Ghislaine Maxwell case: What it was like covering the 'trial of a generation'

8:09 pm on 20 July 2024

Ghislaine Maxwell pictured in September 2013 in New York City.

Ghislaine Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking and grooming minors. Photo: AFP / Getty Images

Journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley witnessed some "very, very strange behaviour" while covering the trial of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

In The Lasting Harm, she writes an account of what it was like watching "the trial of a generation" and her own childhood sexual assault.

Maxwell, a British socialite, was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and grooming minors for her then-partner, financier Jeffrey Epstein. She has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Epstein, who was linked to some of the world's top politicians and business leaders, killed himself in a jail cell in 2019, while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial.

Despite the fervid global interest in the case, only four reporters were allowed into the New York courtroom each day - first come, first served.

Hellbent on getting a spot, Osborne-Crowley arrived increasingly early each morning. Then, a couple of days before the verdict, she started staying onsite 24/7.

"I left the courthouse about 7pm and I just sat outside all night to make sure that I was one of the first four the next day. And this is a New York winter. It was December, so, you know, not, not what I'm used to ... I got snowed on all night. You just have to sit there and wait.

"It was really important to me, not only to be there but to really properly be there, sitting a couple of feet away from her and seeing everything with a front-row seat. I wanted to really understand."

Maxwell was not allowed to talk to the journalists, but she tried to build a rapport with some "very, very strange behaviour", Osborne-Crowley says.

Maxwell winked and smiled at Osborne-Crowley and blew her kisses, and later drew a sketch of her, which she described as a "power play".

"She showed it to me from the defence table, just to kind of show that she was watching me.

"She knew that I was one of very few people who were in a position to watch her, it felt like her doing this kind of stick figure drawing of me and showing it to me was her way of showing that she was also watching me."

Lucia Osborne-Crowley's book examines the trial and the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Photo: Allen and Unwin

Our society does not have a good understanding of crimes related to grooming, coercive control and organised child sexual abuse, Osborne-Crowley says.

Telling the trial story her way was "incredibly hard work", partly because the descriptions of sexual abuse resembled her own experience.

"It became obvious that it was actually very, very, very similar to what I lived through, more so than I thought looking in from the outside, and that really affected me and humbled me.

"I guess I thought I was tougher than it turned out that I was, and I learned a lot from the survivors about that. They really helped me when I was struggling to deal with what it brought up for me so I'm really grateful to them for that."

The "web of people" Maxwell associates with are very powerful, Osborne-Crowley says, and they will never let her victims out of their sights.

"[She and Epstein] did promise them, when they were children, that if they ever tried to speak out about this, that that they would be watching and they meant it, you know, and they have people who are still watching."

Annie Farmer, left, and her lawyer Sigrid McCawley arrive at US District Court for the Southern District of New York on 28 June 2022, for the sentencing hearing of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Annie Farmer, left, was groomed by Maxwell and gave evidence at trial. She is pictured with her lawyer Sigrid McCawley ahead of Maxwell's sentencing hearing. Photo: AFP

Since Osborne-Crowley started covering the case, she says someone appears to have an eye on her, too.

"I had someone get into my phone just last week who was based in Palm Beach and luckily, I have a lot of security on my phone so the whole thing shut down. But someone successfully installed a piece of software on my phone where they could just watch everything that I was doing."

For legal reasons, Osborne-Crowley was unable to publish the names of people she claims to have evidence either knew about or engaged in abuse related to sex trafficking.

A group she describes as "tens of dozens of people who have a lot of money and a lot to lose" have not yet been associated with Epstein, who killed himself in his jail cell in 2019, she says.

"They want it to stay that way, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that they are not exposed."

Rather than focusing on the celebrities and powerful people involved in the Epstein/Maxwell story, Osborne-Crowley centres The Lasting Harm on the victims.

Distracting ourselves with the trappings of celebrity can be a way to protect ourselves from the worst parts of a sexual abuse story, she says.

"What I wanted to do with this book is take that away and ask people if they do have the capacity to engage with the parts of the story that are much, much harder to live with."