — one girl as
young as 14 — for sexual acts with Mr. Epstein and others. She will be tried on
six counts, including transporting minors to engage in criminal sexual
activity.
The
prosecution’s case. Prosecutors say Ms. Maxwell psychologically manipulated
young girls in order to “groom” them for Mr. Epstein. The concept of grooming
is at the heart of the criminal case against her.
The
defense. Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers have sought to undermine the credibility of her
accusers and question the motives of prosecutors — efforts they have indicated
they would continue at trial. Ms. Maxwell has steadfastly maintained her
innocence.
“At no time
has the defense represented to the government that Epstein victimized the
defendant in any manner,” the prosecutors wrote.
And when
prosecutors more recently asked Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers whether they planned to
offer such evidence at trial, “defense counsel declined to answer,” the
government said.
In a tart
response to the government’s assertions, Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers suggested that
there was indeed evidence for such an argument.
“The
government should reread the many thousands of pages of witness statements,”
the defense wrote, “before asserting that it would be ‘baseless’ to claim that
Ms. Maxwell was a victim of Epstein.”
“The
government would like nothing better than for the court to require defense
counsel to have their hands tied behind their back and their mouths
duct-taped,” the defense added.
Whatever
the defense’s strategy, Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers also will be fighting a
perception that she is Mr. Epstein’s proxy — that her trial will be the one he
never had.
Mr. Epstein
first avoided federal sex-trafficking charges in 2007 when he negotiated a
secret deal with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami to plead guilty to lesser
state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution. He avoided another trial
when he died by suicide in 2019.
“The fact I
will never have a chance to face my predator in court eats away at my soul,”
one of Mr. Epstein’s accusers, Jennifer Araoz, said in a court hearing shortly
after Mr. Epstein's death. She had accused Mr. Epstein of raping her when she
was a 15-year-old performing arts high school student in New York.
The judge
in Mr. Epstein’s case, Richard M. Berman, had called the hearing after
prosecutors asked him to dismiss Mr. Epstein’s indictment because of his death.
Judge Berman did so, but only after giving nearly two dozen of Mr. Epstein’s
accusers a chance to be heard in court.
“Please,
please finish what you have started,” another of Mr. Epstein’s accusers, Sarah
Ransome, said at the hearing, thanking prosecutors for “pursuing justice on
behalf of the victims.”
As for the
picture of Mr. Epstein, who was sketched seated between his lawyers at a 2019
bail hearing, it was taken down as the parties requested.
“My sense
is both sides want to ensure there’s going to be a fair trial,” said Deirdre
von Dornum, the head of the federal defenders office in Brooklyn.
She said
prosecutors would not want the defense to later be able to seek a mistrial on
grounds a juror was influenced by the Epstein sketch. And Ms. Maxwell’s
attorneys would not want a juror thinking, “He’s so notorious that he’s hanging
on the wall.”
“It’ll
remind the jurors,” she said, “that his trial never happened and that he was
never brought to justice, so someone still needs to be.”
Benjamin
Weiser is a reporter covering the Manhattan federal courts. He has long covered
criminal justice, both as a beat and investigative reporter. Before joining The
Times in 1997, he worked at The Washington Post. @BenWeiserNYT
Rebecca
Davis O'Brien covers law enforcement and courts in New York. She previously
worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the
2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for stories about secret payoffs made
on behalf of Donald Trump to two women.
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