A rally is being held this morning in Washington, D.C., at which more than 100 survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell will gather and some will speak, including some speaking publicly for the first time. Some of the survivors are meeting privately with members of the House Oversight Committee in a bipartisan effort, though so far no public testimony is planned. The “Stand With Survivors” rally is organized by several different victim advocacy groups including World Without Exploitation (WWE), Sanctuary for Families, Polaris and others because, as Lauren Hersh, National Director of WWE put it, “The voices of survivors have been omitted from the conversation for far too long.” Indeed, as Rachel Foster, one of the co-founders of WWE explained, “We need to be listening to survivors, hearing their voices, and not turning a microphone to a predator.” ​​
The microphone to which Ms. Foster was referring is the two-day interview conducted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche with Maxwell last month. Maxwell was convicted by a jury in 2021 of participating in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Jeffrey Epstein, for which she was sentenced in 2022 by a federal judge to 240 months in prison. The judge who sat through the entire trial and heard the victims and witnesses and saw the evidence found that Maxwell was “instrumental in the abuse of several underage girls and that she herself participated in some of the abuse” – conduct that was “heinous and predatory.”
The interview with Maxwell was labeled by the Justice Department as a “proffer.” But that was, to put it mildly, a farce. Why? Because the entire purpose of an interview pursuant to a proffer agreement is to allow the interviewee to admit wrongdoing without fear of further liability and to, therefore, speak freely and with credibility about other people’s involvement. The one big exception to that protection, the thing that usually shuts a proffer down in its tracks, is when the target or defendant minimizes their own conduct and lies in material ways to the prosecutor. The job of the prosecutor questioning a potential witness during a real proffer is to test the witness’s credibility against known facts testified to by witnesses at a trial or found by a judge and probe when there is something unclear in answer to a material question. The proffer interview is also meant to help identify other witnesses and evidence worth pursuing. Here, the questioner, Todd Blanche, did the exact opposite – something which does not appear to be accidental.
During the interview, Maxwell repeatedly denied and minimized her own criminal conduct. For example, she denied recruiting underage girls to be “masseuses” for Epstein – a central tenet of the survivors’ stories from the beginning that the Palm Beach police found credible. Even Mr. Trump seemed to publicly acknowledge recently that Virginia Giuffre, one of the most outspoken survivors, was lured from his Mar-a-Lago Club for Epstein. Maxwell’s denials fly in the face of findings by the trial judge who concluded that Maxwell “worked with Epstein to select young victims who were vulnerable. … [and] played a pivotal role in facilitating the abuse of the underaged girls through a series of deceptive tactics. A sophisticated adult woman, she provided an initial veneer of responsibility and even safety. She befriended and developed relationships of trust. She then manipulated the victims and normalized sexual abuse through her involvement, encouragement, and instruction.” A prosecutor conducting a real proffer who encountered this kind of denial by Maxwell would go into cross-examination mode – something I have seen Todd Blanche do firsthand when he and I were prosecutors together in the Southern District of New York. That he didn’t do this here is not because he doesn’t understand a prosecutor’s role in a proffer. It seems he just chose to ignore it.
