NEW YORK | At her trial in New York for sex trafficking of minors, Ghislaine Maxwell, former companion and collaborator of American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein who died in 2019, was portrayed on Thursday as the “mistress of the house” of the financier, responsible for preserving the secrecy of his crimes sexual.
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Juan Alessi, Epstein’s former butler at his Palm Beach, Florida residence in the 1990s, testified in Manhattan federal court, which has been judging ultra-socialite Ghislaine Maxwell since Monday. The daughter of press mogul Robert Maxwell is suspected of having been Epstein’s “tout” for him to sexually exploit underage girls between 1994 and 2004.
If found guilty, the 59-year-old Franco-American-Briton faces life imprisonment.
Juan Alessi, an Ecuadorian, told jurors how Ms Maxwell imposed an “untold number” of very strict rules on the Palm Beach house, the most terrifying of which forbade meeting the gaze of Jeffrey Epstein.
“Don’t look him in the eye, turn your head and answer him,” recalls hearing Juan Alessi say.
“Remember: you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except to answer a question which is directly addressed to you”, lists a kind of internal rules of 58 pages of the house of Epstein, influential financier New Yorker accused of sex crimes but who committed suicide in prison in the summer of 2019 before being tried.
“NEVER reveal to anyone what Mr. Epstein or Ms. Maxwell is doing,” the regulation still orders, according to Juan Alessi, who quit his job in the late 1990s.
Among the many things the butler had to prepare before Epstein arrived at his Florida residence, he was to make sure a pistol was in the financier’s nightstand drawer.
Dressed in black, Ms Maxwell listened to the testimony in silence.
She has been in pre-trial detention since the summer of 2020 and pleads not guilty to all six charges, including that of sex trafficking of young underage girls.
Tuesday and Wednesday, a crucial witness in the trial, “Jane”, had sometimes explained in tears how the Epstein-Maxwell couple had approached her in 1994 and how the financier had sexually assaulted her on several occasions, at his home in Palm Beach, when she was only 14 years old.
Juan Alessi said he remembered two young girls at the time, including “Jane”, whom he had seen for the first time with his mother. He even said he picked her up from school.