If a verdict does not come before Thursday, when the court will close for the long Christmas weekend, the panel will return next week to continue reviewing evidence from the high-profile trial. It must sort out whether to convict Maxwell on a number of serious charges, including conspiracies related to the trafficking of girls for illegal sex acts.
Prosecutors argued at the close of the trial that Maxwell was intimately involved in the recruitment of underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, a multimillionaire financier who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial.
As Epstein’s longtime partner and “right hand,” prosecutors alleged, Maxwell deliberately sought out “young girls from struggling families” from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s and dazzled them with gifts, attention and praise.
In a two-hour closing statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Moe said the girls then became “trapped” in uncomfortable and terrifying sexual encounters, in which they were paid to touch Epstein and be touched by him during sexualized massages he demanded.
“Maxwell was a sophisticated predator who knew exactly what she was doing,” Moe said. “She caused deep and lasting harm to young girls.”
Moe also argued that Maxwell was handsomely paid for her willingness to commit crimes for Epstein. In several installments beginning in 1999, he wired more than $30 million to her accounts, according to financial records that were admitted as evidence.
Defense attorney Laura Menninger painted a drastically different version of events for the jury, saying that the memories of the women who accused Maxwell of wrongdoing were molded by decades of outside influence and a memory-science theory known as “post-event suggestion.”
“The stories relied on by the government are the product of erroneous memories, manipulation and money,” Menninger argued.
Maxwell faces as much as 70 years in prison if convicted on sex-trafficking and related counts.
During the three-week trial, her attorneys painted the four accusers as money-hungry opportunists, saying they changed their Epstein abuse stories to include Maxwell only when there was a chance to cash in.
After Epstein’s death, the women — who said they were abused as teenagers, between 1994 and 2004 — received millions in settlement funds from a victims’ program established by his estate.
Prosecutor Maurene Comey countered in rebuttal arguments that the main details of the abuse were clear to the women because such traumatic events are “seared into your brain forever.”
While the accusers did receive substantial compensation for their abuse by Epstein, they had no financial motive to come to court to testify against Maxwell, because they cannot recover anything more than they’ve already gotten, Comey argued.
“If money was all they wanted, they would have walked away as soon as the check cleared. … These women put themselves through the hell of testifying at this trial even though they had nothing to financially gain,” Comey said.
On Monday morning, Moe pleaded with jurors to ignore Maxwell’s attempts at divorcing herself from Epstein’s illicit affairs — pointing to documents and testimony that, she argued, prove that Maxwell knew all that was going on in Epstein’s life.
Maxwell, now 59, kept a phone book at the Palm Beach, Fla., villa she and Epstein shared, with a section for “massage therapists.” Moe told jurors the therapists were really teenagers with no training, whose parents’ phone numbers were sometimes also listed in the book.
Maxwell absolutely knew that the young women were as young as 14 because she had conversations with them about their lives, the prosecutors said.
In their testimony, accusers described Maxwell as a figure they thought they could trust to serve either as a sort of chaperone or as a buffer between them and Epstein, should he begin to cross a line. Instead, they alleged, Maxwell — Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and household manager — sometimes facilitated the illegal sex acts Epstein had come to expect.
Three women who testified also described experiencing unwanted sexual touching from Maxwell directly.
Maxwell’s lawyers have tried to downplay her connection to Epstein, emphasizing that she worked for him and managed his properties. But several witnesses testified that Epstein and Maxwell at one point shared the Palm Beach home and employees treated her as a head of the household.
The defense lawyers hope jurors will be swayed by the testimony of “false memory” researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who also appeared as a defense witness at the sexual assault trials of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.
Loftus described how memory can be influenced by internalizing other accusers’ stories and from media coverage.
Maxwell’s accusers were cross-examined extensively on details of their accounts that had changed over time. One of them, for instance, did not mention Maxwell when she spoke to the FBI in 2007 about what transpired at Epstein’s home, but on the witness stand described Maxwell as a major presence at the Palm Beach residence.
Portions of another woman’s testimony were also in conflict with facts she disclosed to the FBI in earlier interviews. She testified that the traumatic memories came back to her in full throughout a series of interviews leading up to the trial.
Maxwell is the daughter of late media investor Robert Maxwell. Four of her siblings were present in court for the final arguments Monday.