This article references rape, grooming, and sexual assault.
In June 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein abuse young women and girls. During the trial, four women testified that they'd been groomed and abused by Epstein – and that Maxwell had played a crucial role in facilitating this abuse.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a journalist and survivor of sexual abuse and grooming, witnessed the explosive trial first-hand. She speaks to GLAMOUR about her new book on the trial, the powerful relationships she formed with Epstein and Maxwell's victims, and why she's calling for urgent law reform to protect all victims and survivors.
Cast your mind back to the last 'true crime' documentary you watched. How often did you hear the victims speak? Perhaps they appeared for 30 seconds, faces blurred, to describe the crime's catastrophic impact on their physical, emotional, and financial health. Or perhaps they made no appearance at all; perhaps they were already dead.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a journalist and survivor of rape, childhood grooming and sexual assault, never felt particularly comfortable with this format. And when she decided to report on Ghislaine Maxwell's trial for recruiting and trafficking women and girls for sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, she was determined to bring survivors' stories to the forefront.
“When we talk about true crime, we're often too fixated on the perpetrators,” she tells me over Zoom a few weeks before the release of her book about the trial, The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. This is undoubtedly the case when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “We have this obsession with wealth and power, and we allow ourselves to get caught up in the details of all Jeffrey's houses, his island and his private jets… That is just not that interesting to me. Nothing about him is that interesting to me.”
Lucia argues that stories about perpetrators, such as Epstein and Maxwell, get told “all the time” but little thought is spared for the survivors who actually lived through it.
In 2021, Lucia temporarily relocated to New York to report on Maxwell's trial. For five weeks, she woke up at 1:30 am to ensure she was first in the press line, where she met swathes of other reporters eager to get their scoop. “They were focusing on the kind of really splashy celebrity stuff rather than the people who were willing to show up to court and be re-traumatised by the justice system,” Lucia explains. “So I really wanted to focus on them and their bravery and what this trafficking meant for them, but also what it meant for them to come to court and speak about it.”
In December 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five sex-trafficking-related counts. This was only possible thanks to the testimony of four women: Jane, Kate, Carolyn and Annie Farmer, whose lives were utterly derailed by Epstein and Maxwell, who endured intrusive, triggering cross-examinations in court, and who deserve to share their stories on their terms. Lucia, having already written two books about the “long shadow” cast by her own trauma from sexual abuse and grooming, is devoted to doing just that.
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The similarities between Lucia's trauma and that of Epstein and Maxwell's victims were at the forefront of her mind throughout the trial. “Not only was I violently raped at 15 years old — as some of Epstein’s victims were,” Lucia writes in The Lasting Harm, “but more importantly, I was groomed and sexually abused from a young age, in a very similar scenario to the one set up by Epstein.”
Lucia thought she could “handle” reporting on such a relentlessly triggering case, at least on a “cognitive level”. The Lasting Harm – an eviscerating, original piece of reporting – is a testament to that belief. But it came at some cost. By the end of the book, Lucia writes powerfully about having to check into a psychiatric unit for trauma survivors because she became “overwhelmed with how deeply connected my trauma was to theirs and how hard it was for me to be talking about it all the time.”
“There's no point in doing this work if I can't look after myself.”
“It humbled me a bit,” Lucia tells me. “I thought I could handle more than I could […] I thought I could just push through, but I couldn't. It was actually too much for me, and that's the first time I've had to admit that.”
Lucia emphasises the role that Jane, Kate, Carolyn and Annie played in helping her come to this realisation. “They taught me so much. They are the most resilient, most wonderful people, and they taught me so much about how to be warm, giving and generous even when the most terrible things imaginable have happened to you. So it's really kind of changed my perspective on everything. And also they've taught me how to look after myself.”
“I'm not going to be of any help to anyone as a journalist if I am not well,” she reflects. “So I also learned a lot both from them and from the rehab centre about the fact that there's no point in doing this work if I can't look after myself.”
She reflects on the kinship and shared struggle between herself, Jane, Kate, Carolyn and Annie: “I just wanted so badly for this not to have happened to them, and I don't have the power to do that […] In the same way that I can't go back and try and get Carolyn not to go to school on that particular day, I also can't go back in time in my own life and change the things that have happened.”
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We speak a little more about Carolyn. “I spoke to members of the jury who all said that they found her testimony incredibly compelling,” says Lucia. “They believed all of the survivors, but Carolyn's story is just so heartbreaking.”
Carolyn was a vulnerable 14-year-old who had already experienced childhood sexual abuse when she first met Ghislaine Maxwell. She was regularly pressured into massaging Epstein, who went on to sexually abuse her. She also testified that Maxwell groped her: “She came in and felt my boobs, my hips and my buttocks and said that… I had a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”
Lucia reflects on how vulnerable children like Carolyn are targeted by sexual predators. “She wasn't being looked after properly, so they targeted her and she ended up being trafficked by them for many years and was left with many lifelong symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I wrote to her thinking that she wouldn't want to talk to me because she'd never spoken about her experience before,” Lucia continues. "I went out to see her in West Palm Beach where she lived, and we spent a really nice week together. And then from then on, we started talking on the phone.
“We use the word ‘survivor’ to express the daily act of survival, no matter how long we're able to do that for.”
“Every day she would call me, and I'd wake up to messages from her saying, 'I want to be the first person today to tell you that you're worth it and you're loved, and you're a really valuable person.'”
Last year, Carolyn died suddenly at the age of 36. “We still don't know what happened,” says Lucia. “Her husband tried to call me, but I was in court, and then he just texted me saying, ‘Please call me back. She really loved you.’ And I called him back, and he said Carolyn had passed away.”
“She deserved so much to find some peace and joy, and she was able to do that… I'm amazed at how much she was able to do that, given what she went through, but it's so unfair that she's not with us anymore.”
We speak a little about the tension between words like ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ – is it right to use the word ‘survivor’ when so many victims don't survive? “It's not just about the act of physically surviving,” Lucia tells me. “Carolyn was one of the strongest survivors I've ever met. And that's not changed by the fact she's no longer here.”
“That's a really important thing to hold in our minds when we use the word ‘survivor’,” Lucia adds. “We use the word to express the daily act of survival, no matter how long we're able to do that for.”
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Carolyn's story is a testament to the fact that the trial, while momentous, has not delivered justice – not even close.
Epstein is dead; Maxwell is currently appealing her conviction (based on a technicality), and there are a great deal of influential people involved in their sex trafficking scheme who are still roaming free.
There were multiple allegations against powerful men that Lucia couldn't reflect in The Lasting Harm, for legal reasons. “It keeps me up at night,” she says. “There are people that I know committed these horrific crimes against my friends, and I know they did it, and they know they did it, but they're just out there not only living their lives but living some of the best lives that you can buy because they're some of the wealthiest people. And I find it very hard to live with that.”
“Victims are so afraid to speak out because they could get sued by their perpetrators, and there's nothing in this country to stop that from happening.”
“We are living in one of the most hostile jurisdictions when it comes to victims speaking up and journalists reporting allegations.”
For example, Lucia has previously faced resistance against reporting an allegation in print for fear of legal repercussions – even though the standard of proof (or ‘the balance of probabilities’) in defamation is much lower than in criminal cases, where one would need to prove something beyond reasonable doubt.
“That puts me in the position of having to be an investigative journalist and a prosecutor because it makes you have to act as a criminal lawyer […] It's not right,” she says.
“We should have more freedom to speak than that. Victims are so afraid to speak out because they could get sued by their perpetrators, and there's nothing in this country to stop that from happening.”
Lucia, as you might have already gathered, is not in the business of giving up without a fight. "I will keep trying [to bring these men to justice] and also keep trying to change the law about public interest journalism and what you can and can't report.
"I think the courts need to find a way to really whittle out these defamation claims that are just intimidation tactics. There should be a standard where a journalist can say, ‘I have this evidence. I can prove this on a balance of probability standard,' then it should be in a newspaper. That's how defamation law is supposed to work.
“But it has got really out of control in this country, and it means that victims can't speak up, and it means that journalists can't speak up on their behalf.”
Lucia has spent much of her life advocating for survivors to be able to share their stories without damning repercussions. Her account of Ghislaine Maxwell's trial is a testament to the work she's done so far – as well as a call to action for the rest of us to join the fight.
The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Fourth Estate, £22) is published on 4 July.
For more information about reporting and recovering from rape and sexual abuse, you can contact Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222.
If you have been sexually assaulted, you can find your nearest Sexual Assault Referral Centre here. You can also find support at your local GP, voluntary organisations such as Rape Crisis, Women's Aid, and Victim Support, and you can report it to the police (if you choose) here.
If you are worried that you or someone you know is being groomed, you can access Victim Support’s Children and Young People Services. You can contact your nearest Victim Support office, call the 24/7 Supportline, contact them via live chat, or if you are 16 or older, you can create a My Support Space account.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
