Journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley was among a handful of people who witnessed the trial and sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell.
In 2021, Maxwell was convicted for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of four girls.
Osborne-Crowley's legal expertise has played a key role in the coverage surrounding the trial - and she's since used her findings to write a book, The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.
She says covering the trial a foot away from Ghislaine Maxwell herself was an 'unsettling' experience.
"She still managed to communicate with me, she made a lot of eye contact with me, she winked at me once - she drew a picture of me at one point, which was very unsettling."
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb Right.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
In December twenty twenty one, Gilain Maxwell was convicted and
sentenced for her role in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of four girls.
One of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom daily
was UK based Australian trained lawyer and court reporter Lucia
Osborne Crowling. Lucier's expertise at the trial and case have
been widely used in the media and is now the
(00:34):
source of the book it's called The Lasting Harm. Lucia
Osborne Crowley joins me now from the UK. Good morning, Lucier,
good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
How are you? Thank you for having me?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh, thank you so much for being with us. Now, look,
tell me how did you manage to get into this
courtroom because this was a there was a huge amount
of global attention on this trial.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah. Absolutely, and the answer is with great difficulty. I
had to line up about midnight one am every day
of the trial in order to be Basically, they're only
four reporters allowed in and it was first come, first serve,
so you literally had to be one of the first
four in line. At eight am when they opened the doors,
and there was no shortcut to that. There was no
(01:17):
It wasn't like you reserved a seat on day one
and that you had that seat for five and a
half weeks. Every day for five and a half weeks,
I had to line up, and so by the end,
actually it was Verdict day. I didn't know this at
the time, but by Verdict Day I decided to just
not go back to the hotel at all. So the
earliest I got there was seven pm. When I left
the court room, I just sat outside and stayed there
(01:38):
all night.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
That is quite a commitment. What what was that like,
Lutia being in the room.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
It was amazing. It was definitely worth it. I mean,
amazing is a strange word to use, but I use
it in the kind of literal sense in the fact
that it really is completely different being in the room
than it is kind of watching from afar. And so
I'm really glad that I followed through with that commitment
because it did it does give you a compulon different perspective.
(02:07):
I mean, being in the room with the victims when
they testified is completely different from from trying to cover this,
even from one of the overflow rooms or you know,
kind of watching the global coverage. That was the most
important thing to me. I got to see the victims,
you know, be right up close as they were testifying,
and also see the jury react to them. That was
(02:29):
really important to me as well. And of course, you know,
I sat a foot or two away from Galaine herself
for those five and a half weeks, and that was
very very interesting because she's she's quite an alarming person
to share a space with for that long.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Did Gelaine make any contact with you, Lucia? She did.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
She wasn't allowed to speak to us, so but she did.
She still managed to kind of communicate with me. She
made a lot of eye contact with me. She winked
at me once. She drew a picture of me at
one point, which was very unsettling. She had like her
legal padern just a byro own. She just kind of
drew a sketch of me and showed it to me,
which was a very strange kind of power move, I think,
(03:12):
because you know, she felt powerless in that situation and we,
as the press, were watching her, and she'd recognized by
then that I'd been there every day, and she just
it's like she wanted me to know that she was
able to watch me as well, So that was very,
very weird. I mean, she just glared at me while drawing,
and I didn't know what she was doing, and then
she showed me that it was a drawing of me.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, I can understand how that would be unnerving. One
of the I mean, look, a lot of things struck
me reading your book, but the one thing that strikes
you when you're reading about the trial on your book
is that there are only four victims. Tastifying. Why only
four victims?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one I imagine
I'll spend a lot a lot more investigative reporting hours
trying to answer because I haven't definitively answered it yet.
Because as you go through the book, you find out
that I meet people in years following the trial who
desperately wanted to testify but were turned away by the
(04:12):
US government and the Department of Justice. And I don't
know why that is. They didn't give the victims a
good explanation. They didn't give me a good explanation when
I put those allegations to them. So you know, it
was a question we asked ourselves in the press gallery.
We said, you know why they're only four, because we
know that there are at least one hundred, but probably
(04:34):
you know, many, many, many more than that victims, and
I know at least too who were desperate to testify.
And so the answer is, I don't know. For some reason,
this trial was orchestrated to be very, very narrow. They
kept it to a small number of victims. My suspicion
is that they really wanted a conviction. They had really
(04:54):
messed up by letting Jeffrey die in jail and get
out of a trial, and they wanted to ensure a
conviction and therefore keep it as narrow as possible. And
that's incredibly unfair on the victims who wanted to testify,
and we're turned away.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
What do you want people to understand about sexual abuse
and the impact on the victim?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Great question. So what I really really want this book
to do is to convey the effects of this kind
of abuse on the day to day life of the victim.
Because what I know, what I think from seeing coverage
of sexual abuse, especially when there's a kind of sensationalized aspect,
(05:34):
you know, or celebrities involved, we just love to focus
on perpetrators. We love to be to kind of focus
our gays on them and why they do what they do,
and that takes away oxygen from the victims, because you know,
columnchers are precious and airtime is precious, and so even
if we don't think we're doing it all, the time
(05:56):
we spend kind of obsessing about perpetrators is necessarily taking
time away from the stories of the victims. So what
I wanted to do was to give a kind of
minute by minute, day day or account of what these victims'
lives actually look like, and from what they have told me,
you know, they have not been given that opportunity before
because no one has given them enough space to do that.
(06:17):
So basically, what I want people to take away is
an actual lived sense of how this impacts are life,
and not only when it's happening, because of course, these
women told me about what it felt like when it
was happening, and that is heartbreaking and very difficult to read.
But for me, what's even more important and even harder
to come to terms with, is them telling me about
(06:39):
the thirty years since then and how their entire lives
have been impacted and shaped by crimes committed by unrepentant
individuals who have for the most part, completely escaped accountability.
And I want people to understand how that impacts are
life and just how lasting that damage is.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
How do we stop the justice system from retraumatizing victims?
Are the lines of questioning that we just need to
stamp out?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes, I absolutely believe. So. I've said, I cover the
courts as a journalist kind of all day every day,
so I've seen a lot of trials and this was
is it the worst example, but I see it all
the time. You know, the way that victims of these
kind of crimes are cross examined should absolutely be reformed.
(07:28):
There should be questions that are not allowed to be asked.
I've discussed in the book things like the neuroscience of
traumatic memory and delayed disclosure, the reason that people aren't
able to come forward about sexual abuse when it's happening.
The science on that is very clear, And what I
believe is that we should outlaw questions on cross examination
(07:48):
that are unscientific. So, you know, all these women were
accused of lying and making up a story because they
didn't come forward straight away, or because their memories aren't
exactly clear. But we know from the neurochemistry of traumatic
memory that no traumatic memory will ever be clear. That's
(08:08):
how the brain deals with these kind of overwhelming memories.
So I think that being attacked for having an incomplete memory,
being attacked for not coming forward sooner, these things should
not be allowed because they are unscientific. And if a
jury is not across the science and the neurochemistry of trauma,
then then they might believe a defense's line of argument
(08:32):
about that, and the legal system should be based in fact,
and those questions are not factual or scientific, so they
should be banned. And also I feel very strongly about
banning questions that aim to discredit victims based on the
very symptoms of trauma. So things like this is what
I'm talking about in terms of the lasting damage. We
know scientifically that things like self harm, eating disorders, addiction,
(08:57):
any kind of numbing, any kind of chronic numbing behavior
is a direct consequence of trauma. But yet victims are attacked.
The witness stand in cross examination for exhibiting those very
symptoms and they say, you know, I heard the defense say, oh,
you're just a drug addict and you're lying because you
want to get some money from Epstein's estate to buy
(09:19):
more drugs. You know, but we know that drug addiction
in adulthood is closely connected to sexual abuse in childhood.
So again, scientifically, those questions shouldn't be allowed. They are nasty,
they are cruel, They are intended to discredit a victim,
when in fact, symptoms the victim is showing make it
more likely that this thing happened to them, not less likely.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Lucie, is this story over? In the victim and PEG statements,
Sarah made the point that there are other enablers and
institutions who should be held to account. Is there more
to come?
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Absolutely? Certainly. I mean there is so much more even
that I know that I couldn't publish in this book
names of perpetrators who haven't been held to account. And
I certainly hope that we see many, many more indictments.
From what I know, there should be at least five
to ten people against whom there is already enough evidence
(10:13):
for an indictment. I'm very disappointed those haven't happened yet.
I will keep trying to publish what I know because
there are so many people out there who have not
been held accountable. And that's another thing I really wanted
to come across in this book is that a lot
of people think they know this story and therefore that
this is kind of in the past, but it is
(10:35):
so far from over, because there are people out there
living their lives who abused these women when they were
children and should be held accountable for it, but are
still being protected by their wealth and power and connections.
And that makes me very angry. And I hope and
I'll certainly continue working on this, but you know, I
also hope the criminal justice system produces, you know, many
(10:58):
more indictments over the years to come.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Lucal. When it became when people became aware of the
fact you were covering the case and writing the book,
you were threatened.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yes, yes, I was.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I mean, the most obvious way, which is the only
one that I put in the book, is that when
I went out to Florida to beat one of the victims,
I was tailed and followed around the whole time that
I was there. But then I was directly approached by
whoever it was who was being employed to follow me,
and he threatened me to try and get me to
(11:35):
not do this interview with this particular victim who'd never
spoken to a journalist before, and there are a lot
of people who would not want her to speak to
me because she was trafficked to a lot of people,
and they really didn't want me to do this interview,
and so they threatened me. They tried to pay me
to not do it, and when that didn't work, they
(11:55):
threatened me some more. And then since then they've just
made it very clear to me in my phone and
kind of you know, making it clear that I'm being watched,
which is, you know, again something that these people do
and they've been doing it to the victims for thirty years.
I mean, a lot of them told me that Gilaine
(12:17):
promised them when they were teenagers that if they ever
spoke up about this, then you know, she and her
people will be watching. And they have followed through on that, right.
You know, they still follow the victims around. Most of
them have to live mostly in hiding, so you know,
these people still wield a lot a lot of power
in society and have a lot of money and a
lot to lose, and so they can afford to spend
(12:38):
money hiring people to follow me around and trying to
intimidate me.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Lucier, thank you so much for your time this morning,
and thank you so much for the book and your
persistence with this case.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
No, thank you, thank you for your time. I really
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
And The Lasting Home is in stores now.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
For more from the Sunday session with friend Jessica Rudkin,
listen live to use talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb Right.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
In December twenty twenty one, Gilain Maxwell was convicted and
sentenced for her role in Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of four girls.
One of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom daily
was UK based Australian trained lawyer and court reporter Lucia
Osborne Crowling. Lucier's expertise at the trial and case have
been widely used in the media and is now the
(00:34):
source of the book it's called The Lasting Harm. Lucia
Osborne Crowley joins me now from the UK. Good morning, Lucier,
good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
How are you? Thank you for having me?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh, thank you so much for being with us. Now, look,
tell me how did you manage to get into this
courtroom because this was a there was a huge amount
of global attention on this trial.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah. Absolutely, and the answer is with great difficulty. I
had to line up about midnight one am every day
of the trial in order to be Basically, they're only
four reporters allowed in and it was first come, first serve,
so you literally had to be one of the first
four in line. At eight am when they opened the doors,
and there was no shortcut to that. There was no
(01:17):
It wasn't like you reserved a seat on day one
and that you had that seat for five and a
half weeks. Every day for five and a half weeks,
I had to line up, and so by the end,
actually it was Verdict day. I didn't know this at
the time, but by Verdict Day I decided to just
not go back to the hotel at all. So the
earliest I got there was seven pm. When I left
the court room, I just sat outside and stayed there
(01:38):
all night.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
That is quite a commitment. What what was that like,
Lutia being in the room.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
It was amazing. It was definitely worth it. I mean,
amazing is a strange word to use, but I use
it in the kind of literal sense in the fact
that it really is completely different being in the room
than it is kind of watching from afar. And so
I'm really glad that I followed through with that commitment
because it did it does give you a compulon different perspective.
(02:07):
I mean, being in the room with the victims when
they testified is completely different from from trying to cover this,
even from one of the overflow rooms or you know,
kind of watching the global coverage. That was the most
important thing to me. I got to see the victims,
you know, be right up close as they were testifying,
and also see the jury react to them. That was
(02:29):
really important to me as well. And of course, you know,
I sat a foot or two away from Galaine herself
for those five and a half weeks, and that was
very very interesting because she's she's quite an alarming person
to share a space with for that long.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Did Gelaine make any contact with you, Lucia? She did.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
She wasn't allowed to speak to us, so but she did.
She still managed to kind of communicate with me. She
made a lot of eye contact with me. She winked
at me once. She drew a picture of me at
one point, which was very unsettling. She had like her
legal padern just a byro own. She just kind of
drew a sketch of me and showed it to me,
which was a very strange kind of power move, I think,
(03:12):
because you know, she felt powerless in that situation and we,
as the press, were watching her, and she'd recognized by
then that I'd been there every day, and she just
it's like she wanted me to know that she was
able to watch me as well, So that was very,
very weird. I mean, she just glared at me while drawing,
and I didn't know what she was doing, and then
she showed me that it was a drawing of me.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, I can understand how that would be unnerving. One
of the I mean, look, a lot of things struck
me reading your book, but the one thing that strikes
you when you're reading about the trial on your book
is that there are only four victims. Tastifying. Why only
four victims?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one I imagine
I'll spend a lot a lot more investigative reporting hours
trying to answer because I haven't definitively answered it yet.
Because as you go through the book, you find out
that I meet people in years following the trial who
desperately wanted to testify but were turned away by the
(04:12):
US government and the Department of Justice. And I don't
know why that is. They didn't give the victims a
good explanation. They didn't give me a good explanation when
I put those allegations to them. So you know, it
was a question we asked ourselves in the press gallery.
We said, you know why they're only four, because we
know that there are at least one hundred, but probably
(04:34):
you know, many, many, many more than that victims, and
I know at least too who were desperate to testify.
And so the answer is, I don't know. For some reason,
this trial was orchestrated to be very, very narrow. They
kept it to a small number of victims. My suspicion
is that they really wanted a conviction. They had really
(04:54):
messed up by letting Jeffrey die in jail and get
out of a trial, and they wanted to ensure a
conviction and therefore keep it as narrow as possible. And
that's incredibly unfair on the victims who wanted to testify,
and we're turned away.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
What do you want people to understand about sexual abuse
and the impact on the victim?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Great question. So what I really really want this book
to do is to convey the effects of this kind
of abuse on the day to day life of the victim.
Because what I know, what I think from seeing coverage
of sexual abuse, especially when there's a kind of sensationalized aspect,
(05:34):
you know, or celebrities involved, we just love to focus
on perpetrators. We love to be to kind of focus
our gays on them and why they do what they do,
and that takes away oxygen from the victims, because you know,
columnchers are precious and airtime is precious, and so even
if we don't think we're doing it all, the time
(05:56):
we spend kind of obsessing about perpetrators is necessarily taking
time away from the stories of the victims. So what
I wanted to do was to give a kind of
minute by minute, day day or account of what these victims'
lives actually look like, and from what they have told me,
you know, they have not been given that opportunity before
because no one has given them enough space to do that.
(06:17):
So basically, what I want people to take away is
an actual lived sense of how this impacts are life,
and not only when it's happening, because of course, these
women told me about what it felt like when it
was happening, and that is heartbreaking and very difficult to read.
But for me, what's even more important and even harder
to come to terms with, is them telling me about
(06:39):
the thirty years since then and how their entire lives
have been impacted and shaped by crimes committed by unrepentant
individuals who have for the most part, completely escaped accountability.
And I want people to understand how that impacts are
life and just how lasting that damage is.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
How do we stop the justice system from retraumatizing victims?
Are the lines of questioning that we just need to
stamp out?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes, I absolutely believe. So. I've said, I cover the
courts as a journalist kind of all day every day,
so I've seen a lot of trials and this was
is it the worst example, but I see it all
the time. You know, the way that victims of these
kind of crimes are cross examined should absolutely be reformed.
(07:28):
There should be questions that are not allowed to be asked.
I've discussed in the book things like the neuroscience of
traumatic memory and delayed disclosure, the reason that people aren't
able to come forward about sexual abuse when it's happening.
The science on that is very clear, And what I
believe is that we should outlaw questions on cross examination
(07:48):
that are unscientific. So, you know, all these women were
accused of lying and making up a story because they
didn't come forward straight away, or because their memories aren't
exactly clear. But we know from the neurochemistry of traumatic
memory that no traumatic memory will ever be clear. That's
(08:08):
how the brain deals with these kind of overwhelming memories.
So I think that being attacked for having an incomplete memory,
being attacked for not coming forward sooner, these things should
not be allowed because they are unscientific. And if a
jury is not across the science and the neurochemistry of trauma,
then then they might believe a defense's line of argument
(08:32):
about that, and the legal system should be based in fact,
and those questions are not factual or scientific, so they
should be banned. And also I feel very strongly about
banning questions that aim to discredit victims based on the
very symptoms of trauma. So things like this is what
I'm talking about in terms of the lasting damage. We
know scientifically that things like self harm, eating disorders, addiction,
(08:57):
any kind of numbing, any kind of chronic numbing behavior
is a direct consequence of trauma. But yet victims are attacked.
The witness stand in cross examination for exhibiting those very
symptoms and they say, you know, I heard the defense say, oh,
you're just a drug addict and you're lying because you
want to get some money from Epstein's estate to buy
(09:19):
more drugs. You know, but we know that drug addiction
in adulthood is closely connected to sexual abuse in childhood.
So again, scientifically, those questions shouldn't be allowed. They are nasty,
they are cruel, They are intended to discredit a victim,
when in fact, symptoms the victim is showing make it
more likely that this thing happened to them, not less likely.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Lucie, is this story over? In the victim and PEG statements,
Sarah made the point that there are other enablers and
institutions who should be held to account. Is there more
to come?
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Absolutely? Certainly. I mean there is so much more even
that I know that I couldn't publish in this book
names of perpetrators who haven't been held to account. And
I certainly hope that we see many, many more indictments.
From what I know, there should be at least five
to ten people against whom there is already enough evidence
(10:13):
for an indictment. I'm very disappointed those haven't happened yet.
I will keep trying to publish what I know because
there are so many people out there who have not
been held accountable. And that's another thing I really wanted
to come across in this book is that a lot
of people think they know this story and therefore that
this is kind of in the past, but it is
(10:35):
so far from over, because there are people out there
living their lives who abused these women when they were
children and should be held accountable for it, but are
still being protected by their wealth and power and connections.
And that makes me very angry. And I hope and
I'll certainly continue working on this, but you know, I
also hope the criminal justice system produces, you know, many
(10:58):
more indictments over the years to come.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Lucal. When it became when people became aware of the
fact you were covering the case and writing the book,
you were threatened.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yes, yes, I was.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I mean, the most obvious way, which is the only
one that I put in the book, is that when
I went out to Florida to beat one of the victims,
I was tailed and followed around the whole time that
I was there. But then I was directly approached by
whoever it was who was being employed to follow me,
and he threatened me to try and get me to
(11:35):
not do this interview with this particular victim who'd never
spoken to a journalist before, and there are a lot
of people who would not want her to speak to
me because she was trafficked to a lot of people,
and they really didn't want me to do this interview,
and so they threatened me. They tried to pay me
to not do it, and when that didn't work, they
(11:55):
threatened me some more. And then since then they've just
made it very clear to me in my phone and
kind of you know, making it clear that I'm being watched,
which is, you know, again something that these people do
and they've been doing it to the victims for thirty years.
I mean, a lot of them told me that Gilaine
(12:17):
promised them when they were teenagers that if they ever
spoke up about this, then you know, she and her
people will be watching. And they have followed through on that, right.
You know, they still follow the victims around. Most of
them have to live mostly in hiding, so you know,
these people still wield a lot a lot of power
in society and have a lot of money and a
lot to lose, and so they can afford to spend
(12:38):
money hiring people to follow me around and trying to
intimidate me.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Lucier, thank you so much for your time this morning,
and thank you so much for the book and your
persistence with this case.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
No, thank you, thank you for your time. I really
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
And The Lasting Home is in stores now.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
For more from the Sunday session with friend Jessica Rudkin,
listen live to use talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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