MANHATTAN (CN) — After calling the last of four accusers to testify about sexual abuse in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, prosecutors rested their case nearly a month ahead of schedule.
Annie Farmer was 16 years old when Maxwell gave her a nude massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, Farmer testified on Friday.
After showing Farmer how to give Epstein a foot massage — each massaging one foot, and then Farmer continuing on her own while Epstein “groaned” — Maxwell told Farmer what a “lovely experience” it was to have a massage, and encouraged her to try it out. Then she told the teenager to get undressed and lie under a sheet on a massage table.
“She started rubbing my body and rubbing my back and my legs,” Farmer, now 42, testified. “At some point in the massage she had me roll over so I was laying on my back. … She pulled the sheet down and exposed my breasts and started rubbing on my chest and on my upper breasts.”
“I just wanted so badly to get off the table and have this massage be done,” Farmer said. The door to the room was open. “I was fearful that Epstein — I just had this sense that he could see me.”
The next morning, Epstein opened the door to the bedroom where Farmer was staying, and came “bounding into my room,” saying he wanted to cuddle, Farmer recalled. He climbed into the bed, got behind her and “pressed his body into me.”
Farmer said she didn’t want to be in bed with Epstein, but didn’t say no.
“I was very aware at that time that I was very isolated” on the ranch, she said, with “no one safe for a great difference. She wanted to “get through this and move on.”
Maxwell is accused of grooming victims for sexual abuse, and is charged with six sex trafficking and conspiracy counts, and two counts of perjury, in the Southern District of New York. Her trial began November 29, and was initially expected to extend into January. Earlier this week, prosecutors said they had slashed their witness list and would wrap up early.
Farmer’s testimony followed women who testified under the pseudonyms “Jane” and “Kate,” and one who testified using her first name, Carolyn. They described being recruited to give Epstein sexual massages, sometimes with Maxwell’s participation, during which Epstein would masturbate or use sex toys on the minors — who were as young as 14 years old.
The teenage girls were paid in cash.
“I was young and $300 was a lot of money,” Carolyn said on Tuesday. When she was around 16, she said she was paid $600 after she recruited three other teenage friends from West Palm Beach, Florida, to come over to Epstein’s mansion in the more moneyed Palm Beach for paid sexual massages.
It wasn’t the first time Farmer, the only accuser to testify using her full name, had spoken publicly in the criminal prosecution against Maxwell, the former girlfriend and longtime employee of the deceased multimillionaire Epstein.
During a 2020 bail hearing, Farmer called Maxwell a “sexual predator,” and said she never showed remorse for “heinous crimes” or the devastating long-term effects of her actions. Maxwell has been held in custody since her July 2020 arrest.
Farmer spoke on Friday about first meeting Epstein — who was her sister Maria’s boss at the time — in New York City in late 1995, during the holiday school break.
Like other victims, Farmer’s family was tight on money — she was raised by a single mother of three, without child support — and Epstein offered support.