Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were “partners in crime” in the sexual abuse of teenage girls, a prosecutor said Monday, while Maxwell’s lawyers said she was being made a scapegoat for a man’s bad behavior as the British socialite’s sex trafficking trial got underway in New York.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said at the start of Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial that the British socialite and Epstein enticed girls as young as 14 to engage in “so-called massages” in which sex abuse came to be seen as “casual and normal” after vulnerable victims were showered with money and gifts.