This text references rape, grooming, and sexual assault.
In June 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to twenty years in jail for serving to Jeffrey Epstein abuse younger girls and women. Throughout the trial, 4 girls testified that they’d been groomed and abused by Epstein – and that Maxwell had performed a vital function 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 guide on the trial, the highly effective relationships she shaped with Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, and why she’s calling for pressing legislation reform to guard all victims and survivors.
Solid your thoughts again to the final ‘true crime’ documentary you watched. How usually did you hear the victims communicate? Maybe they appeared for 30 seconds, faces blurred, to explain the crime’s catastrophic impression on their bodily, emotional, and monetary well being. Or maybe they made no look in any respect; maybe they had been already useless.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a journalist and survivor of rape, childhood grooming and sexual assault, by no means felt significantly snug with this format. And when she determined to report on Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial for recruiting and trafficking girls and women for sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, she was decided to deliver survivors’ tales to the forefront.
“After we speak about true crime, we’re usually too fixated on the perpetrators,” she tells me over Zoom a couple of weeks earlier than the discharge of her guide in regards to the trial, The Lasting Hurt: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. That is undoubtedly the case in terms of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “We’ve got this obsession with wealth and energy, and we enable ourselves to get caught up within the particulars of all Jeffrey’s homes, his island and his non-public jets… That’s simply not that attention-grabbing to me. Nothing about him is that attention-grabbing to me.”
Lucia argues that tales about perpetrators, reminiscent of Epstein and Maxwell, get informed “on a regular basis” however little thought is spared for the survivors who truly lived by means of it.
In 2021, Lucia briefly relocated to New York to report on Maxwell’s trial. For 5 weeks, she awakened at 1:30 am to make sure she was first within the press line, the place she met swathes of different reporters desperate to get their scoop. “They had been specializing in the form of actually splashy superstar stuff fairly than the individuals who had been prepared to indicate as much as court docket and be re-traumatised by the justice system,” Lucia explains. “So I actually wished to concentrate on them and their bravery and what this trafficking meant for them, but in addition what it meant for them to return to court docket and talk about it.”
In December 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was discovered responsible on 5 sex-trafficking-related counts. This was solely attainable because of the testimony of 4 girls: Jane, Kate, Carolyn and Annie Farmer, whose lives had been totally derailed by Epstein and Maxwell, who endured intrusive, triggering cross-examinations in court docket, and who need to share their tales on their phrases. Lucia, having already written two books in regards to the “lengthy shadow” solid by her personal trauma from sexual abuse and grooming, is dedicated to doing simply that.
The similarities between Lucia’s trauma and that of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims had been on the forefront of her thoughts all through the trial. “Not solely was I violently raped at 15 years outdated — as a few of Epstein’s victims had been,” Lucia writes in The Lasting Hurt, “however extra importantly, I used to be groomed and sexually abused from a younger age, in a really related situation to the one arrange by Epstein.”
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