‘Epstein would find unsupported children and tell them: I’ll save you’

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist, law reporter and the author of three books including My Body Keeps Your Secrets, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham prize for literature in 2022. Her most recent, The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, was published in 2024. 

Ten days ago, at the Laugharne Weekend, Lucia spoke on stage with the broadcaster Robin Ince about that trial – where she was one of only four journalists allowed each day into the Manhattan courtroom – and about the latest release of the Epstein files. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

RI What has surprised you most with the release of the Epstein files?

LOC It didn't surprise me as such, because I knew this from the survivors I've spoken to. But seeing it in black and white was really, really shocking.

We're in a really strange moment. We've got the [US] Department of Justice (DoJ) releasing the Epstein files – and doing it in such a way where they're releasing huge swathes of material all at once, while redacting huge amounts of it in a way that is illegal under the Epstein Files Act.

And there's a tendency in the media to treat it as a kind of daily news story. Someone will find an email, there'll be one headline about it, and then it moves on.

This is not about looking at one individual email. This is not about a smoking gun. This is about putting all of it together and understanding the scale and the sophistication of this criminal sex trafficking operation – and the number of people who were not only aware, but actively involved in keeping it going.

When you look at these emails, you've got people emailing Epstein saying, "Oh, can we move X person to 4pm so you can see X person at 3:30?" – and they're talking about victims. There are all these people scheduling what is this generation's largest sex trafficking ring. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people involved in the day-to-day running of it.

That is so shocking, and it aligns with everything I've been told by survivors. It's the kind of thing they would tell journalists – and a lot of journalists wouldn't want to print it, or wouldn't believe it, because it feels far too horrifying to be true. But it absolutely is true, and these documents are evidence of that. The scale of it is so remarkable.

The reason we have conspiracy laws in criminal statutes is that if you are aware of a criminal conspiracy and you don't do anything about it, there is a point at which that becomes a criminal act in itself. It becomes a duty to report. These documents show hundreds of people who did not do that. There are so many lives that could have been saved if just one of those people had intervened and tried to say something – and none of them did.

RI What gives me a kind of existential despair when I read your work is the number of men who are able to empathise with the abuser. The moment Mandelson was made ambassador, everyone knew that he had accepted accommodation from someone who was serving time in prison for sex crimes. And that person had been given a ridiculously short sentence – Epstein wasn't really “in prison”, was he?

LOC This is the other thing I would say about the files. We did know about it. But the files reveal so much more than we knew.

When Epstein was first arrested, in 2007 he was offered a plea deal which, as far as I can tell from my legal research, is totally unprecedented. He was allowed to plead guilty to two counts of solicitation. He was given a prison sentence, but he was allowed out on work release for 12 hours every day – and in those 12 hours, he just drove back to his mansion in Palm Beach. He continued to abuse girls while he was technically in prison. It was just like sleeping in a crappy motel. He did that for around a year. He was allowed his laptop, he could watch TV whenever he wanted.

We knew all of that. And it is really remarkable – because I know so many survivors who were trafficked after 2007. Law enforcement had all this information, could have held him accountable, and actively decided not to.

But the thing that's new – and this is really, really shocking, something I didn't know: there are internal emails between the DoJ, the FBI, and Epstein's lawyers (at times, of course, Alan Dershowitz). They're talking through this in a way that is so unbelievable – just casually working out how to let him get away with it, hammering out a deal together. Epstein was really in control of that deal. And he had just been caught sexually abusing underage girls.

As a society, people agree that it is a very, very serious crime. And yet all these people in the DoJ and FBI were together working out a way for him to plead to minor charges.

And the other thing – which I didn't know – is the evidence they had against him in 2007. One of the emails says they believed there were at least 100 girls. And they allowed him to plead to two charges of solicitation.

So the idea that a federal law enforcement agency and the state police in Florida had so much evidence – and got up every day and made a decision to let this person keep doing what he was doing – is really shocking. It tells us a lot about how these systems work, how these institutions work, and a lot about the discretion of law enforcement.

RI The thing that's really disturbing is that far more people than I'd have imagined ultimately consider child abuse to be acceptable. It's one of the most disturbing things about the 21st century – a new understanding of a very large number of human beings, far more than we'd feel comfortable thinking about.

LOC Exactly. And I think this is really important – because I get a lot of people saying, "Oh, child sexual abuse is very uncommon, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead now, so what's the big deal?" But there are so many things wrong with that sentence.

The first is that child sexual abuse is not at all uncommon. Particularly what we call in the research "organised child sexual abuse". It is, sadly, very, very common – but the world is very committed to a narrative that it's not, because people really don't want to live in a world where this happens all the time.

Unfortunately, if you witness it firsthand, or if you're a journalist speaking to survivors, you don't get a choice about whether you live in that world – because you know that it is common. A lot of other people would like to exercise that choice.

And it's really disturbing, because then you get this idea that "Jeffrey Epstein's dead, so it's dealt with" – completely ignoring the hundreds of people who were enabling and complicit in this. And completely ignoring all the children who are victims of this kind of abuse all over the world, every day.

RI Have you read Jenny Evans? Jenny was in [the 1997 film] Twin Town, and when she was in her late teens, she ended up going to parties in London and was raped by “a famous man”. That is that's all she can call him in her book – even years later, even after 40 other women came forward.

And that's the thing: the weight is placed so heavily on the victims of abuse. In her book, she talks about finding a letter she thought would help her case – but because in that letter she mentioned a previous experience of abuse, it actually destroyed the case. Literally: "it's a bit of a habit of yours." And all of this pressure always placed on the victims.

LOC As you know, there were so many male journalists at the Maxwell trial – not actually in the room, but in overflow rooms where people who hadn't queued could go. And they would come out and say things to me like, "oh, this has happened before in her [a victim’s] family”. Things like "it's a bit of a habit of hers".

It's so devastating – because if you understand trauma, the fact is the exact opposite of what these men are saying. If you were traumatised in childhood, there's a neurobiological and neurochemical change in the way you see the world. It makes you more vulnerable to having these things happen again, because it activates a much stronger “fight, flight, or freeze” response. And perpetrators can spot that. Perpetrators can see which individuals are vulnerable and which will have an overactive freeze response – and they prey on those people.

So these male reporters were saying: "Oh, it's happened to her before, so she's probably making it all up." But actually, if you look at the science – particularly the neurobiology – the opposite is true. The fact that it's happened before makes it more likely to be true.

And also, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and everyone else who identified victims did this very intentionally. They went and found children who were vulnerable in some way. We see this across all the literature. The way perpetrators identify their victims is by finding children who are lacking in some core need – maybe their parents are struggling financially, maybe one parent has just died, maybe the parents are addicts and not very emotionally present. They were all lacking something that Jeffrey Epstein could offer them.

If you listen to survivors describe their first interactions with Jeffrey or Ghislaine, you can always hear the moment when Epstein or Maxwell worked out that this person was vulnerable. So the things that had happened previously in their childhood were exactly why Epstein knew to target them. If a child's parents are very active in their lives, there's more chance the parent will intervene – and he didn't want that.

He would come along and offer to help them pay their rent, pay their tuition. And part of grooming is emotional manipulation – this is really key. He would find children who felt emotionally neglected and say, "I believe in you. I believe in your dreams. I'm going to make you a star, a model, an actor, a dancer." You see this over and over again in the Epstein story. He would find girls with dreams that, for various social and structural reasons, weren't being supported at home or at school – and he would say: "I'm the one who believes in you, and I will save you." 

And then, when there's an adult who comes along and promises to save you, when that person starts hurting you, it's very, very confusing. That's why it's so hard for children to come forward while they're still children. That's why we have what we call delayed disclosure – where people are unable to come forward until well into adulthood.

When you study all these patterns, you can understand how perpetrators make this work. But then if people on the street are saying "oh, this has happened before, so it's a bit of a habit of hers", it's really hard to break through that misunderstanding.

RI One of the things that kept coming up during that trial, as you were just mentioning, is journalists leaving and saying: "I don't understand, why did she take so long to come forward?" 

LOC We had an expert on grooming who gave evidence at trial. She was incredible. She described all of these processes and patterns, and explained that when a child is in this situation – and their trust has perhaps been broken by other adults, intentionally or because of structural societal vulnerabilities – and then someone comes along and says "I'm going to help you," and then does start hurting them – it becomes very confusing. She used the phrase: they really want to keep the hope alive.

And because of this – because of perpetrators keeping the hope alive – it's very, very hard to break contact with one of these abusers.

We would see, for example, a survivor on the stand being presented with an email she had sent Jeffrey Epstein after she had managed to escape him. That email might have been friendly, or neutral. And then they'd attack her: "This person abused you – why are you still emailing him?"

And I came out of the room and all these journalists – mostly men in their 40s – were saying: "Yeah, I mean, she made it up." I was like: what? They said: "Did you hear that email? She obviously made it up." 

I've been reporting on this for a long time and I often feel like it's hard to shock me, but this really stunned me. How many of these men just said: "Oh, well, she stayed in touch with him. So she made it up."

And – we've talked about this before – there was the whole thing about Annie Farmer's boots. Ghislaine Maxwell bought Annie Farmer a pair of cowboy boots because they were going horse riding and Annie didn't have any. Her parents didn't have much money. This was actually a really key piece of evidence – it was Maxwell's card, and we were at Maxwell's trial – connecting Maxwell to the grooming. Gift-giving is one of the five stages of grooming: it's part of earning a child's trust. We'd had all of this explained to us. The boots cost $150 or something.

And then the defence brings out the boots, shows everyone they're scuffed, and says it's obvious Annie wore them. She said: "Yes, I wore them." And they said: "Why would you ever wear something given to you by an abuser?"

I thought: that's ridiculous – the whole point is that you identify vulnerable children and give them things they need. Of course they're going to use them.

But then we came out, and I had three different male journalists say: "She made it up. No way she would have worn the boots." That night, I went back to my hotel and read the day's coverage. Annie had just spent hours telling that court about some of the worst things that had ever happened to her. And the only thing in the press was the boots. I counted the word "boots" something like 97 times across the major outlets.

That just shows you clearly how many people are attached to what we sometimes call rape myths or abuse myths – these really key pieces of misinformation that they use, in their own minds, to completely sink a person's story. When in fact, if you actually understand grooming, Annie wearing those boots makes more sense than her not wearing them. She needed shoes. And that's part of the grooming process.

RI I presume one of the major issues is that victims are still carrying the blame. And that's one of the reasons they may stay silent. Can you see ways we can change the narrative?

LOC Absolutely. And I think there's both a micro level and a macro level to this. At the micro level, once you pick up that someone is about to tell you something that, because of the way society is built, carries this false shame: you can just say: "I don't know what you're about to tell me, but let me just say – it wasn't your fault." 

That's a really, really powerful thing to be able to do. Or, when they tell you some of it, you just say: "I want you to know this wasn't your fault." That can make all the difference.

At the macro level, it's much harder. So I think it's about really trying to platform the voices of survivors: for example, in terms of what's happening right now with the incredible survivors who managed to get the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed through Congress, actually giving space, as journalists, to their lives and their stories.

And the way we give survivors agency is we give them time, and we give them space, and we give them, quote unquote, column inches. But I think one of the reasons I wrote the book is that so much of the coverage is about: who is Jeffrey Epstein? All the time we spend wondering about perpetrators is oxygen we're taking away from the stories of survivors.

As a society, we need to be able to tolerate those stories, platform those stories, and share them.

One of the survivors in my book is called Jess Michaels. She was going to be a professional dancer. She had done all these amazing dance gigs and had this incredible life – and all of her stories are so interesting. And then she is raped by Jeffrey Epstein, and all of that falls away. But she has an interesting story and interesting life, and really deserves for us to pay attention to that life.

And when you compare that to how totally uninteresting and unspecial people like Jeffrey Epstein are, it just shows that the journalism that so often focuses on perpetrators is not motivated by what we're supposed to be doing, which is helping an audience connect with a story.

The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley is published by Fourth Estate