Ghislaine Maxwell trial | A crucial witness hounded by the defense

(New York) The first victim who testified at the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former companion of American financier Jeffrey Epstein on trial for sex trafficking of minors, was subjected to a tough cross-examination on Wednesday by the defense, which attempted to portray her as a dishonest, money-hungry woman.

Tuesday, this key witness at the trial, the first of four that the prosecution wants to call, explained, sometimes in tears, how the couple Epstein and Maxwell had approached her in 1994 and how the financier had sexually assaulted her in several times, at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, when she was just 14 years old.

Called “Jane”, to preserve her anonymity, she had also accused Ghislaine Maxwell of having been present during certain sexual assaults and of having sometimes participated in them.

Alone in the accused box after the suicide of her former companion in prison in the summer of 2019, the former British socialite born in France, daughter of the deceased media mogul Robert Maxwell, faces life imprisonment.

Accused of recruiting underage girls from 1994 to 2004 to make them available to Epstein, she says she is innocent and pleads not guilty to six counts.

“Shameful secrets”

One of the defense lawyers, Laura Menninger, tried to point out several inconsistencies in the account or the chronology of the testimony in front of the Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, compared to previous hearings.

Then she unearthed the notes of an agent who had interviewed “Jane” in December 2019, pointing to more confused memories of the role of Ghislaine Maxwell, 59 years old. The victim replied that his notes were not complete transcripts and did not accurately reflect his story.

A little later, she also explained that she had not given all the details during her first auditions, because she was revealing to strangers “the most shameful secrets, which I had to carry all my life. “.

In a new round of questions, the defense pointed to the acting skills of “Jane”, who has been an actress in sentimental soap operas, to accuse her of dramatizing her testimony.

She finally had to deny any financial interest in testifying, specifying that she had no civil complaint in progress because she had been compensated up to $ 5 million (2.9 after costs) by the “Epstein fund”, an official mechanism of reparation drawn from the fortune of the billionaire after his death.

“In this country, damages are the only thing you can get when you want to try to move forward in your life again,” she blurted out, after a pause during which she cried and hid his face behind a handkerchief.