NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell groped a 14-year-old girl’s bare breast and declared the teen “had a great body for Mr. Epstein,” a Manhattan jury heard Tuesday.
The third accuser to take the stand against Maxwell — who testified under her first name, Carolyn — said she first met Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell, his alleged chief enabler, in Florida in the early 2000s when she was 13.
The witness alleged Maxwell fondled her when she was 14 going on 15.
“I was upstairs setting up the massage table. And at that point I was kind of comfortable because I had been there so many times, that at that point I was getting fully nude,” said Carolyn.
“And she came in and felt my boobs and my hips and my buttocks and said that — that Mr. Epstein would — that I had a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”
The witness told the court that Virginia Roberts Giuffre introduced her to the couple in the early 2000s, who she said paid good money for massages.
It was around the time Carolyn dropped out of her Palm Beach, Florida, school in the seventh grade.
Although she is not a part of the trial, Giuffre is a prominent accuser of Epstein. She has alleged he loaned her out to Prince Andrew for sex in a civil complaint pending in federal court in Manhattan.
Carolyn told jurors the abuse happened even as she confided to Maxwell and Epstein that she had been sexually assaulted and that her mother was an alcoholic. “I remember telling her that I had been raped and molested by my grandfather starting at the age of 4,” she said.
Prosecutors have said Maxwell and Epstein purposely sought out minors from broken homes to abuse.
Carolyn said the abuse involving Maxwell and Epstein continued until she was 18. Maxwell often called her to schedule massages for Epstein, according to her testimony. The couple also enlisted her to bring friends, Carolyn said.
Maxwell even tried in vain to convince the teen, who didn’t have a passport, to fly to his private island in the Caribbean, Carolyn testified.
Carolyn described in excruciating detail how she first met Epstein upstairs by the massage table with Giuffre — furniture that prosecutors showed to jurors Friday.
“He brushed his teeth and then laid face down on the massage table,” said Carolyn.
Dumbstruck, Carolyn wasn’t forced to participate further than the massage the first time. But the witness said she sat and watched Giuffre have intercourse with the pedophile financier before he paid the girls a few hundred dollars and allowed them to leave.
Maxwell took the teen’s phone number before she left.
Carolyn said Maxwell, Epstein and his assistant, Sarah Kellen, would book her for massages at least 100 times throughout her teen years. She said Maxwell was present at least three of those times, including the groping incident.
Carolyn provided graphic testimony of what would happen in the massage room, where two friends of Epstein once saw her naked, she said.
“Something sexual happened every single time,” the witness said, telling the captive-looking jury Epstein would “turn over and start masturbating until he ejaculated” at the end of every single massage.
When she turned 18, Carolyn said Epstein started inquiring about her social circle, asking if she had younger friends who could come and massage him.
“And that’s when I realized I was too old,” Carolyn recalled.
A New York native, Carolyn told jurors she moved to Florida in 1999. She came from a broken home where heavy drug use was the norm, she testified.
During emotional testimony, she described becoming addicted to cocaine and sleeping pills during her formative adolescent years when Epstein was sexually abusing her.
Carolyn said she used the money Epstein paid after each abusive massage to finance her drug addiction.
On cross-examination, Maxwell’s lawyer Jeffrey Pagliuca sought to impeach Carolyn as a witness based on statements she gave to the FBI and in depositions she gave in two lawsuits filed in 2008 and 2009 against Epstein and Kellen. Maxwell did not feature in either civil complaint.
Carolyn said Maxwell wasn’t the subject of the interviews in question and thus didn’t come up.
“The only thing Ms. Maxwell was involved in was fondling and touching my breasts and my buttocks, and for that, my soul is broken and so is my heart,” the witness exclaimed.
“I am devastated.”
Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to charges she trafficked teenage girls to Epstein’s multimillion-dollar properties worldwide for the financier’s systematic sexual abuse. She faces separate charges of lying about the conduct under oath.
She faces a possible 80-year federal prison sentence if convicted of sex trafficking charges and perjury charges, for which she will be tried separately.
The British publishing heiress’s lawyers say she has been unfairly substituted for Epstein as he killed himself and can no longer be brought to justice.
