What the Epstein case teaches us about grooming

0:00Lucia Osborne-Crowley:This is The Guardian.

0:07Lucia Osborne-Crowley:Today, what one journalist learnt from Geoffrey Epstein's crimes?

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0:56Lucia Osborne-Crowley:On the 29th of November 2021, Lucia Osborne Crawley got up in the depths of the night and made her way to an imposing slate grey courthouse in Manhattan. I got there at 2.3 in the morning on that first day. You have to be there first if you want to get in the courtroom and there were only four spots. I was trying to keep myself warm. It was freezing. We were there for hours in the dark. That first morning there was a bit of snow. In later weeks there was a lot of snow. Lucia is a legal journalist and for six weeks she followed this same routine, determined to be inside that courthouse for every moment of the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.

1:38Lucia Osborne-Crowley:There's a big set of stairs. We had to line up down at the bottom. I remember once just getting hailed on and I walked up to the top just to get some shelter and this security guard screamed at me like really really yelled at me and I said oh look you know I've got an autoimmune condition can I just have some shelter for a few minutes and he said absolutely not and chased me down the stairs.

2:05Opening statements begin in the trial of socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. The British socialite is on trial, accused of helping her former boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, recruit and groom underage girls for sex.

2:19Lucia Osborne-Crowley:There had already been a lot of coverage of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's crimes. Yeah, plenty of intrigue surrounding this case. Some tried to shine a light on what made a powerful billionaire and a glamorous socialite traffic and exploit children and young women. It's here in New York where Maxwell used her friendship with Prince Andrew to access America's high society. On their glittering lives and the famous people they knew. On the enigma of his wealth and the tragedies in her life. We've heard talk about this black book, an address book that Ghislaine Maxwell had kept with some fairly famous names.

3:00Lucia Osborne-Crowley:But for Lucia, Epstein and Maxwell weren't special or mysterious. They were just predators, and she had met predators like them herself.

3:17Lucia Osborne-Crowley:What she wanted to understand was how crimes like this could happen. Not just on private islands or in million-dollar mansions, but everywhere. In our communities and our institutions. I thought I really want to find a way to be able to recount that to everyone who's not in that room and help other people understand how this kind of grooming and this kind of organised child sex abuse works because it is so common and unfortunately it's just very poorly understood. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, Jeffrey Epstein's playbook and what we can all learn from it.

4:04Luthea Osborne-Crowley, thank you so much for joining us today in The Guardian Studios. Welcome to Stay in Focus. It's a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. It's a real honour to be here.

4:14Lucia Osborne-Crowley:So you're a journalist and you've been reporting on the Epstein story for years now. And I know you've met and you've interviewed many of Epstein survivors. And you've also spent a lot of time combing through the Epstein files as well. you write in your book about how this was also very personally resident for you because of the experiences that you yourself have gone through and I wondered if you would mind just telling us what happened so I was a very very serious gymnast this mentor and authority figure was very very very good at making us feel incredibly special and understanding whatever it was that we needed to hear in order to feel loved.

5:00How old were you at this time? You were very young. Yes, I was nine and in some ways, you know, I used to think he chose me because I was good but actually in some ways the truth is I was good because he chose me because the thing is once you're chosen, then you get so much attention so much time with that person who's teaching you this this skill and you get much better because because you're the focus he would say I love you I love you like a daughter so the emotional attachment would start to be about more than just pure talent or pure hard work and that also comes with because this is so special no one will understand it so it's best if you don't tell anyone how close we are and then there's a very confusing kind of emotional attachment that I used to feel all the time which was once I had been told all of these things what he did and what these perpetrators do is they then kind of threaten you with the idea of what might happen if you ever stopped being good or special you know the idea of disappointing this person seems like the most terrible thing you could do.

6:14And we'd be really seriously punished by him if we did. So there'd be this kind of flip side, which was really serious anger, aggression, which would then turn into, I'm so sorry, I'm just so disappointed in you. You've really let me down. I thought you were better than this. And you're talking to a 10-year-old. so then that becomes really really emotionally scary because you feel like this attachment figure is going to leave you behind if you're not good enough and the abuse itself happens within that dynamic then and does it happen gradually or is it yeah yeah so um it began for me and I know for others with talking to us about sexuality in a way that I now understand is incredibly inappropriate.

7:04And so he started to tell me things about my body and about sex that were very explicit and about things that he liked, things that no one should be saying to a 10-year-old. But by this time, he was like God to me. I'm so sorry and also kind of at that age you don't have any idea of your own sexuality anyway do you so it's just this thing that's being imposed on you that you don't recognize in yourself at all yes exactly and you know that's the difference is you know when I hear my friends talk about them discovering this part of themselves for the first time it's so interesting because I never got to get to that point of discovering it for myself I mean, it's so much more common than anybody imagines, and these people really do hide in plain sight.

7:58Lucia Osborne-Crowley:In 2016, when the Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown first began publishing her investigations into the allegations of sexual abuse and trafficking that surrounded Epstein, Lucia followed these new reports closely. With a really, really amazing focus on the victims themselves, she ran an investigative series where the victims told their stories. And I heard in their voices these things that I had experienced. And that was huge. In 2019, Epstein was indicted on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy, only to be found dead, apparently by suicide, in his prison cell 35 days later. Two years later, Ghislaine Maxwell would face those same charges in a New York courtroom.

8:49And then I just really wanted to follow it from there because it was on this scale that was just, it's just so hard to really get our heads around the scale of this and how many people were harmed by it. So I felt this kind of pull to follow it through.

9:13What was it like sitting in that courtroom and watching the survivors, the women standing up there and going through cross-examination, being pulled through the criminal justice system? It was, I mean, it was so, so, so hard to watch. In a trial, you begin with direct examination of a witness. So the first thing you'd hear is their story through prosecutors. I was just watching them be so incredibly brave and so courageous and I was just amazed by it. And then I had to see them be so incredibly brave and so courageous through something that was so much more awful than even I expected. And I've covered lots of trials, you know, but the way the defence treated these victims was really shocking.

10:01I watched them be spoken to by these defense lawyers like they were worthless. You know, like it's bringing out this part of them that has been shamed before. It's awful. And there's so much about that case, wasn't it? It was about understanding what grooming is. Could you just explain to us what exactly do we mean when we talk about grooming? Yeah, absolutely. So what grooming does is it brings the child into a situation where eventually that perpetrator has total access. So it's all about access. It's all about isolation of the child. And in the research, they talk about stages of grooming. So the first one is usually to identify the victim.

10:50And this is all through the Epstein files if you know what to look for. it's basically these kind of incredibly sophisticated perpetrators they know that they need to find children who are vulnerable in some way so have something in their lives that they need some some kind of need that's not being met whether it's emotional or financial or psychological they say I'm here now I see that the adults around you have have not done what you need, but it's okay because I'm here now and I'm going to help you and I'm going to save you. What I think is a really good example of this is that Epstein's mansion in Palm Beach was on one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country.

11:36And then you just have to do a short drive. I've done it myself over a bridge and you're in an incredibly poor area where there's a lot of very, very vulnerable families. And that's where he told Ghislaine Maxwell to go. So identifying is the first one. The second is isolating the victim. So basically that means finding a way to get them away from adults who would protect them. And that takes work. That part of the manipulation is important because you need to get yourself into a relationship with a child where it's okay for you to be alone with that child. So that's where building the trust is really, really important.

12:20And in this case, Ghislaine would be responsible for a lot of this based on what we heard at trial because she was younger than Geoffrey, she was a woman, and she would kind of play this almost big sister role is how some of the survivors have described it to me. So she would meet them and she would ask them about their day and she would ask them how they were feeling and she would ask them what they wanted to be when they grew up and she earned their trust by saying same textbook I see something special in you I believe in you she would make that connection with them and that's the beginning of this really important relationship because then the child feels attached to that person they start to feel a sense of safety and so they want to trust this person who's saying I'm going to help you and I

13:10Lucia Osborne-Crowley:I mean, it's not just kids from kind of difficult economic backgrounds or who might have had experiences of childhood sexual abuse before they met Epstein and Maxwell, is it? In your book, you give this example of a survivor that you call Jane, although that's not her real name. Could you tell us about how she met Maxwell and Epstein? Absolutely. So she went to a summer camp that was for ambitious young people who wanted a career in the arts. So she wanted to be a singer. She wanted to be an actor. So she would go to this camp and what Jeffrey Epstein did, he would donate huge amounts of money to that camp.

13:49What he asked for in return for his money was a permanent lodge on site. So he could live at a summer camp for middle schoolers. He would not usually be there all summer, but he could come and go as he pleased. He would stay there for the weekend. And he was there with Ghislaine one weekend and he approached Jane. She was with a group of friends. A lot of the others kind of walked away and they started talking to her. And he said something like, I'm an investor in this camp, so I'd love to hear how is it? Are you happy with your experience? Are you having fun? And she says, yeah, it's really great.

14:26And then he uses that to say kind of, oh, tell me more about yourself. Why are you here? What do you want to be? And then they worked out that they were from similar areas. And one of them said, oh, maybe we know your parents. Like we know a lot of people. Maybe we know your parents. What do your parents do? And she said what her mum did and then she said, and my dad just died. And so that's immediately to them. The vulnerability. The vulnerability. And we now know from trial that after he died, they really didn't have very much money. They lost their house. They had to live with friends. So they got all of that information out of her.

15:09So she'd just very recently lost a parent at, I think she was 14 that summer. And also she'd been flung into a financial situation that was incredibly vulnerable and very precarious. So just in one conversation, they were able to, through what they were masquerading as small talk, find out if there was a vulnerability or not. And as soon as they did, you can hear in the way she describes the conversation, they just absolutely went for it. So they kind of said to her, we're going to help you. we're going to make your dreams come true we think you're going to be a star and then um they would start helping her mom with rent they would start giving her money to give to her mom saying like look i know it's a really hard time we just want to help out and then you know this is kind of another stage of the grooming is is when that power imbalance they take it to a level that becomes transactional in some way so they will give you something either money directly or or pay for something that you need and that's kind of the next phase of them ensuring that access because then they have something to hold over you if you try and walk away and again in emails you can see this you can see the way Jeffrey says to them you should be grateful I've done so much for you when they're trying to withdraw and for Jane and her family that's exactly what he did.

16:37Lucia Osborne-Crowley:So you've talked about this kind of grooming process, the isolation phase. In Jane's case, she started being taken to Epstein's house away from her mother. What did they do next? Yeah, so, you know, it's very similar to my story in the sense that it started with normalising talking about that kind of thing. so Ghislaine in particular would kind of ask her about her life and then would start to ask her do you have a boyfriend and then start to ask more graphic questions. The purpose of that part of grooming is to normalise having that in a relationship between an adult and a 14-year-old which of course is not an acceptable thing to be doing.

17:21For Jane one of the next steps is that when she would arrive Ghislaine would be topless and some other women there would be topless And so they'd start to normalise nudity and then there'd be an initial kind of approach to normalise physical touch, which would often be, can you give me a shoulder massage? Or, you know, can you give Geoffrey a foot massage? Something like that. These perpetrators are very, very, very good at doing this in a kind of step-by-step way and it's incredibly hard to see as what it is. And all the way through your book, all the way through these stories, it's this massage thing.

17:58It's interesting, isn't it, the parallels with the Weinstein case as well, Harvey Weinstein, this idea of this almost kind of acceptable physical contact. Exactly, yeah. Masking something else, but you're not sure when the line is crossed. Exactly. So what you'll see that's common in all of these is, as you say, different forms of physical touch that are acceptable in society. and seen as consensual and acceptable. You know, there are survivors who were targeted because they were young dancers. And when you're a dancer, it's the same as me as a gymnast, you massage each other. Massaging is a big part of professional sport.

18:39So in those situations, Geoffrey would know that these young dancers were used to that happening in a legitimate way. and he would use that to present himself as legitimate and then once, and again this is kind of the final stage, is once they've been able to be alone with the child. When there is no one else around, then they'll cross a line that goes beyond legitimate physical touch and as you say, by that point it's incredibly hard for the child to understand that a line has been crossed. And also the fear, I guess, of going home and telling someone and they're saying, well, why were you in a room with him?

19:17Exactly. Why did you let yourself get into that situation? Exactly.

19:25In my old job, I spent a lot of time reporting on exploitation and sex trafficking and the way that child sexual abuse plays into these dynamics that can trap people for their whole lives in these very exploitative situations. And everything that you've talked about in terms of this grooming playbook, it's just literally like a kind of paint by numbers. In this case, it's very rich and powerful people with lots of money and lots of kind of glamour. It can be translated into models of sexual violence and sex trafficking around the world. Absolutely, and I think, you know, this is one of the dangers with this is when people talk about Jeffrey Epstein as though he's special or as though he's mysterious in some way, as though he's this kind of someone that we really need to try and understand because there's no one else like him.

20:14that it takes away from the truth of it, which is that there are lots of people like him. It's not the case that Jeffrey Epstein is dead, so we don't have to worry about this kind of thing happening. This kind of thing happens in neighborhoods all over the world, in institutions all over the world. And when you understand the playbook, you can see that it is the same playbook all the time. And that's how we know that it is so much more common than anybody thinks.

20:46Lucia Osborne-Crowley:Yeah, I mean, it's so common. And in your reporting, you also highlight just how survivors experience trauma and how the way that trauma impacts them can be misunderstood and also be treated with suspicion by the criminal justice system. Well, exactly. And the problem is that the court system demands narrative. It sees credibility as being our ability or otherwise to tell a story in a truthful sequence. And the problem with that is that if you have a traumatic memory that has not been processed and hasn't been put into a narrative, it is not only hard, but actually impossible for us to remember a sequence of events.

21:41And it allows the defence to pick holes in your case. Exactly. Does that also relate to how it can take people a long time to disclose as well? Absolutely. So we heard a lot about what we call delayed disclosure at trial. And basically, it's the idea that it takes a victim of trauma, but sexual abuse in particular, a very, very long time to disclose what happened to them. And that's because, particularly in a grooming situation, you have an adult who's come and said that you can trust them and said that they'll help you. And then they've betrayed you. And they've then set up in you a world that is kind of inherently dangerous.

22:21They've set up a world where adults are not to be trusted. There's also the relational aspect, which is that victims feel very, very, very afraid of betraying their perpetrator, even years after they understand. Which goes back to the trauma bond as well, doesn't it? Exactly. So they feel so worried about getting that person in trouble, even if they know how to name what happened to them, they know it's a crime, it still feels very hard to betray that person And because that person has made you feel so loyal to them.

23:01One of the most awful things about this whole model is the way that victims can then be kind of turned into abusers or certainly recruiters themselves. So you've seen this model where girls who are abused by Jeffrey Expey then go on to recruit others for them. Could you just explain how? So again, it's all about manipulation. Predators like this, they create a situation where victims can become recruiters because by this time in the grooming, they have made the victim feel firstly like they owe this person so much and they can't say no to him by that point. And I know from survivors that he did used to threaten them when they tried to say no about introducing him to other friends.

23:47He did become very, very, very threatening. There's also this idea that because when you're in it, and especially when you're young, it's very hard for you to even understand what's happening to you. So to understand what will happen to another person that you introduce to Jeffrey Epstein is almost impossible. So now people are saying, oh, well, this person introduced someone knowing what would happen. But that misunderstands the kind of extreme state of confusion and manipulation that you are in as a victim by this point because you don't even understand what's happening to you and you don't even necessarily understand how harmful it is because you still want to think that this person is good and so you don't want to think that they're hurting you.

24:35There was also this thing about him wanting younger and younger girls and also the idea of girls who he tires of them being passed on to other men. Can you tell us a bit about that kind of part of the model as well? Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that is not very well understood in terms of this operation. It does seem, from what I've been told, and again, this is all corroborated by the emails, that it seems like Jeffrey Epstein would abuse younger girls and when they got older, their role would shift and that's when he would begin to traffic them to other people. so he would in some cases stop his own abuse of them because of whatever predilection he had but he wouldn't stop the abuse.

25:20He would change the abuse to a human trafficking situation and by that point victims, they are completely trapped in this situation. There is no way that they can get away from these other men, say no to these other men and that was a huge, huge part of the operation.

25:40And over the decades, another thing that really struck me about this case as well was about all of the people, all of the adults that have been involved in facilitating this. Chauffeurs, doormen, assistants scheduling appointments, pilots of private aircrafts. In Jane's case, we've talked about the other adults who were in the room with her when she was being abused. Can you talk to us a bit about this kind of huge network of people who are also complicit in this abuse? Yeah. I mean, what is really important to say is just how many people are in this category. And again, when you look at the emails, it's obvious how sophisticated this operation was and how many people were needed to keep it running smoothly, you know, to keep appointments, to book flights, to everything.