As newly unsealed documents linked to a case against the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell reveal names of high-profile associates of Jeffrey Epstein, many are quick to reiterate that their place on the long-awaited list does not mean they have done anything illegal. This is absolutely true – and as a court correspondent, it is incredibly important to stress the legal implications, or more accurately lack thereof, of this new information.
With the exception of allegations made under oath by Johanna Sjoberg against Prince Andrew that, if proven, would amount to criminal conduct, most of those named on the list are not accused of any legal wrongdoing. But that doesn’t mean we should not ask questions about the moral, rather than strictly legal, implications of their conduct. I mean this in two senses – both the personal moral implications for those named and the morals we hold as a society, which are laid hideously bare in these documents.
I have been working on a book about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the culmination of my investigative reporting on the case, for almost four years. The thing that shocks me even more than the graphic details I’ve learned from survivors that have never been made public is that this sex trafficking ring was known about and enabled by such an enormous group of people for perhaps as long as four decades. The number of people who saw or interacted with the victims I’ve spoken to – people who were famous, wealthy, headline-grabbing or otherwise – and did not ask questions about why they were there, is staggering.
The headline, for me, of the most recent tranche of documents is an email in which the Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre alleges that former president Bill Clinton “walked into [Vanity Fair] and threatened them not to write sex trafficking articles about his good friend,” referring, Guiffre says, to Jeffrey Epstein. This is an allegation that has not been proved. But that doesn’t mean it is not worthy of further inquiry – and the same is true for so many other allegations in the Epstein files.
The question here is not just criminal conduct in terms of actually sex trafficking and/or sexually abusing children. If that were really our base societal moral standard, we should be taking a long hard look at ourselves. The more pertinent question, particularly when the number of Epstein associates is so staggeringly high, is about knowledge of criminal conduct, which should breach our moral, if not necessarily legal, standards. If Giuffre’s allegation is true, it goes some way to proving that the former president knew, at the very least, that there were allegations of sex trafficking circulating about his “good friend”.
If a person – particularly a person who has been elected as a role model – has knowledge of such serious allegations, they should be expected to investigate them further, rather than shutting them down. Similarly, the supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle appeared overnight on a list of potential witnesses for the defamation case, with a court document – therefore, one that a legal practitioner must swear is a true and accurate representation of their knowledge – stating that he “has knowledge of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking conduct”.
Again, this does not prove he had knowledge of crimes being committed – it states that Guiffre’s lawyers had reason to believe he had knowledge of conduct relevant to the sex trafficking allegations. We don’t know what that conduct was, but the lawyers apparently thought evidence about it could help prove sex trafficking.
Also on this witness list were Clinton’s former adviser Doug Band, who, the document states, “may have knowledge of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and interaction with minors”. The list also includes Eva and Glenn Dubin, Prince Andrew, the US politician Gwendolyn Beck, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and the fashion magnate Leslie Wexner.
For each witness, a version of the phrasing “has knowledge of” or “may have knowledge of” sex trafficking conduct is used. We should be determined to find out what each of these people did in fact witness – and whether they could have intervened to protect Epstein’s victims, but chose not to. I know of many other names of people who allegedly either participated in the abuse or witnessed the presence of underage girls in Epstein’s various homes or planes – names I’ve been told I cannot report because of the easily abused defamation laws in England and Wales, set to be reformed through upcoming anti-Slapp legislation – who should also be asked to explain, on the record, how much they knew.
This speaks to the important difference between the role of journalism and the legal system. Having worked as a practitioner in both, I feel strongly that the role of the press right now is both to clarify the law and to ask hard questions about actions – or omissions – that may not be illegal but about which we should still, as the fourth estate, be asking hard questions. A failure to intervene when you suspect or close your mind to the possibility of the continuing commission of crimes as serious as the abuse of children may not be illegal, but if we wish to continue pushing for a world that delivers some degree of justice for abuse survivors, then it should certainly be considered gravely immoral.
In some cases, the law itself backs up this theory. The US concept of “conscious avoidance” – which the jury were instructed about at length as I sat in the press gallery during Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial, and which means ignoring signs that may raise questions about illegal activity – can, under some pieces of legislation (including some sex trafficking legislation) be legally equivalent to actual knowledge of a crime.
We are witnessing, this week, the unveiling of the true extent of perhaps the biggest and most powerful sex trafficking conspiracy in modern history. The number of people who knew, or decided not to know, about its existence, was critical to its success and impunity – which lasted for decades and is continuing. If we are to truly start to change the way the justice system and our culture views sexual offences, we must not put the bar so low as to only include the perpetrators. We must hold the enablers to account – whether they broke the law or not.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist and author of The Lasting Harm, a work of investigative reporting about the Epstein case
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