Maxwell Prosecutors Rest Case After Fourth Accuser Testifies 

(Bloomberg) -- The prosecution in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial rested its case shortly after jurors heard from the fourth and final witness to testify that she was lured into sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Moe said on Friday that the government had finished putting on its case. U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan excused the jury and told them to return to court on Dec. 16. 

Prosecutors had said earlier in the week they planned to end their case this week, earlier than expected in a trial that had been scheduled to continue into January. The defense said on Tuesday it was still undecided if it would call any witnesses. The judge on Friday swiftly dismissed a routine defense motion asking her to dismiss the case on the grounds that the prosecution had presented insufficient evidence.

Earlier on Friday, Annie Farmer said on the stand that an incident when Epstein groped her in a New York movie theater at age 16 made her uncomfortable but that she accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at his New Mexico ranch four months later when she learned his girlfriend, Maxwell, would be there. 

“I didn’t think anything would happen” with her there, Farmer said. She wound up being sexually abused by both of them, she said.

‘Very Nervous’

Farmer was the last of four accusers to testify at Maxwell’s trial in Manhattan federal court, and the first to use her actual name. Prosecutors claim the British socialite lured and groomed underage girls for abuse by Epstein, her former boyfriend and employer. She has pleaded not guilty, and her lawyers claim she’s being scapegoated for the crimes of Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial.

On the stand Friday, Farmer said visited New York in December 1995 to see her older sister, who worked for Epstein at the time. The financier first invited the sisters to his Upper East Side mansion before having his driver take them to see “Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway. But, on another occasion, he asked them to go to the movies with him.

During the movie, she said Epstein took her hand and then began stroking her leg and shoe.

“I was very surprised and very nervous and anxious,” said Farmer. “I felt sick to my stomach. It was not something I was at all expecting.” She said Epstein would stop touching her when he interacted with her sister but then start again when the interaction was over.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Laura Menninger brought up the journal Farmer kept at time, in which the then-16-year-old described the movie theater incident.

‘Weird Feeling’

“It was one of those things that gave me a weird feeling,” Farmer wrote in her journal. “But it probably wasn’t that weird and probably normal.”

Menninger suggested Farmer’s memories of what happened in New York might have been “colored” by what happened later in New Mexico.

Epstein paid for her trip to his Zorro ranch, Farmer said, where she expected he would advise her on plans for college, a topic they’d also discussed in New York. When she got there, she realized she was the only visitor there for the weekend with Maxwell and Epstein.

The couple took her shopping and to the movies, and then Maxwell told her she could give her a massage, Farmer said. The socialite told her to undress completely but covered her with a sheet as she lay on her stomach on the massage table. Maxwell made small talk as she massaged her back, Farmer recalled, but then told her to flip over.

“She pulled the sheet down and exposed my breasts and started rubbing on my chest and upper breasts,” Farmer said.

“How old were you when Maxwell gave you a massage?” prosecutor Lara Pomerantz asked.

Wanted to ‘Cuddle’

“I was 16 years old,” Farmer answered.

The next morning, Epstein “bounded into” her bedroom and said he wanted to “cuddle,” Farmer said.

“So he climbed into bed with me and laid behind me and reached his arms around me and got pressed his body into me,” she said, adding that she retreated into the bathroom and locked herself in. 

Farmer said she was confused by what was happening because Epstein had said he wanted to help her in her academic pursuits. She recalled at one point during the weekend trying to talk to Maxwell about a high school paper she was writing about British authors. But the Oxford-educated Maxwell “seemed disinterested and acted like she didn’t care,” Farmer said.

“I thought I had been brought there for one set of reasons,” she said. “I thought they were interested in me as a student which they wanted to help. So I was trying to be impressive in that way. But all these experiences made me feel like they had very different interests in me. It was extremely disorienting and I wanted to be done with it.”

Defense lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said in opening statements that Farmer was above the age of legal consent in New Mexico at the time. “From our perspective, what happened in New Mexico is not illegal conduct under the terms of this indictment,” Sternheim said.

Prosecutors have charged Maxwell conspired with Epstein to transport Farmer to New Mexico from another state for the purposes of being “groomed” and “subjected to acts of sexual abuse.”

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