It was in 1994: the young Jane was 14 years old. She was attending a summer camp in Florida, chatting with friends at a picnic table, when she was approached by a man and a woman, he in his forties, she in her thirties. They talked to her about funding her a scholarship and, at the end of the conversation, Jane left them her phone number. “It was the start of a nightmare that would last four years. What Jane didn’t know was that they were sexual predators.”explained Monday, September 29, Lara Pomerantz, the deputy federal prosecutor of Manhattan, in New York.
Jane’s real surname has not been revealed, but she is one of the alleged victims of Jeffrey Epsteinthe sexual predator of minors found dead by suicide in New York in his cell in the summer of 2019, and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell, 59 years old. Accused of having been the beater of her lover who became a “partner in crime”, the daughter of tycoon Robert Maxwell has been on trial since Monday in a federal court in Manhattan. Imprisoned in New York since the summer of 2020, she has never been released on bail, her triple nationality (American, French and British) increasing the risk of flight. She faces seventy years in prison after a trial that should last six weeks.
“The accused was sex trafficking minors”Deputy District Attorney Pomerantz said in her opening remarks, explaining that the couple were targeting young girls raised alone by their mothers, in financial difficulty, and who believed that meeting Epstein would allow them to realize their dreams. “The accused was decisive in this scheme”according to Lara Pomerantz, since Ghislaine Maxwell “recruited” the girls, the “manipulated” talking to them about sex and making them think what was going to happen to them was normal, preparing them for the sexual assault or rape they were going to suffer in the so-called “massage” room, in which she sometimes participated.
“Jane was 14 years old. She was a child”
“She knew exactly what she was doing. She was dangerous. She was grooming young girls to be assaulted by a predator,” summed up the accusation. “Jane was 14 years old. She was a child”when the two defendants were more than twice his age. “And Jane Wasn’t Alone”, continued Deputy Prosecutor Pomerantz, detailing the fate of three other complainants, the last of whom was recruited by a young woman recruited by the couple, Virginie Giuffre. Now 38, the latter is at the origin of the first revelations of the Epstein scandal but she is not a party to the trial.
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