Witness Says Maxwell Recruited Her for Sexual Encounters With Epstein

A woman identified by the pseudonym “Kate” testified on Monday that Ghislaine Maxwell befriended her in London when she was 17 and recruited her to give Jeffrey Epstein massages, which led to years of sexual encounters with him.

The woman was the second of four accusers expected to appear as witnesses in Ms. Maxwell’s trial, now in its second week.

Kate told jurors that Ms. Maxwell played a direct role in arranging her encounters with Mr. Epstein, including by ushering her into massage rooms, coordinating her international travel and, in one case, giving her a “schoolgirl” outfit to wear as she served Mr. Epstein tea.

Kate testified that she met Ms. Maxwell in 1994 in Paris and found Ms. Maxwell to be “very sophisticated and very elegant.” She gave Ms. Maxwell her phone number, and when they were both back in London, Ms. Maxwell called and invited her to tea at her home.

“She seemed to be everything that I wanted to be,” Kate testified. At the time, Kate was caring for her ailing mother, and she was excited to have “a new friend” who in turn seemed excited to meet her.

Ms. Maxwell said she hoped to introduce Kate to her boyfriend, a “philanthropist” who liked to help young people, Kate told the jury.

Weeks later, Ms. Maxwell invited Kate to her home, where Mr. Epstein was sitting in the living room in sweatpants, Kate told the jury. She urged Kate to give Mr. Epstein’s foot “a little squeeze” to show him how strong she was, and Mr. Epstein said, “Oh, you can go ahead and do my shoulders.”

Soon after, Ms. Maxwell called Kate with an urgent request, Kate recalled: Mr. Epstein was there, and his masseuse had canceled — would she be able to fill in?

Kate went to Ms. Maxwell’s home, where Mr. Epstein was waiting in a dimly lit room. He initiated sexual contact with Kate and they engaged in a sex act during the massage, Kate testified.

Kate said she continued to see Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell several times a year. She stayed in touch with Ms. Maxwell on the phone, she said, and Ms. Maxwell often raised sexual topics, including how “demanding Jeffrey was.”

Once, Ms. Maxwell asked if she knew anyone who could come over to perform a sex act on Mr. Epstein, “because it was a lot for her to do,” Kate testified. Ghislaine also told her that Mr. Epstein liked “cute, young, pretty” girls like Kate, and that he “needed to have sex about three times a day.”

Kate told the jury she gave Mr. Epstein sexualized massages in London, Palm Beach and New York and on his island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, saying she traveled on commercial flights with tickets arranged for her by Ms. Maxwell. She said their contact ended when she was in her early 30s.

Once, when Kate was staying at Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home, she found what she described as a “schoolgirl outfit” laid out on her guest room bed. When she asked Ms. Maxwell what it was for, Ms. Maxwell said, “I thought it would be fun for you to take Jeffrey his tea in this outfit.”

Kate put the outfit on, and Ms. Maxwell gave her a tray; she found Mr. Epstein by the pool. He initiated a sex act with her, she told the jury.

Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz asked Kate why she had put on the outfit.

“I didn’t know how to say no,” Kate said. “I had never been to Palm Beach or Florida before. I had no idea where the house was. And I wasn’t sure if I said no if I would have to leave, or what the consequence would be for not doing it.”

On cross-examination, a defense lawyer asked pointed questions suggesting that the witness had chosen to appear on behalf of the government to get help with a visa and that her history of alcohol and drug use had affected her memory.

The second accuser to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell — referred to only as “Kate” — took the witness stand on Monday as Ms. Maxwell’s trial entered its second week in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Before her testimony, the government had provided few details about Kate, but Bobbi C. Sternheim, Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, last week offered a brief description of her in an opening statement to the jury, and also raised questions about why she was appearing in the case.

Ms. Sternheim said that Kate was a 44-year-old former actress, model and socialite from Britain who for years has lived in the United States, having come to this country on an entertainment visa. She is no longer in the entertainment business, Ms. Sternheim told the jury.

Although the indictment describes Kate as a minor when she was sexually abused by Mr. Epstein with Ms. Maxwell’s knowledge, the judge instructed the jury on Monday that Kate was over the relevant age of consent at the time, and thus any sexual conduct she says occurred with Mr. Epstein was not “illegal sexual activity,” as the indictment charged.

“I instruct you that this witness is not a victim of the crimes charged in the indictment,” the judge, Alison J. Nathan, told the jury.

“To the extent you conclude that her testimony is relevant to the issues before you,” the judge said, “you may consider it.” But the jury could not convict Ms. Maxwell on the basis of the testimony regarding sexual conduct between Kate and Mr. Epstein, the judge said.

In her opening statement, Ms. Sternheim told the jury, “You should wonder why she’s here. She is not alleged to be a victim in this case.”

But federal prosecutors have said in court papers that Kate was a minor when she was groomed by Ms. Maxwell to engage in sexual activity with Mr. Epstein.

“It follows that Ms. Maxwell’s role in grooming Kate to engage in sex acts with Mr. Epstein was a part of, and therefore constitutes evidence of, the conspiracy charges against Ms. Maxwell,” the government wrote.

The indictment charges that Ms. Maxwell befriended Kate in London in the mid-1990s, including a period when Ms. Maxwell knew Kate was younger than 18. Ms. Maxwell discussed Kate’s life and family with her, and introduced her to Mr. Epstein and arranged for multiple interactions between them, the indictment said.

During those interactions, the indictment charged, Ms. Maxwell encouraged Kate to massage Mr. Epstein, knowing that he would engage in sex acts with her during those sessions. Kate described those events in her testimony on Monday.

Ms. Sternheim, in her opening jury address, signaled that the defense would seek to discredit Kate’s testimony by suggesting she had ulterior motives in coming forward to assist the government. Ms. Sternheim said that after Mr. Epstein’s death in August 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, Kate “pointed the finger at Ghislaine.”

Ms. Sternheim said that Kate’s assistance to the government helped her to make a successful claim for compensation with the victim fund established after Mr. Epstein’s death, which awarded her $3.25 million.

Ms. Sternheim said Kate was also seeking assistance from the government in obtaining a special visa for government witnesses.

“Now, $3.25 million is a lot of money but it cannot buy you a visa,” Ms. Sternheim told the jury. “Maybe her testimony will. You will evaluate that.”

As the second week of Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial begins on Monday with a new accuser taking the stand, at least one of the key questions in the case has become clear: Were Ms. Maxwell and her longtime companion, the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, partners? Or were they partners in crime?

Prosecutors have portrayed Ms. Maxwell as running Epstein-owned properties, where abuse was said to have taken place, with a near-iron hand.

Ms. Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to charges that she recruited, groomed and ultimately helped Mr. Epstein abuse young girls. He was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges when he died in a Manhattan jail cell.

One witness, testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” told jurors that she met Ms. Maxwell before she met Mr. Epstein, and that Ms. Maxwell acted as a sort of guide into Mr. Epstein’s world, taking her shopping for a “preppy button-up shirt,” a “cashmere sweater,” and eventually for white cotton briefs at Victoria’s Secret, then instructing her on how Mr. Epstein liked to be touched sexually.

The government described Ms. Maxwell’s behavior as a type of “grooming,” intended to facilitate abuse.

“She knew what was going to happen to those girls,” a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, said during her opening statement. “The defendant walked the girls into a room where she knew that man would molest them, and there were times when she was in the room when it happened, making it all feel normal and casual.”

But Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers have pushed back aggressively against the government’s description. During her opening statement, a defense lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, told jurors that what the government had labeled grooming — “asking someone what they like to do, whether they like a movie, whether they like going shopping” — was actually lawful behavior.

While cross-examining Jane, defense lawyers suggested to jurors that she was an unreliable witness who had initially been uninterested in accusing Mr. Epstein or Ms. Maxwell of wrongdoing but had changed her mind out of a desire for money.

And they used the appearance on the stand of another government witness, a man who once managed Mr. Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, to undercut the notion that Ms. Maxwell had run the household. While being cross-examined, that witness, Juan Alessi, acknowledged that he had said previously, in a deposition, that Mr. Epstein was his “direct supervisor,” and that Ms. Maxwell would deal with him only if Mr. Epstein was “not available.”

She was born in France, reared in an English mansion, educated at Oxford. She spent decades dining with financiers, politicians and celebrities and hopping from Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion near Central Park to his lavish hideaways in Florida and the Virgin Islands.

It is perhaps no wonder that Ghislaine Maxwell finds life at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the hulking concrete federal jail on Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, “intolerable,” as her lawyers described it in court papers; she has also called it “a living hell” and even, as her brother put it, “torture.”

But the judge in Ms. Maxwell’s trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges did not agree. Four times, Judge Alison J. Nathan of Federal District Court in Manhattan has denied bail requests — even when Ms. Maxwell offered collateral of $28.5 million.

“Ms. Maxwell poses a substantial actual risk of flight,” Judge Nathan said.

Ms. Maxwell holds passports from three countries, including France, which does not extradite citizens to the United States. And prosecutors have linked her to more than 15 bank accounts that, over four years, received more than $20 million from accounts associated with Mr. Epstein.

Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers say she “wants nothing more than to remain in this country to fight the allegations against her.”

Nearly every detail has been contested in bail proceedings, from her actions before her arrest in July 2020 to her protective-custody conditions at the jail.

Ms. Maxwell has complained of sewage leaks and of intrusive surveillance that her lawyer compared to the monitoring of Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Prosecutors contend she lives better than other inmates, with her own shower, phone, TV and two computers.

Prosecutors also say that before her arrest, Ms. Maxwell hid in New England, eventually using cash to buy a 156-acre property in Bradford, N.H., veiling its ownership behind a corporation, telling a real estate agent she was a privacy-seeking journalist named Jen Marshall and then claiming falsely not to know the buyer.

Ms. Maxwell also used fake names to register her phone and order packages. She says she was hiding not from the authorities but from paparazzi, hackers and other threats.

Prosecutors countered that during her arrest, she ignored orders to open the door, fleeing to another room. Her lawyer replied that she was following security protocol, not looking for “some secret tunnel.”

The two sides have also clashed over Ms. Maxwell’s income and how recently she had contact with Mr. Epstein. Prosecutors summed up her claims as “implausible,” and for now, the judge has sided with them.

Each day at her trial, Ghislaine Maxwell sits in the courtroom at the corner of two long tables, flanked by her legal team — no fewer than four lawyers, hailing from a range of backgrounds and law firms.

Jeffrey S. Pagliuca and Laura Menninger, two Colorado-based lawyers at the firm Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, have represented Ms. Maxwell for at least five years, including in civil litigation brought by women who accused Jeffrey Epstein, her longtime companion, of sexual abuse.

Christian Everdell, a partner in the New York office of the international law firm Cohen & Gresser, is an alumnus of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is prosecuting Ms. Maxwell. During his decade-long tenure as a federal prosecutor, Mr. Everdell was part of the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit and its complex frauds team.

As an assistant U.S. attorney, Mr. Everdell contributed to the Justice Department’s investigation of the drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, which led to Mr. Guzmán’s conviction in another district. (Mr. Everdell brought charges against leaders of a Colombian drug trafficking organization that worked closely with Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, a partnership that figured in the case against Mr. Guzmán.)

Bobbi C. Sternheim, who delivered the defense’s opening statement on Monday, is a veteran criminal defense lawyer in New York whose clients have included one of Osama bin Laden’s earliest and most trusted aides, Khaled al-Fawwaz. In 2015, Mr. Fawwaz was convicted of participating in a global conspiracy to kill Americans and received a life sentence.

A former president of the New York Women’s Bar Association and counsel to the law firm Fasulo, Braverman & Di Maggio, Ms. Sternheim has represented defendants in organized crime and racketeering cases, according to the firm’s website. She has also been appointed numerous times by federal judges to represent defendants in cases eligible for the death penalty.

At the trial, Ms. Maxwell frequently passes notes to her lawyers and leans over to speak with them during breaks. At the close of each day, she sometimes embraces them.

Jeffrey Epstein looms over nearly every aspect of the sex-trafficking trial of his former partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, but his suicide in a federal jail cell in Manhattan removed any possibility of hearing the evidence against him at trial.

Mr. Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. The New York City medical examiner determined he had hanged himself with a bedsheet on a night when he was alone because his cellmate had been transferred.

His death in Manhattan set off a rash of unfounded conspiracy theories on social media that were picked up and repeated by high-profile figures, including Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. But investigations by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s Inspector General found no evidence of a conspiracy, proving Mr. Epstein’s death was a suicide, the Attorney General at the time, William P. Barr, later said.

It was not the first time he had tried to kill himself. A month earlier, after being denied bail on federal sex trafficking charges, Mr. Epstein was found unconscious in his jail cell with marks on his neck in what prison officials investigated as a suicide attempt.

The Friday morning before he died, thousands of documents from a civil suit had been released, providing lurid accounts accusing Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing scores of girls.

Investigations into the suicide found jail officials had made serious mistakes. Mr. Epstein was supposed to have been checked by the two guards in the protective housing unit every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not followed that night. One of the guards was not a full-fledged correction officer.

In addition, because of Mr. Epstein’s earlier attempted suicide, he was supposed to have had another inmate in his cell, officials said. But the jail had recently transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone, a decision that also violated the jail’s procedures, the two officials said.

Two days after Mr. Epstein died, Mr. Barr said he “was appalled” by the suicide and sharply criticized the management of the jail. He ordered a full investigation. The warden was transferred.

The two guards, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, were charged criminally with ignoring their duties and then lying about it. Prosecutors said the guards had been browsing the internet and napping rather than checking on Mr. Epstein every half-hour as they were supposed to the night he died. They were also accused of falsifying official logs, recording they had made the rounds. In May, they reached an agreement with prosecutors that allowed them to avoid prosecution and do community service.

This year, a trove of more than 2,000 pages of Federal Bureau of Prisons records obtained by The New York Times after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit suggested Mr. Epstein had gone to lengths to persuade jail officials that he was not suicidal after the first apparent attempt to hang himself in July 2019.

The notes and reports compiled by those who interacted with Mr. Epstein during his 36 days of detention show how he repeatedly assured them he had much to live for, while also hinting that he was despondent. After the first attempt, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein said he was living a “wonderful life,” denying any thoughts of ending it, even as he sat on suicide watch.

“I have no interest in killing myself,” Mr. Epstein told a jailhouse psychologist. He was a “coward” and did not like pain, he explained. “I would not do that to myself.”

In recent weeks, the country has watched two gripping trials with wide social resonance unfold on television and computer screens.

Video broadcasts allowed an untold number of people to watch the trial and acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people during a protest over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis. A similarly large audience watched the trial and conviction of three white men in Georgia charged in the murder of a Black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery. In the past, such access would likely have required a seat inside a courtroom.

So why is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial not equally accessible? The answer has to do with the difference in jurisdictions — federal court in the case of Ms. Maxwell, and county courts in the other two.

There are specific, sometimes arcane rules that govern federal proceedings. Though the federal judiciary has experimented with pilot programs allowing cameras in civil cases, the broadcast of criminal cases has been barred since 1946 under Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

By contrast, some state and county courts for decades have had latitude to allow trial broadcasts. For instance, in 1993, the Los Angeles County Superior Court let Court TV broadcast the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, brothers who used shotguns to kill their parents but claimed they did so in self-defense after years of sexual and psychological torture.

Vivid scenes with weeping defendants and dramatic cross-examinations helped create a cultlike following among some of those who tuned in. Soon afterward, Court TV and the E Channel both covered O.J. Simpson’s murder trial live from Los Angeles County. Those proceedings, too, drew devoted audiences.

But the televised trials also had their critics, who complained that the national audience encouraged lawyers, judges and witnesses to grandstand.

The first attempt to prosecute the Menendez brothers ended with jurors unable to agree on a verdict. The judge handling the case, Stanley M. Weisberg, believed that the television coverage had affected many potential jurors for the retrial and barred electronic coverage of the second trial to “protect the rights of the parties, the dignity of the court and assure the orderly conduct of the proceedings.”

In 1994, the U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for federal courts, voted down a proposed amendment to Rule 53, which would have allowed cameras in criminal proceedings. The conference also rejected a similar proposal to allow the recording and broadcast of civil proceedings, concluding “the intimidating effect of cameras on some witnesses and jurors was cause for concern.”

People who want to keep track of legal proceedings remotely in federal cases in New York may have an easier time when verdicts are appealed. The Second Circuit, which hears appeals in New York State, as well as in Connecticut and Vermont, has a web page for the “livestream audio” of oral arguments. Those who tune in cannot watch what is happening inside the courtroom but can listen to what is being said.

Ghislaine Maxwell faces six counts in her federal trial, which relate to accusations that she facilitated the sexual exploitation of girls for her longtime companion, the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The six counts center on the accounts of four accusers. The charges include:

• One count of enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, in which Ms. Maxwell is accused of coercing one girl — identified as Minor Victim 1 in charging documents — to travel from Florida to New York, between 1994 and 1997, to engage in sex acts with Mr. Epstein.

• One count of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in illegal sex acts, which accuses Ms. Maxwell of bringing the same girl from Florida to New York on numerous occasions.

• One count of sex trafficking of a minor, which charges that between 2001 and 2004, Ms. Maxwell recruited, enticed and transported another girl — identified in the charges as Minor Victim 4 — to engage in at least one commercial sex act with Mr. Epstein.

• And three counts of conspiracy, which are related to the other counts. The conspiracy counts in the indictment are more expansive, involving all four accusers and homes in the United States and in London. These charges involve accusations that Ms. Maxwell worked with Mr. Epstein to secure underage girls for sex acts, for example, by encouraging one to give Mr. Epstein massages in London between 1994 and 1995.

Ms. Maxwell, 59, could face a lengthy prison term if convicted. Conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors carries a maximum 40 year sentence; the other charges have maximum penalties of five or 10 years.

When Ms. Maxwell was arrested in July 2020, she was also charged with two counts of perjury, accusing her of lying under oath in 2016 during depositions for a lawsuit related to Mr. Epstein. In April, Judge Alison J. Nathan granted the defense’s request to sever the perjury counts, which will be tried separately.