Live Updates: Ghislaine Maxwell’s Defense Begins to Present Its Case

Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense team called an expert witness on Thursday who described memories as fragile and malleable, and testified that they can be distorted by language, emotion and misinformation.

Questioning the reliability of the memories of four women who have accused Ms. Maxwell of grooming them for sexual abuse is central to the defense’s case. Many of the events they described happened decades ago.

The witness, Elizabeth Loftus, is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and has spent decades studying what she described as “the nature of memory,” “the workings of memory” and “false memories.”

She said she had conducted hundreds of experiments on memory and determined that exposure to falsehoods can cause people to form false memories that they regard as real.

“They fall sway to the misinformation,” she said. “It becomes their memory.”

Ms. Loftus has testified in multiple trials as a defense witness, taking the stand during Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape trial to question the testimony by the actress Anabella Sciorra and to tell jurors in that case that memories not only fade over time but can often be skewed.

Prosecutors in Ms. Maxwell’s trial had asked Judge Alison J. Nathan to exclude from evidence Ms. Loftus’s opinions on topics like how memories are created and how “false memories can be described with confidence, detail, and emotion.”

But Judge Nathan accepted Ms. Loftus as an expert witness, and on Thursday Ms. Loftus testified about some of the topics that the government had wanted to avoid.

Defense lawyers have worked hard throughout the trial to trip up prosecution witnesses on their recollections, highlighting uncertainties about when events happened and pointing out discrepancies between testimony in court and earlier statements to investigators. The defense also suggested that one witness who had used drugs and alcohol might have inaccurate recollections as a result.

During her testimony Ms. Loftus said that memory “doesn’t work like a recording device,” and described three stages that cover how memories are formed: the acquisition stage, when events occur; the retention stage, when memories of those events are essentially stored; and the retrieval stage, when someone may be asked to recount an experience.

Post-event suggestions, including “disinformation,” questioning by someone with an agenda or a hypothesis, or even a conversation between two people about the past can cause memory “contamination,” Ms. Loftus testified. She added that news reports or questions from law enforcement can also affect memory.

And, she said, people can start out with ambiguous memories of certain events but then, if those events are “labeled” in a certain way, they can start to remember their experiences as closer to that label.

Ms. Sternheim asked whether the inclusion of “very vivid details” means that a memory is accurate. Ms. Loftus replied that false memories can be just as vivid or detailed as real ones.

“People can be confident about them,” she said. “People can be emotional about them.”

While cross-examining Ms. Loftus, prosecutors sought to portray her as favoring defendants.

As she was questioned by a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, Ms. Loftus acknowledged that she had testified in about 150 criminal trials, all but one of them for the defense, and written a book titled “Witness for the Defense.”

A few minutes later Ms. Pomerantz asked whether people who were subject to repeated traumatic experiences had reliable memories of those events.

“The more times you’re exposed to something the better your memory,” Ms. Loftus said.

A federal judge said on Thursday that she had denied a request by Ghislaine Maxwell to have three witnesses testify anonymously on her behalf at her widely watched federal sex-trafficking trial in Manhattan — a request the judge said was unprecedented in the annals of law.

The ruling by Judge Alison J. Nathan came as Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers began to present the defense’s case in Federal District Court, where Ms. Maxwell faces charges she helped Mr. Epstein recruit, groom and ultimately sexually abuse underage girls. She has pleaded not guilty.

In support of the request for witness anonymity, Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers cited the judge’s earlier decision to allow three of Ms. Maxwell’s accusers to testify for the prosecution under the pseudonyms “Jane” and “Kate” and a first name, “Carolyn,” in order to protect their privacy.

But Judge Nathan, in a written opinion filed on Thursday morning, drew a distinction between the government’s witnesses and those of the defense. She wrote that the court had a legal duty to ensure that the privacy and dignity of crime victims are respected.

“If alleged victims of abuse were subject to publicity, harassment, and embarrassment, other alleged victims of sex crimes may be deterred from coming forward to report abuse,” she added.

She said such reasons did not apply to the defense’s request.

“None of the defense’s witnesses intend to testify to sensitive personal topics or sexual conduct,” Judge Nathan wrote. Rather, she said, they all were anticipated to deny misconduct by Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein and did not qualify as victims under the law.

“Further, there is no similar concern, as there are for alleged victims of sexual abuse, that denying the use of pseudonyms will deter reports of misconduct,” the judge said.

The defense has not identified the three witnesses who were seeking anonymity. Bobbi C. Sternheim, one of Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers, had suggested in court that some defense witnesses might not be willing to testify if they had to do so under their true names. She argued that denying their requests for anonymity might “impact the willingness of these witnesses to testify, thereby compromising Ms. Maxwell’s right to present her defense.”

Judge Nathan wrote that those concerns are present in every high-profile criminal case.

As to the defense’s concern about Ms. Maxwell’s right to present a defense, Judge Nathan noted the “late-breaking nature of the defense’s request” — which was made two days after the government rested its case. She noted that the government’s request to use pseudonyms had been made before the trial began.

“The defense could and should have anticipated potential witnesses’ concerns,” Judge Nathan said, adding that Ms. Maxwell could always use tools like a subpoena to compel a reluctant witness’s attendance at trial.

A woman who worked as Ghislaine Maxwell’s executive assistant testified that she respected and looked up to her, as Ms. Maxwell’s defense began presenting its case in her sex-trafficking trial on Thursday.

Cimberly Espinosa, who worked for Ms. Maxwell from about 1996 until 2002, was the first witness called by Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers. She described Ms. Maxwell as Mr. Epstein’s “estate manager” but could not say how important Ms. Maxwell was to Mr. Epstein.

Although she was demanding, Ms. Maxwell was fair to her, Ms. Espinosa testified. “I highly respected Ghislaine,” she testified. “I looked up to her very much.”

Ms. Maxwell is charged with recruiting, grooming and ultimately helping Mr. Epstein sexually abuse young women and girls. The two-week case presented by prosecutors often focused on the nature of the relationship between Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial.

Among the witnesses prosecutors presented were four women who testified that Ms. Maxwell had facilitated sexual contact or abuse by Mr. Epstein. One expert witness testified about the methods sexual predators often use to select targets and acclimate them to abuse, which psychologists who study abuse call “grooming.”

During her time on the stand Ms. Espinosa also offered her thoughts on Mr. Epstein and on Jane, one of the four women who testified that he sexually abused her.

Ms. Espinosa said that Mr. Epstein was known to pay for the education of employees’ children, adding: “He was a giver, he was generous.” She said that she remembered that Mr. Epstein had distributed tickets to “The Lion King” on Broadway to “almost all the employees” who wanted to go.

Jane and her family members stayed in one of several apartments owned by Mr. Epstein, which were commonly used by his friends, Ms. Espinosa testified. She added that Mr. Epstein’s employees thought of Jane as his goddaughter.

“I thought it was a loving relationship,” she said.

Ms. Espinosa testified that she had “never” seen Ms. Maxwell or Mr. Epstein engage in inappropriate activity with underage girls. A few minutes later, a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, briefly cross-examined Ms. Espinosa, who agreed that she had never visited Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home, which other witnesses have described as the site of abuse.

Since the prosecution rested last Friday, the defense has revealed little about its plans, except to say that its case would likely last no longer than four days. But during back and forth between defense lawyers and prosecutors in front of the judge on Thursday morning before jurors entered the courtroom Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers previewed part of their case.

They said they would call as a witness Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist who is an expert on false, repressed and unreliable memories. Ms. Loftus testified as a defense witness during the rape trial of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, saying that memory changes over time.

During that trial she also testified that factors like stress and alcohol or drugs can affect a person’s memory. She said leading questions by investigators and extensive media coverage on a subject “can cause a contamination and alteration in memory.”

She appears likely to offer similar testimony in defense of Ms. Maxwell. Defense lawyers have already questioned the memories of prosecution witnesses and have brought up the fact that two of the women who testified about abuse at the hands of Mr. Epstein had a history of drug and alcohol use.

During an opening statement a defense lawyer also told jurors that they would learn that “not only have memories faded, but they have been contaminated by outside information, constant media reports and other influences.”

For two weeks, Judge Alison J. Nathan has entertained questions from prosecutors and defense lawyers in the high-profile trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former socialite charged with helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls.

But this week, Judge Nathan, 49, paused the trial for a trip to Washington, where she faced questions of a different sort.

The judge has been nominated by President Biden to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and on Wednesday, she was grilled at her confirmation hearing by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The questions came mostly from Republicans, who asked about her views on guns rights, capital punishment, compassionate release requests by felons during the pandemic, as well as her past writings and legal advocacy.

Responding to a question from Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, about the Second Amendment, she said she would “without hesitation,” fully implement the Supreme Court’s decisions affirming an individual’s right to bear arms.

Asked by Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, whether states had a legitimate interest in ensuring the integrity of their voter registration rules, she said yes.

But she declined to provide an opinion when Mr. Lee followed up, asking, “Should illegal immigrants be allowed to cast votes in state and local elections?”

“That’s a policy question that would be inappropriate for me, as a sitting court judge or a nominee to the Second Circuit, to weigh in on,” Judge Nathan said.

Judge Nathan, who was back on the bench when the Maxwell case resumed Thursday following the three-day recess, has spent a decade on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.

About a month ago, while she was overseeing jury selection in the Maxwell case, the White House announced her nomination to the Second Circuit, noting at the time that she would be the second openly gay woman to serve on any federal circuit court if she was confirmed by the Senate.

At the hearing, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader and a former Judiciary Committee member, introduced Judge Nathan, whom he had recommended for the post.

Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law who closely follows federal judicial nominations, said Wednesday that the judge’s questioning by Republican members followed a familiar pattern for Biden nominees.

“All of the appellate nominees and many of them people of color are being asked similar kinds of questions,” Professor Tobias said.

At one point in the hearing, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, asked Judge Nathan, “Do you think America is mostly good or mostly bad?”

She answered by describing a walk she took on Tuesday with her sons to the Supreme Court, where she once had been a law clerk, and of seeing the inscription engraved above the entrance, “Equal Justice Under Law.”

“I’m proud to be a part of this American judicial system,” Judge Nathan said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Kennedy said. “But do you think America is mostly good or mostly bad?”

“America is mostly good, Senator,” she replied.

More than a dozen photographs were displayed last week during Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, showing her seemingly carefree romantic relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which witnesses have said masked much darker depths.

The images could have come from the scrapbook of any relatively affluent couple: a graying man and slightly younger woman in casual, unrehearsed moments — standing on a wooden footbridge, astride a motorcycle, at a table with a drink.

They were introduced by the government over defense objections, as prosecutors sought to document, through the images, Ms. Maxwell’s longstanding relationship with Mr. Epstein.

Lawyers for Ms. Maxwell will attempt to convince jurors as they begin to present their defense on Thursday that the woman in the pictures is little more than a scapegoat for Mr. Epstein, who killed himself in jail while awaiting trial.

The photographs shown in court are part of a trove found in 2019, when F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Epstein’s townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Defense lawyers objected last week to the photographs, saying the government didn’t need to enter so many pictures into evidence to make its point.

A prosecutor, Alison Moe, argued that the relationship between Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein was central to the case because the defense had “repeatedly tried to distance Ms. Maxwell from Mr. Epstein and his affairs.”

The judge, Alison J. Nathan, agreed, and the next day the pictures were being flashed onto a screen in the courtroom.

Some capture moments of intimacy: Ms. Maxwell embracing Mr. Epstein near a jetty or pier, kissing him on a sidewalk, massaging his foot aboard an airplane. A few hint at the opulence and wealth that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell enjoyed.

One photograph was entered into evidence under seal. A pretrial motion said that image depicts the couple “swimming together while nude.”

A conversation last week 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.

On Friday, 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.

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.

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.