In 2021, Lucia Osborne-Crowley was one of four reporters who gained daily courtroom access to the almost five week trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of assisting, facilitating and participating in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of minor girls. Her book, The Lasting Harm, exposes a broken judicial system while presenting the stories of ten women, many who have never spoken at length before. Maxwell, sentenced to 20 years, had recruited, groomed, and abused the 14, 15 and 16-year-old teens, who were now the 36, 49, 50-year-old adults seeking justice. Sexual grooming, a complex soft skill, purposely establishes an emotional connection with a child to gain trust and compliance. It begins by targeting potential victims—girls without money, parental support or self-esteem.
An award-winning writer and journalist, Lucia is a lawyer and a court reporter for Law360 (a US newswire covering courts and crimes across the world). As a child, she was a gymnast on track for the Olympics. At fifteen, preparing for her second world championship, she was violently and repeatedly raped. But before that trauma, beginning at the age of nine, her coach established an emotional connection with her, then began grooming and eventually sexually abusing her. In 2018, she published a longform essay in The Lifted Brow, which was my introduction to her work. Since then, I followed her on Twitter. The Indigo Press acquired her next two books: I Choose Elena (2019), then My Body Keeps Your Secrets (2022).
Yvonne Conza
How did this story come to you?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
In 2016, I started reading Julie Brown's reporting on Jeffrey Epstein in the Miami Herald and I was interested in the story. After Epstein died (2019), I decided to investigate it further. The way Jeffrey and Ghislaine Maxwell operated—their grooming and enabling—was something that I recognized immediately.
Then in the summer of 2020, Ghislaine, who had gone into hiding, was found. I realized that there might be a trial and he was going to be indicted. Her involvement would touch upon these questions that are important to me about grooming and enabling. I made the plan to go and live in New York to cover it.
My own knowledge and history of grooming and child abuse with my gymnastics coach was a similar type of pyramid scheme operation. I thought that writing this book could be a good way to take a story that people are interested in and use it to explain complicated dynamics that hide in plain sight—ones we don't understand well enough as a society.
Yvonne Conza
Was that the "all-in" for you? The ability to expose and give context to grooming? Your understanding of Maxwell's role as criminal?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Yes, I think so. The US government Department of Justice made a decision, even though as it turned out, their trial wasn't very comprehensive, but they made a decision to charge someone primarily for her role in recruiting, grooming and trafficking the girls. There was direct evidence that she was involved in the abuse as well. They didn't necessarily know that back in 2020, and that wasn't a huge focus of the trial.
When she was indicted, I knew that they were going to make an effort to prove that her role was different from Jeffrey's, but absolutely crucial to the scheme. Because she was the one, and I explore this in the book, the one who was gaining the girl's trust. In my investigation with people who were forced to spend a lot of time with Jeffrey, they stated he hated socializing and found it difficult to talk to people. There is no way that he would have been able to pull any of this off without her because he could not walk up to a teenage girl pretending to be a charming and caring figure. He just didn't have it in him. She did.
Maxwell was able to treat them like much younger sisters. She was able to be nurturing, give them advice and make them feel like she was going to help them. This scheme wouldn't have worked without her in that role. Jeffrey just didn't have the soft skills (method of grooming) that she had. That's what made me want to go all in for her trial. It's really important to start to recognize grooming with organized child sexual abuse. That role is very important. Someone there who gains the trust of vulnerable people with minimal risk of detection.
The rest of the process doesn't work if you don't have that trust. That's also why it's so harmful because it results in crushing a person's sense of trust in other human beings.
Yvonne Conza
During the trial a number of obstacles were placed in the journalist's way. Why do you think that was?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
It was my first experience of that hostility from any arm of the judicial system towards journalists. They were treating journalists very much like they didn't really want us to be there. As though we were not there for the right reasons. The entire time felt hostile.
I'm a court reporter in London, my day job, and I never get treated like that. It was alarming, coming down to a couple of things that included such a high-profile trial and perhaps their effort was to not over-sensationalize it. But by keeping everything so contained, they ended up also mistreating the victims along with journalists. The court failed to make a proper distinction between crime victims who have a statutory right to be treated properly by the court and allowed in the trial room.
My inquiry to the press office about the hostility and difficulties of reporting on the trial has received no response.
Yvonne Conza
It struck me as a form of silencing.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
My impression of this trial is that the government really wanted it to happen and for there to be a conviction. But not much more than that. The trial was kept narrow in scope and as low-key as possible.
They, for no good reason, seem to have rejected evidence from a bunch of survivors who came forward and wanted to testify against Ghislaine—as if they wanted it over and done. But I wouldn't say with a commitment to do it properly, which translated to an effort of silencing reporting on it.
Yvonne Conza
At one point Maxwell starts drawing you.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
So bizarre, honestly. She had a pen and a little pad. It was just really weird. When she locked eyes with me it was incredibly intense. All of my interactions with her were very, very bizarre.
Every day she walked in with these two young women who were her guards and they were falling all over her, laughing at her jokes. Her family was sitting right in front of me. Ghislaine would say hi to her sisters and brothers and her lawyers, and then she'd always wave at us because she recognized that we were there every day. She treated this like it was a cocktail party, not a federal sex trafficking trial.
I remember on Christmas, we broke for Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and we came back on the 27th. Christmas Day is Ghislaine's birthday. She had turned 60, walked in blowing kisses and curtsying and everyone and her lawyers said, "Happy birthday, G." Some she kissed on the cheek. It felt like she wasn't acknowledging how serious all of it was.
There was talk from lawyers beforehand that Maxwell was going to argue that she was also a victim of Jeffrey's. To some degree she did end up arguing that in sentencing. But not before giving a speech on how sorry she was for what Jeffrey, not she, did. She was totally remorseless.
Yvonne Conza
Will others be charged in this case? If so, who?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
I should not say who. There's so much that I wasn't allowed to put in the book. I'll just say that there's one very high-profile public figure and a very prominent businessman that I would expect to be charged.
Yvonne Conza
What reasons were given for the material not allowed in your book?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
We are living in a time of very hostile defamation laws. This is not so much the case in the US, but because my primary publishing jurisdiction is the UK, all of the legal advice we got on the manuscript had to be safe in the UK. The UK is one of the worst places on earth to be a journalist right now. Our courts are being so strict on defamation and protecting the reputation of powerful people over the right of journalists.
In order to report a lot of the stuff that I knew, the UK courts have said that journalists should be able to prove what they know beyond a reasonable doubt. That's a criminal standard. There's no reason that a criminal standard should be used in a defamation case which is a civil action.
Journalists have always had to prove substantial truth of their reporting based on the balance of probabilities that is in the public interest. Reporting on something doesn't send someone to jail. It just gets information out there, then the authorities can act on that if they wish.
Everything has now shifted. And, I'm told that powerful people, and we're talking about rich powerful people that I've been given evidence against, will win defamation proceedings unless, as a journalist, I can prove the truth of the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. So, anything I couldn't prove to a criminal standard was taken out. Expecting reporters to also be public prosecutors and be able to get to the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard means that you're just shutting down almost all public interest journalism.
Yvonne Conza
Where did the book title come from?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
It was a quote from Judge Nathan in her sentencing remarks for the need to impose a sentence reflecting the lasting harm inflicted on these victims. She looked directly at Maxwell when she said it and I was like, "That's a really interesting phrase." Just the way that she's decided to say 'the lasting harm', immediately I thought, that's it. The judge really got it.
The idea that you have to take into account not just what was done to them as children, but what is being done to them as adults now, and every day because they have to live with these kinds of memories that took hold in the formative stages of their lives—when you're learning to trust people, when you're learning to be close to people, when you're learning to be cared for, or when you're learning how not to be cared for. That lasting harm stays with you and affects all of your other relationships. It bleeds into every part of your life when this happens at such an early age.
Yvonne Conza
Had you thought of first writing this as an article?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Straightaway I knew this was a book. People know the basics of this story of what was done. But not the lasting impact of how it affects you as an adult.
Consolidating from my two previous trauma-informed books, I wanted to provide the context of how navigating adult life with those experiences as a child is difficult. Neurologically, abuse victims are more likely to be attracted to relationships that repeat the patterns of coercive control and abuse. At one point I wrote: Trauma is not what happens to you. It's what happens inside of you. It's how your body and your brain respond to being violated, respond to the violence endured, respond to living with fear and living with a sense of worthlessness that is ingrained in you when these terrible things were done to you. That's what I want people to understand. I am unfortunately very familiar with all of this and I continue to work through these things in my adult life.
Yvonne Conza
The defense strategy centered on victims as lying.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Which was incredibly retraumatizing and meant to discredit them. An immediate instinct to discredit victims of certain kinds of crimes, not others, is a serious societal problem. If you're in a car accident and someone in another car hits and injures you, you go to the hospital, then the police. If you get similar or worse injuries from a sexual assault, we are taught from a very young age that we shouldn't tell authorities or our parents. From an early age, as if by osmosis, not telling the police is because we feel we won't be believed. This allows people to continue perpetrating sexual assault.
That's why the exclusive interview I did after the trial with Scotty David, juror number 50 on the Maxwell trial, was an important story. During our conversation, he revealed that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
Yvonne Conza
His juror screening questionnaire did not disclose childhood sexual abuse.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Correct. However, shocking was the public reaction that Scotty shouldn't have ever been allowed to be on the jury. From my legal training, I knew that he would not have been stricken from serving on the jury for that. But the fact that so many people assumed there was such a rule and that he broken it was really hard for me to hear. It was saying, "If sexual abuse happens to you, then you can never be unbiased again." That you are ruined and have lost the ability to rationally assess evidence because of something someone else did to you as a child that you had no control over.
That's not what the court thinks of sexual abuse victims at all. Judge Nathan reiterated in her judgment. "No, this is not the law. It has never been the case that we'd try and get sexual abuse victims off juries."
Yvonne Conza
What does the questionnaire ask?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
"Have you or someone you know been the victim of a sexual abuse crime?" "You or someone you know," that's almost everyone in the world. This is why it's so important to understand the ins and outs of jury selection. That question is not designed so that if someone ticks yes, then they're off the jury. It's so that then they can be asked a few more questions about whether they can be fair and impartial.
Yvonne Conza
Carolyn Andriano opens and closes your book. Her testimony was arguably the most important one in the Maxwell trial. The charges associated with Carolyn's story, recruited when she was fourteen years old, carried a potential 40-year prison term. But it was more than that. It was her unfiltered, honest and heartbreaking testimony. The life-long effects of her trauma were laid bare at the trial. The course of her life was altered by that childhood trauma. She died on May 23, 2023 in a West Palm Beach hotel room.
If she was here today, what would you say to her?
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
I think about this so often. I really do. I learned from all the survivors about how to better look after myself. Carolyn was such a big believer in me and was the most incredible friend. She saw me so clearly. She made me feel like I was worthwhile and that things were going to be okay. I don't know that she ever gave herself much credit for how caring she was. Her words were powerful and meant everything to me.
I'd really like to say thank you and I miss her.
NONFICTION
The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell
By Lucia Osborne-Crowley
HarperCollins Publishers
Published July 4, 2024
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