The lawyer said “accusers have shaken the money tree, and millions of dollars have fallen their way.” Sternheim said the four women who would testify that Maxwell recruited them to be sexually abused were suffering from quarter-century-old memories and the influence of lawyers who guided them to get money from a fund set up by Epstein's estate after his August 2019 suicide in a Manhattan federal jail as he awaited his own sex trafficking trial. "He is not visible, but he is consuming this entire courtroom and overflow courtrooms where other members of the public are viewing,” she said. She called Epstein “the proverbial elephant in the room." She’s not like Jeffrey Epstein” or any of the powerful men, moguls and media giants who abuse women, Sternheim said. When she finished, attorney Bobbi Sternheim said her client was a "scapegoat for a man who behaved badly,” just like so many women all the way back to Adam and Eve. The prosecutor spoke from an enclosed plastic see-through box that allowed her to take off her mask as Maxwell, in a cream-colored sweater and black pants, at times wrote and passed notes to her lawyers.
She said Maxwell “helped normalize abusive sexual conduct” by making the teenagers feel safe and by taking them on shopping trips and asking them about their lives, their schools and their families. “The defendant was the lady of the house.”Įven after Maxwell and Epstein stopped being romantically involved, the pair “remained the best of friends,” Pomerantz said. Maxwell “was involved in every detail of Epstein’s life,” the prosecutor said.
Attorney Damian Williams looked on from a spectator bench. The defendant and Epstein lured their victims with a promise of a bright future, only to sexually exploit them,” Pomerantz said, as U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
