Third Accuser Says Epstein and Maxwell Preyed on Her as a Troubled Teen

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-carolyn.html

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The 14-year-old girl was removing her clothing in the master bathroom of Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., home, preparing to give him a massage, she said, when Ghislaine Maxwell entered the room and touched her breasts, hips and buttocks. Ms. Maxwell told the teenager she had “a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends,” the girl — now a woman in her 30s — told a jury Tuesday in Ms. Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial.

Testifying under only her first name, Carolyn, she said she was sexually abused by Mr. Epstein more than a hundred times beginning around 2001 and in the years that followed.

In many ways, Carolyn’s testimony echoed the two accusers who testified before her: All three said they were unhappy teenagers when they were drawn into intimate conversations with Ms. Maxwell, who arranged massages with Mr. Epstein that led to sexual encounters. There were gifts, sex toys, invitations to travel.

But Carolyn was different.

Jane, the first accuser to testify, was a successful soap-opera actress who told the jury last week that she met Ms. Maxwell at a summer camp for talented youth. Kate, the second accuser, was a British model, actress and singer from a wealthy family, who said her first encounter with Ms. Maxwell was in Paris. They testified under pseudonyms, they said, to protect their careers and families.

In contrast, Carolyn was a middle school dropout who said she became addicted to drugs during Mr. Epstein’s abuse. She spent her teenage years in Palm Beach with her mother, whom she described as an alcoholic and a drug user. She was sexually abused by her grandfather starting at age 4 — an experience she said she spoke with Ms. Maxwell about. She later worked for an escort service and as a stripper.

Prosecutors say Ms. Maxwell, 59, helped to recruit and groom teenage girls for sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein, the notorious sex offender and financier who was her longtime companion. Mr. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial; Ms. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty and denied the accusations.

The difference between Carolyn and the accusers who testified earlier was apparent even in their voices. While Jane addressed the jury with the clear projection and composure of a trained performer, and Kate spoke with a crisp British accent, Carolyn’s voice during her testimony was halting and peppered with blunt anatomical terms.

Carolyn’s testimony provided evidence of the damage done to a particularly vulnerable girl — one to whom Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell did not apparently offer career support or the promise of a lavish lifestyle.

Carolyn’s testimony posed a new challenge for Ms. Maxwell’s legal team, which had portrayed earlier accusers as enamored of Mr. Epstein’s wealth and Ms. Maxwell’s charm, and who in some ways benefited from their patronage. But without the polish of the earlier witnesses, Carolyn presented an account of a hard life made more painful by Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell’s involvement.

At times, Carolyn appeared to grow impatient under cross-examination by one of Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers, Jeffrey Pagliuca, who pressed her to explain apparent inconsistencies in her accounts in civil lawsuits and F.B.I. interviews from more than a decade ago. She repeatedly said: “That’s not true,” or denied saying what had been written.

On her direct testimony, Carolyn admitted that she lied about her work as an escort during a 2009 deposition, and said she regularly took methadone to treat her opioid addiction and medication for her schizophrenia symptoms. Asked by a prosecutor why she had scarcely mentioned Ms. Maxwell in her decade-old accounts to law enforcement, Carolyn said: “I wasn’t asked about Maxwell.”

Ms. Maxwell is charged with the sex trafficking of Carolyn, who is identified in the indictment as “Minor Victim-4.”

Carolyn’s encounters with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell began when she was about 14 years old, she said, when a friend of her boyfriend’s asked her if she wanted to make money by giving massages to a man she knew. The friend, Virginia Roberts, got her dressed up in provocative clothing and brought her to Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach house.

Ms. Maxwell met them at the door and told them to go upstairs to Mr. Epstein’s bathroom, Carolyn said. The first time, Ms. Roberts got fully undressed, while Carolyn kept her bra and underwear on. Mr. Epstein entered the adjacent massage room, where he lay down on his stomach.

Forty-five minutes later, Mr. Epstein turned over, and he and Ms. Roberts had sex while Carolyn watched from a nearby couch, she told the jury, her voice cracking.

Afterward, Carolyn said, they were both paid in cash left at the bathroom sink, and Ms. Maxwell took her number.

Ms. Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, has become one of Mr. Epstein’s most vocal accusers. She is not believed to be one of the four accusers on which the charges against Ms. Maxwell are based, and is not expected to testify at trial.

In the years that followed, Carolyn told the jury, she went to Mr. Epstein’s house two or three times a week. The appointments were arranged by Ms. Maxwell, whom Carolyn would always see when she entered the house through the kitchen door.

Each time, Mr. Epstein would first lie on his stomach while Carolyn gave him a massage; sometimes, they spoke about her troubled upbringing, she told the jury. At the end, he would roll over and masturbate, or engage in other sex acts with Carolyn.

“Something sexual happened every single time,” Carolyn told the jury.

She was paid $300 to $400 in hundred-dollar bills after each encounter, sometimes handed directly to her by Ms. Maxwell, she said. She used the money to buy drugs, she said, and soon she became addicted to cocaine and pain pills.

She said she brought teenage friends over a few times to take part in the massages, for which she was paid extra. On two occasions, she said, Mr. Epstein summoned another naked woman into the room, and the three of them had sex.

Carolyn testified that Ms. Maxwell saw her naked in the massage room three times, including the incident in the bathroom where she touched her body.

Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein knew she was only 14 years old when the abuse started, Carolyn said, because they asked if she could travel to Mr. Epstein’s island in the Caribbean and she said she did not have a passport and that her mother would not allow her to go.

Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein sent her gifts, she said: Victoria’s Secret lingerie, concert tickets, a massage book.

During his cross-examination of Carolyn, Mr. Pagliuca at one point cited a legal filing in which she was asked whether she had ever had intercourse with Mr. Epstein. Carolyn had replied in the negative, Mr. Pagliuca said.

Before Mr. Pagliuca had finished asking his question, Carolyn interrupted. “I replied no because I was not a willing participant,” she said. “He had intercourse with me and I stopped it.”

During her direct testimony, Carolyn said she suffered from anxiety, “thinking my daughters will be trafficked or stolen from me.” Mr. Pagliuca asked whether the fear stemmed from the fact that she had previously lost custody of them because she had abused substances, a claim Carolyn angrily denied.

Several years into the abuse, Carolyn got pregnant by her then-boyfriend and had a child, she told the jury. Afterward, she went back to Mr. Epstein’s house a few times, because she needed money. “He asked me if I had any younger friends, and I said no,” she said. “And that’s when I realized I was too old.”

She was 18.