The Lasting Harm is well named. Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s book arrives, gives you its hand, and clings on. It’s a plea to be heard, but delicate, and I think it has changed me in ways I am not quite ready to disclose.
It is, superficially, a narrative of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial. She is the socialite daughter of the late British media tycoon Robert Maxwell and was named for the patron saint of difficult births and childhood sickness. In New York City in 2021 she was convicted of abusing young girls with the American financier Jeffrey Epstein and jailed for 20 years. It’s easy to gaze at Maxwell – she is a monster made of consumer goods (she plucked one victim in a department store) and this gaudy surface concealed her purpose, which was to charm girls for Epstein and his circle. But this book is about her and Epstein’s victims, and Maxwell is an empty presence, which suits her, because psychopathy is an absence. She is, here, the witch at the verge of the forest, and the edge of the page.
It opens with Osborne-Crowley, a journalist, in Miami in 2022 for a trip that “already… feels doomed”. She is there to meet Carolyn, who was abused by Maxwell and Epstein from the age of 14. Carolyn, a recovering drug addict, is a paradigm of the lasting harm, which “completely alters the course of our lives… leaves us vulnerable to addiction, self-loathing and more trauma… traps us in a cycle of violence and shame… refuses to let us go”.
Osborne-Crowley interviews Carolyn and leaves her “with an impulse for some justice of my own. I pull out my phone,” she writes, “and start googling my old gymnastics mentor from my hometown.” He had groomed her from the age of nine and told her: “You know I love you, right? You know I love you like a daughter?” But “there was much more to come”. When she was 15, still abused by her “mentor”, and training for the World Championships, she went out with friends. “Being sexually abused as a child encodes survival responses in you that you cannot control,” she writes. “Mine, I have learned… is usually ‘freeze’, also known as submission. So, when a man led me into a nearby McDonald’s and up several flights of stairs to a disused bathroom… I followed him.”
The injuries, she writes, “ended my gymnastics career. I did not tell anyone about my rape, for the same reason I did not tell anyone about my gymnastics mentor: because I lived in a world that had taught me that I had done something wrong.” Her trauma left her “with some of the same symptoms as the survivors you will hear from in this book: substance addiction… eating disorders; addiction to abusive relationships and chronic self-harm. These symptoms, as you will see, would be weaponised against Epstein’s survivors on cross-examination at trial in an attempt to undermine their credibility, their morality, their memories”. I think this is why Osborne-Crowley queued most of the night for a courtroom seat for a month: to watch over them.
The account of the trial, intersected with chapters telling the women’s stories, is oddly colourless. If this is not by design, it feels apt. The violence is past, and this is the quiet wreckage. Osborne-Crowley notes that “testifying at trial does not allow you to tell your story”. Nor is the average court reporter able to unearth it. The journalists were mostly men in their forties, who “did not have any experience of sexual trauma”.
The female journalists gather, as if for warmth. She meets Vicky Ward, whose 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein was stripped of abuse allegations because, according to Ward, its editor, Graydon Carter, did not believe them. (Carter contradicts this account. He has said that Ward “did not have the reporting to back up the allegations,” which is, writes Osborne-Crowley, “an assertion she disputes”.)
The profile is another absence, though Ward did her best to hint at Epstein’s malevolence, and her predicament. The entrance hall in his home, she wrote, “is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs”. They are glass eyes, which cannot see. “On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted.”
She also meets Julie Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who broke the case open in 2018, and Sarah Ransome, a victim, who should have been offered a seat in the courtroom but is relegated to an overflow room. Liz Stein, a victim who arrives for the verdict is shouted at by a court official for her presumption: “If you haven’t registered with my office, you are not a victim.”
The most awful scenes are the flashbacks, plainly written, and frightening. There is Jane, 14, who on, “the heady complicated last day of summer” in August 1994 was accosted by Maxwell – “a tall, slim woman wearing a thin white sun dress and gigantic floppy hat” – at her summer camp in Michigan. Jane’s father is dead, her mother broke and depressed, and she wants to be a musician. Maxwell entices her with a dog and a promise. Epstein, she says, will help Jane with a scholarship. That was the strategy: Maxwell would find unloved girls and take them to Epstein, who bartered with their dreams.
Carolyn was first abused when she was four years old. She met Maxwell and Epstein through another of Maxwell’s “girls”, Virginia Giuffre, who told her that she could earn money by massaging Epstein. Giuffre took her to the Palm Beach mansion, taught her massage, and gave her Xanax and beer for her nerves. Carolyn, then 14, watched Giuffre have sex with Epstein. Maxwell told her, “You have a great body for Jeffrey.” One day Carolyn was massaging a stranger in the mansion, when he attacked her. Carolyn ran from the room and told Maxwell, “He just tried to rape me.” “Honey,” Maxwell replied, “it’s not rape. You were willing.”
There is Annie, who met Maxwell and Epstein when she was 16. Annie was taken to New Mexico, to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, and assaulted. There is Kate, who met them in London, and was assaulted. Before Kate’s first encounter with Epstein, she described Maxwell as excited, “activated”. (Osborne-Crowley says the word “would stick in my mind for months”.) Kate says Maxwell told her that Epstein’s sexual needs were “a lot for me. Do you know any other girls who’d be willing to come over and give Jeffrey a blowjob? It would really help me out. You know what he likes. Cute, young, pretty – like you.” Kate said Maxwell had “an almost schoolgirl like demeanor… giggly and embarrassed”: a parody of a happy teenager. Epstein gave Maxwell $30m for the women; she gave them a few hundred dollars each time. The New Yorker compared Maxwell to a Zola heroine: “Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow.”
Osborne-Crowley writes about traumatic memories: “They live as flashes of emotion triggered by sounds, smells, sensations. Because we cannot store them as long term, narrativised memories… it is simply not possible for the brain to remember them consistently. This is a survival mechanism.” She writes about the tendency of the abused to confide in their first serious lover (“delayed disclosure”); the incalculable cruelty of the groomer, whose initial goal is to make the child love them, and the inevitable outcome: “How do you navigate the world with the broken compass?” We learn about fools too: “I just can’t understand,” a male reporter says, “why you would stay in touch with an abuser. It doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t make sense.”
Osborne-Crowley’s response is that “the very purpose of grooming is to create confusion and distrust of oneself… in order to begin the abuse”. The perpetrator senses unmet needs: they give gifts, offer love. “Once that love and loyalty is secured, the abuse begins. When those we love and those who promise to care for us when no one else would begin to hurt us, we find it difficult to fathom that the adult is at fault. And so we blame ourselves, and we continue to try to please the perpetrator in the mistaken belief that if we become better, the abuse will stop and we will be able to rewind to the time when the perpetrator was loving and kind. We want a different ending.”
It was, of course, partial justice. Epstein died in his New York prison cell in 2019, and, aside from Maxwell, who glibly sketched the court artist sketching her, his fellow abusers have not been publicly named or punished. Osborne-Crowley notes that, had the authorities acted effectively when the first accusations came in 2005 – the charges of sexual abuse and sex with minors were downgraded to solicitation of a prostitute, and Epstein served just 13 months in jail – women and girls would have been saved. Carolyn died in 2023: “She fought harder than anyone I’ve ever met,” Osborne-Crowley writes. “But some things are too terrible, too evil, to sustain a life.”
The Lasting Harm is a plea for women to name themselves. The week I read it I confronted an abuser, and I don’t think I would have done that if I hadn’t read these words of self-awareness, and love. I cherish the author, who writes like a child trying to become an adult: cautiously, and with growing strength.
The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Fourth Estate, 336pp, £22
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk