MANHATTAN (CN) — “I was young and $300 was a lot of money,” a woman given anonymity to testify against Jeffrey Epstein's alleged recruiter Ghislaine Maxwell told the court Tuesday.
Though she was introduced to jurors as simply Carolyn, her first name, the witness said she referred to Maxwell by her surname — "because I couldn’t exactly pronounce her first name."
Carolyn told the jury she engaged in sexual massages with Epstein over a hundred times in the early 2000s, beginning when she was 14 until she became “too old” at 18. “Every single time” she gave Epstein a massage, she explained, he would turn over after 45 minutes and masturbate.
For the first few massages, Carolyn said she kept her bra and underwear on. The massages with Epstein occurred approximately two to three times each week, however, and she began stripping fully nude for later incidents as she grew more comfortable.
“Something sexual happened every single time," Carolyn said.
When she was 14, Maxwell once “came in and felt my boobs and hips and my buttocks, and said that I had a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends," Carolyn testified.
She recalled group sex encounters with Epstein and other women she described as models. Sometimes she was picked up for her appointments by a driver, or a taxi would be called, she said. Other times her boyfriend would drive her in her mother’s car, and occasionally her mother would drive her over to Epstein’s.
When Carolyn 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.
Carolyn had been drawn in by the same lure. Virginia Roberts “asked if I wanted to go make money,” Carolyn recalled of her first invitation to accompany another teen to Epstein’s house in Palm Beach.
As a young teenager living with drug-addicted mother in West Palm Beach, Carolyn said she would smoke pot with Roberts and their boyfriends. Roberts would eventually emerge as Epstein's most prominent accuser, though she has changed her surname to Giuffre.
Carolyn testified that Roberts drove her to Epstein’s house, where she sat on a couch in the massage room and watched as Roberts give Epstein a facedown massage before getting on top of him on the massage table and having sex.
After that first massage encounter with Roberts, Carolyn was paid $300 in hundred-dollar bills, she testified. Maxwell asked Carolyn for her phone number on her way out and would later “call and set appointment times,” Carolyn testified.
Carolyn choked up in tears when prosecutor Maurene Comey asked her how she spent the money she made from Epstein. “I was buying drugs,” she said after a tearful pause. “Marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, anything that could block out ... the appointment,” she said.
To treat her addiction to pain pills today, Carolyn said she now takes Methadone, plus other medications to treat anxiety and schizophrenia related to her experience being trafficked and abused.
After briefly running away to Georgia and becoming pregnant at 18, Carolyn said she returned to Epstein's home more than four or five times. Epstein “asked if I had younger friends, and that’s when I realized I was too old,” she said.
On cross-examination, Maxwell's lawyer Jeffrey Pagliuca pressed Carolyn about how she spent the $1 million to $3 million she says she's received from a fund set up to compensate Epstein's victims, on top of the $446,000 she received from a separate lawsuit settlement. Carolyn broke into tears and repeatedly exclaimed: "Money will not ever fix what that woman has done to me!"
Epstein was charged on July 2, 2019, by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking. He was found dead the following month in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and Maxwell, his former girlfriend, was arrested in July 2020.
The six counts brought against the British former socialite in this trial are conspiracy to entice a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts; enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts; conspiracy to transport a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors; and sex trafficking of minors.
Maxwell, 59, faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted. She has pleaded not guilty. The trial began last Monday and is expected to take six weeks. Carolyn is the third victim to testify.
Giuffre, the other accuser referenced in Day 7 testimony, sued Prince Andrew in Manhattan federal court this past summer. She claims Andrew sexually assaulted her multiple times while she was a teenage victim of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation between 2000 and 2002. Boies Schiller Flexner founding partner David Boies represents Giuffre.
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