Prosecution Rests in Ghislaine Maxwell Trial

The 10th day of Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial centered on the testimony of Annie Farmer, who told the jury that Ms. Maxwell touched her breasts during a massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s Santa Fe, N.M., ranch when she was 16 years old.

At the end of the day, prosecutors said they were done with witnesses and rested their case.

Ms. Farmer, the fourth accuser in Ms. Maxwell’s trial and the first to testify using her full name, told the jury about several sexualized encounters with Mr. Epstein, including in movie theaters in New York and Santa Fe.

Prosecutors say Ms. Maxwell, 59, helped to recruit and groom teenage girls for sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein, the sex offender and financier who was her longtime companion. Mr. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial. Ms. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty and denied the accusations.

Prosecutors rested their case

Shortly after 4 p.m., a prosecutor announced, “the government rests.”

With the jury dismissed for the weekend, a lawyer for Ms. Maxwell, Christian Everdell, made a motion to dismiss the charges against his client — a routine move in criminal trials — arguing there was insufficient evidence to support the counts.

Judge Alison J. Nathan denied the motion.

The trial will continue on Thursday. A lawyer for Ms. Maxwell said the defense would take no more than four days to present its case.

Annie Farmer said Epstein caressed her in a New York movie theater

Ms. Farmer, 42, told the jury that she met Mr. Epstein in New York City in late 1995 or early 1996, when she went to visit her older sister, who worked for Mr. Epstein at the time. Mr. Epstein paid for her flight from Arizona and she hoped he might provide other financial support.

During the trip, Mr. Epstein took the sisters to a movie. He sat in between them, and during the film caressed Ms. Farmer’s arm and foot. “I felt sick to my stomach,” Ms. Farmer said, but she did not tell her sister.

Ms. Farmer first met Ms. Maxwell at Mr. Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico

In the spring of 2016, Ms. Farmer — still 16 years old — went to visit Mr. Epstein at his Santa Fe ranch, where she met Ms. Maxwell.

Once, Ms. Maxwell directed her to undress and gave her a massage, she testified. While Ms. Farmer was naked on her back, she testified, Ms. Maxwell “pulled the sheet down and exposed my breasts and started rubbing on my chest and on my upper breasts.”

Another time, Ms. Farmer recalled waking up one morning to find Mr. Epstein “bounding into the room in this playful way, saying he wanted to cuddle.” He got into her bed and lay behind her, pressing his body into hers, Ms. Farmer testified.

On cross-examination, Laura Menninger, one of Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers, asked Ms. Farmer about an apparent discrepancy in her prior accounts of the incident, in which she said she did not remember if she had been fully naked during the massage.

Ms. Farmer’s testimony sought to highlight Ms. Maxwell’s role

Judge Nathan told the jury they should not consider the contact that Ms. Farmer described being initiated by Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell as “illegal sexual activity,” but that they could weigh Ms. Farmer’s account as they consider Ms. Maxwell’s role in Mr. Epstein’s pattern of abuse.

Ms. Farmer’s mother and high school boyfriend supported parts of her testimony

As they have throughout the trial, prosecutors called additional witnesses to bolster an accuser’s testimony.

David Mulligan, Ms. Farmer’s high school boyfriend, said Ms. Farmer had told him about her encounters with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell.

And Ms. Farmer’s mother, Janice Swain, confirmed Ms. Farmer’s travels and her communication with Mr. Epstein. She said that when her daughter returned from New Mexico, she was “withdrawn” and did not want to discuss what had happened.

A federal prosecutor on Friday announced in court that the government was resting its case in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former socialite charged with helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and ultimately sexually abuse underage girls.

The statement came on the trial’s tenth day in Federal District Court in Manhattan, after the jury heard testimony from Annie Farmer, the last of four accusers prosecutors called to testify against Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein.

Ms. Maxwell’s trial, which was expected to last up to six weeks, has moved much more quickly than expected.

Ms. Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her. If she is convicted of all of them, she could receive a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.

Moments after the government said it was resting its case, one of Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers made a motion, asking the judge, Alison J. Nathan, to dismiss the indictment or direct an acquittal even before the case goes to the jury.

Such motions are routinely made by defense lawyers in criminal trials, and it is rare for a judge to dismiss a case at that stage, when the government cannot appeal the decision.

After hearing arguments from both sides on Friday, Judge Nathan denied the motion. The trial is expected to resume next week.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense lawyers suggested on Friday that a witness’s description of a visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch could be unreliable because the witness did not provide a written record of the trip.

The witness, Annie Farmer, testified that during the visit to New Mexico, which took place when she was 16, Ms. Maxwell gave her an unwanted massage and touched her breasts. Later, Ms. Farmer said, Mr. Epstein “bounded” into a bedroom she was using, got into bed with her and wrapped her in his arms.

Ms. Farmer was the fourth woman to take the stand in Ms. Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan and testify about her experiences with Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein.

During cross-examination, a defense lawyer, Laura Menninger, asked repeatedly about a journal Ms. Farmer had kept as a teenager and which detailed the first time she met Mr. Epstein, during a trip to New York City that she took a few months before the visit to New Mexico.

Ms. Farmer agreed that the journal had helped refresh her recollection of the trip to New York and that it had contained no description of Ms. Maxwell, who she said she had not met during that visit.

It was not clear whether Ms. Farmer had kept a similar journal about her travel to New Mexico, but she acknowledged that she had not provided any such journal entries to the government. That led Ms. Menninger to suggest that without a contemporaneous written account, details of that trip could be muddled.

“We can’t tell without a piece of paper what happened to you while you were there?” Ms. Menninger asked, also asking whether events during the trip could be harder to remember “because we don’t have a piece of paper or a journal entry.”

Ms. Farmer replied that details could be harder to remember without a journal.

Annie Farmer, the fourth accuser in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the first of her accusers to testify under her true name, spent the morning on Friday describing for a jury in federal court her first encounter with Ms. Maxwell at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.

There, she said, Ms. Maxwell directed her to undress and gave her a massage, first on her back and then having her roll over.

“She pulled the sheet down and exposed my breasts and started rubbing on my chest and on my upper breasts,” Ms. Farmer testified. “I was surprised. I wanted so badly to get off of the table.”

Ms. Farmer, 42, testified in Federal District Court in Manhattan on the tenth day of Ms. Maxwell’s trial, in what appeared to be the culmination of the government’s presentation before the jury. Prosecutors told the judge, Alison J. Nathan, this week that they expected to rest their case as early as Friday.

Ms. Farmer said that she first met Mr. Epstein after Christmas in 1995 when he bought a plane ticket for her to fly from Arizona, where she was a high school student, to New York City, where her older sister, Maria, worked for Mr. Epstein.

“She had said that Epstein was interested in possibly helping me with my education and this was one of the reasons that he was purchasing the ticket,” Ms. Farmer said.

One night, the sisters met Mr. Epstein at his home before going to see “The Phantom of the Opera,” for which Mr. Epstein had bought tickets but did not attend with them. Ms. Farmer said she found Mr. Epstein to be down to earth and easy to talk with.

But there was another encounter with Mr. Epstein that Ms. Farmer described in a near-contemporaneous journal entry as “a little weird.”

While at the movies with her and her sister, she testified, Mr. Epstein put his hand on the armrest between their seats, caressed her hand and rubbed her foot and leg.

“I was very nervous and anxious,” she testified. “I was sick to my stomach.”

Ms. Farmer said she and Mr. Epstein spoke on the phone two or three times after the visit. Then, in the spring of 1996, he flew her to his ranch in New Mexico for the visit where she first met Ms. Maxwell.

Ms. Farmer recalled Ms. Maxwell as a “trim attractive woman” who did not seem surprised to see her. “She had a British accent and she was well spoken and articulate and she was enthusiastic in greeting me,” Ms. Farmer said.

She testified that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell took her shopping, bought her a pair of cowboy boots and took her to see a movie. During the film, she said, Mr. Epstein held her hand and rubbed her foot and her arm, similar to what he had done in New York, she said, only “more blatant.”

At one point, when they were back at the ranch, she said, Ms. Maxwell instructed her on how to give Mr. Epstein, who was barefoot, a foot massage. She did so, she testified, feeling very uncomfortable. “I did not want to be touching his feet.”

Ms. Farmer also recalled waking up one morning to find Mr. Epstein “bounding into the room in this playful way, saying he wanted to cuddle.”

He got into her bed and lay behind her, and pressed his body into hers, Ms. Farmer testified. “He kind of had his arms around me and I felt kind of frozen,” she said.

Telling him that she needed to use the bathroom, she shut the door and kept it closed. “I remember thinking, I wanted to be in there long enough that hopefully this situation would be over.”

Asked by a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, if she told Mr. Epstein that she did not want to cuddle, she said no, adding that on the ranch, “I was aware at the time that I was very isolated.”

A conversation before testimony resumed Friday afternoon offered insight into one of the ways Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense may try to undermine the testimony of her accusers at her sex-trafficking trial.

Lawyers for Ms. Maxwell told the judge they may call an expert on “hindsight bias” — a phenomenon in which people claim, after the fact, to have known what was going to happen in a given situation.

Experts who have studied hindsight bias — also known as creeping determinism — say there is a human tendency to remember selective information and details that conform to what is known in the present, and to craft a narrative that fits.

In a 2012 paper, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota wrote that one consequence of hindsight bias can be overconfidence in one’s judgment.

The strategy has already been on display in the cross-examination of witnesses, including on Friday, when a defense lawyer, Laura Menninger, asked one of Ms. Maxwell’s accusers, Annie Farmer, if she had reviewed her journal entries or done research online before speaking with federal law enforcement about her allegations dating back to 1996.

Ms. Farmer, now 42, had told the jury about sexualized encounters she had with Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Maxwell when she was 16 years old. In her journal at the time, Ms. Farmer described one of the encounters — in which Mr. Epstein caressed her hand and foot in a New York City movie theater.

Ms. Farmer did not write in her journal about a similar incident in New Mexico several months later. She testified Friday that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell took her to see the movie “Primal Fear.”

Ms. Menninger asked Ms. Farmer if she had done research on the internet about the release date of the movie. “You placed your memory of that trip to around the time it was released right?” Ms. Menninger asked.

“I wouldn’t say it that way,” Ms. Farmer said.

An address book filled with Jeffrey Epstein’s contacts — one of many small blue or black books where witnesses say he kept the names of girls who gave him massages — can be introduced at Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, the judge has ruled.

Like the “little black book” of the so-called “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss that revealed politicians and celebrities among her clients, the books have been a subject of intense interest since the Epstein scandal burst into public view.

There have long been hopes — and fears — that such contact lists could include the names not only of his victims, but also of prominent figures he socialized with and in some cases was accused of introducing to girls for sexual abuse.

But the ruling, issued Thursday, does not mean those contacts will become public. Just one book, labeled as Exhibit GX52, is at issue in Ms. Maxwell’s trial, and in negotiations in federal court on Friday, the prosecution and defense agreed that only excerpts would be introduced, under seal.

The defense had argued that there was no proof that the book was one of those that Juan Alessi, a former house manager at Mr. Epstein’s villa in Palm Beach, Fla., testified were commonly used by Ms. Maxwell and others to book massages and other visits from young women and girls.

But the judge, Alison J. Nathan, ruled that according to court precedent, the basis of Mr. Alessi’s testimony — years of working closely with Mr. Epstein and his staff — was sufficient to establish that the book was similar enough to those he had seen to authenticate it and support its relevance.

Mr. Alessi testified that several blue or black hardcover directories were typically kept in various locations at the villa, containing “hundreds and hundreds of names” and phone numbers.

Examining the book recovered from the villa, he said he recognized “many, many, many, many names.” Among them were some of the entries listed under “massage in Palm Beach.”

All four women who testified in federal court that Ghislaine Maxwell recruited them for sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein are facing a common tactic as defense lawyers try to discredit them.

The lawyers have suggested the women are seeking financial gain, perhaps through payouts from a victims compensation fund set up after Mr. Epstein’s death or from civil settlements against his estate, now worth $185 million.

But the defense has not explained how the accusers’ testimony could enrich them. To get payments from the fund, they did not have to cooperate with prosecutors; they only had to drop lawsuits or refrain from filing them.

Asked in court if she had a “financial stake” in the outcome of Ms. Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial or believed it would affect her award from the fund, one victim, identified as Jane, replied simply, “No.” The other accusers, known as Kate, and Carolyn and Annie, gave the same answer.

Still, defense lawyers have portrayed Mr. Epstein’s accusers as fortune-seekers and have peppered the proceedings with references to money.

“His accusers have shaken the money tree and millions of dollars have fallen their way,” Bobbi Sternheim, a defense lawyer, said in her opening statement, adding, “Ghislaine has been inserted in those stories as they reframed their stories for a payday.”

She described the accusers partaking of Mr. Epstein’s world of “beautiful homes, beautiful surrounding, beautiful people,” and urged the jury to watch for “manipulation and money.”

Such tactics are common in sex-abuse cases that hinge on victim testimony. Prince Andrew of Britain deployed them to attack another accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who contends in a lawsuit that he sexually abused her after Mr. Epstein introduced them.

Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor and a professor at New York Law School, said that accusing women of “seeking fame and fortune” is a staple for defense attorneys, who, “in fairness,” she said, “have an obligation to represent their clients diligently and zealously.”

A defense, she noted, “doesn’t have to be coherent” to sow doubt about witness motives:“Sometimes, you’re just throwing things at the wall.”

But such tactics could backfire, Ms. Roiphe said. Public awareness about sexual assault has grown, she said, with cultural touchstones like the #MeToo movement and the Jodie Foster movie “The Accused,” and lawyers increasingly risk backlash if juries perceive them “slut-shaming and victim-blaming.”

The four witnesses testified that they did receive money from the victims’ fund: Kate was awarded $3.5 million; Annie, $1.5 million. Jane kept $2.9 million of a $5 million award after paying lawyers; Carolyn received $2.8 million after the fund deducted an earlier settlement from her award.

In 2020, facing dozens of sexual abuse lawsuits, lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate created the compensation fund, modeling it on similar funds that compensated people sexually abused by Roman Catholic priests or sickened after the 9/11 attacks.

Recipients agreed to drop, or not file, lawsuits, but remained free to cooperate with law enforcement, the program’s guidelines state. They say settlements “will not impose any rules of confidentiality on claimants, who are expressly permitted to discuss their allegations without restriction, should they choose.”

The fund ended its work in August, after paying just over $121 million to more than 135 people. A few accusers declined awards to pursue lawsuits. The three witnesses were not among them.

Ms. Maxwell is also trying to collect money from Mr. Epstein’s estate. Last year she filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Virgin Islands, seeking to recoup legal costs.

When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in July 2020, one of her accusers, Annie Farmer, read a statement to the judge, urging her to deny bail to Ms. Maxwell, who was charged with helping to recruit girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein.

“She is a sexual predator who groomed and abused me and countless other children and young women,” Ms. Farmer told the judge, who ordered Ms. Maxwell detained.

On Friday, Ms. Farmer, now 42, took the witness stand in Ms. Maxwell’s federal sex-trafficking trial in Manhattan to tell her story to a jury. She is the fourth accuser to testify but the first to do so under her full name. The previous three asked to be identified by pseudonyms or first names.

“My name is Annie Farmer,” she said as she took the stand on Friday, before spelling her name aloud.

Ms. Farmer’s story is already somewhat well known, in part because she has sued Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein’s estate, and she has spoken out in court hearings and to the news media.

She and her sister, Maria Farmer, made early complaints about Mr. Epstein’s conduct to the authorities. Maria Farmer has said she went to the New York Police Department and called the F.B.I. in 1996 to lodge complaints about Mr. Epstein’s troubling physical contact and threats she had received, The New York Times reported in 2019.

Those were the earliest known allegations made to the authorities about Mr. Epstein’s conduct, but the sisters have said there was no follow-up by either agency. Records show F.B.I. agents came to speak with them about a decade later.

In her lawsuit, Annie Farmer said that her sister, Maria, an artist and graduate student in New York, met Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell at an art show, and that Mr. Epstein took an interest in Maria’s artwork and offered to help her in her art career. Maria eventually accepted a job offer from Mr. Epstein to purchase art for him, the suit said.

Later, Mr. Epstein offered to help Annie Farmer get into college, but, according to the lawsuit, the offer was only a ruse to get her to come to New York so he could abuse her.

The suit describes Mr. Epstein taking Annie and Maria to the movies in New York, positioning himself between them and caressing and petting Annie against her will, without Maria’s knowledge.

The lawsuit also says that Annie was 16 in 1996 when Mr. Epstein flew her to his ranch in New Mexico to attend what she was led to believe was an educational program for high school students. After arriving, she realized that she was the only participant in the program. She also met Ms. Maxwell there, who seemed charming and friendly, the suit said.

According to the suit, Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell took her shopping and lavished her with gifts, including beauty products and new pair of cowboy boots — part of a process that prosecutors have said was “grooming,” to lower her defenses.

Upon their return to the ranch, Ms. Maxwell began pressuring Annie to give Mr. Epstein a foot massage, the lawsuit said. Later, Ms. Maxwell directed Annie to take off all her clothes and lie on the massage table, where she “touched intimate parts of Annie’s body against her will,” the lawsuit said.

The next day, according to the suit, Annie woke up to find Mr. Epstein climbing into bed with her, saying, “I want to cuddle,” and pressing his body against hers, leaving her “frozen in fear.”

David Boies, one of Ms. Farmer’s lawyers, said her lawsuit was ultimately settled with Mr. Epstein’s estate, in an agreement that required the dismissal of all claims against Mr. Epstein’s employees, including Ms. Maxwell.

Mike Baker contributed reporting.

The government’s sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell rests largely on the accounts of four women who say that they were sexually abused by the financier Jeffrey Epstein with assistance from Ms. Maxwell.

Three of those women have already testified in Federal District Court in Manhattan; a fourth is expected to testify this week. All three said that Mr. Epstein sexually abused them while they were teenagers and that Ms. Maxwell played a crucial role in facilitating that abuse, establishing an initial contact with Mr. Epstein, arranging visits to his homes or giving instructions on how Mr. Epstein liked to be touched.

Jane

The first accuser to take the stand, identified only as Jane, testified that she was a 14-year-old girl from Palm Beach, Fla., when she met Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein at a summer camp in Michigan. Her family had little money at the time, she said. Her father, a conductor and composer, had died the previous year.

Jane said that Ms. Maxwell at first treated her like a younger sister, taking her to the movies and buying her clothes — including a cashmere sweater and underwear from Victoria’s Secret. Later, Ms. Maxwell gave her instructions on how to give massages to Mr. Epstein, Jane said, and he sexually abused her during those sessions.

Sometimes Ms. Maxwell took part in the sexual activity, too, Jane said. She said on occasion people gathered at one of Mr. Epstein’s homes would remove their clothes “and it would just, you know, sort of turn into this orgy.”

She never told her mother about the years of abuse, she said, “because I felt very ashamed, I felt very disgusted, I was confused.”

Kate

Kate said met Ms. Maxwell in London when she was 17, introduced by an older man she was dating. Ms. Maxwell had a home in Belgravia, an upscale neighborhood where Kate was living with her mother. At the time, Kate testified, she had just moved back to England from France and had few friends. “I was quite excited to be friends with her,” Kate testified. “She seemed to be everything that I wanted to be.”

Kate told the jury that one day Ms. Maxwell asked her fill in for Mr. Epstein’s masseuse, though she had no experience. During the massage, Mr. Epstein initiated sexual contact. That pattern was repeated multiple times over the next few years, in London and at his residences in the United States.

She recalled one occasion in Florida when Ms. Maxwell gave her a “schoolgirl” outfit –– a short pleated skirt, white socks, white panties and a shirt –– to wear while bringing tea to Mr. Epstein at he mansion. That, too, led to sexual activity initiated by Mr. Epstein.

“I didn’t know how to say ‘no’ to that,” Kate testified. “I wasn’t sure if I said ‘no’ — if I would have to leave or what kind of consequence there might be for not doing it.”

Carolyn

When she was 14 years old, Carolyn testified, a friend brought her to Mr. Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach, saying she could make money for a massage. Once there, Carolyn told jurors, she watched her friend massage Mr. Epstein, then have sex with him.

Over the next four years, Carolyn said, she gave Mr. Epstein more than 100 sexual massages for money, during which touched her and masturbated. Ms. Maxwell called her to arrange some of those massage sessions, Carolyn said.

On two occasions, he summoned another woman to join the sexual activity. At least once, Carolyn said, Ms. Maxwell participated herself, touching Carolyn’s breasts, hips and buttocks. She recalled that Ms. Maxwell said “that I had a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”

She told jurors that she told both Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein how old she was.

Carolyn said she spent money she received for the massage sessions to buy alcohol and drugs and ended up abusing both. She stopped going to Mr. Epstein’s house when she was 18. “He asked me if I had any younger friends, and I said no,” she said. “And that’s when I realized I was too old.”

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.

The sex trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell resumed on Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Manhattan after it was temporarily halted on Thursday when a lawyer fell ill.

On Friday, the judge welcomed the lawyers back into the courtroom and began with a discussion about an exhibit the government is seeking to introduce. The fourth accuser, Annie Farmer, took the witness stand shortly after on Friday, the trial’s tenth day.

The government may also rest its case after the fourth accuser’s testimony, a prosecutor said earlier this week.

Ms. Maxwell, 59, faces charges of recruiting, grooming and ultimately helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls. She has pleaded not guilty.

The trial has moved much more quickly than expected. Before it began, the prosecutors and the defense told Judge Alison J. Nathan that it could last up to six weeks.

The judge had halted the trial on Thursday after a brief discussion among the lawyers in the robing room. She told the court that a lawyer in the case was sick and needed medical attention.

She said the attorney, who was not identified, was necessary for the direct examination of an upcoming witness. Prosecutors on Thursday were expected to call the last of the four accusers who the government has said will testify at Ms. Maxwell’s trial.

The jury in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial heard from four government witnesses on Wednesday, including one of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime pilots and the ex-boyfriend of one of Mr. Epstein’s accusers.

One more woman who alleges Ms. Maxwell groomed her for abuse by Mr. Epstein is expected to testify before the government rests its case this week.

The witnesses on Wednesday served to bolster the accounts of the government’s main witnesses so far — three women who have testified they were sexually abused by Mr. Epstein as teenagers with Ms. Maxwell’s help.

Prosecutors say Ms. Maxwell, 59, helped to recruit and groom teenage girls for sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein, the notorious sex offender and financier who was her longtime companion. Mr. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial; Ms. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty and denied the accusations.

Mar-a-Lago’s human resources director corroborated testimony about an outspoken Epstein accuser.

The first witness to take the stand Wednesday was Janine Gill, the human resources director at former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, where Virginia Roberts — who is now called Virginia Giuffre and has been one of Mr. Epstein’s most outspoken accusers — has said she first met Ms. Maxwell.

Ms. Roberts has not testified at trial, but a former Epstein employee told the jury last week that he and Ms. Maxwell met her at the resort. Ms. Gill introduced evidence that Ms. Roberts’s father worked at the resort at around the time this encounter is said to have taken place.

An accuser’s ex-boyfriend recalling bringing her to Epstein’s Palm Beach home as a teenager.

The second witness testified only under his first name, Shawn. He told the jury that he had driven his ex-girlfriend, Carolyn — along with two other teenage girls he was dating — to Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home regularly from around 2002 to 2004.

Carolyn, who testified this week using only her first name, told the jury that she began going to Mr. Epstein’s house to give him massages when she was 14, and that those encounters typically ended with a sexual act. She was paid for the massages, sometimes by Ms. Maxwell, she said.

Shawn said Carolyn left Mr. Epstein’s mansion with hundreds of dollars after each visit and said she told him about Ms. Maxwell. On cross-examination, he was pressed to explain why he had been unable to place Ms. Maxwell’s accent in his previous meetings with the government.

Messages taken by a former employee appeared to boost an accuser’s testimony

Another witness, Nicole Hesse, said she worked part-time for Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell at the Palm Beach house for about a year, from 2003 to 2004. She said that while she was almost never there at the same time as they were, she had instructions to take down phone calls that came in, on a message pad near the telephone.

Some of those messages were introduced as evidence, including several in which “Carolyn” called.

Another former pilot showed jurors flight logs showing accusers on Epstein’s private jets

The day’s fourth witness, David Rodgers, was the second of Mr. Epstein’s former pilots to testify at Ms. Maxwell’s trial. He walked the jury through flight logs of Mr. Epstein’s private aircraft from 1996 to 2001, showing that he flew Mr. Epstein and others between Mr. Epstein’s various homes and other locations.

Ms. Maxwell was on many of those flights, Mr. Rodgers testified, sometimes along with Ms. Roberts. Sometimes, Ms. Roberts flew with Mr. Epstein alone, the passenger logs showed. Some passengers were marked in the book simply as “one female” or “two females” — annotations that Mr. Rodgers said meant he had not been told their names.

Mr. Rodgers also testified that he flew a passenger identified as “Jane” — who testified last week that she was abused by Mr. Epstein starting when she was 14. Jane was recorded flying with Mr. Rodgers in 1996, when she would have been about 16, and in 1997, 1998 and 2001, the logs showed.