Ghislaine Maxwell trial

[RTH10260]

I don't expect the names of those other than Epstein and Maxwell to be mentioned except in passing.

That strikes me as a little odd. Given that Maxwell is on trial for trafficking, then one might think that all instances of trafficking would be pretty relevant to securing a conviction.

I am interested in this "decision" not to prosecute Prince Andrew. Is there any info on who/when/how this decision was made?

IIRC there is a separate court case against Prince Andrew. It may have not been consolidated cause there are probably legal implication of him being a foreigner without US residency. IIRC the discovery process has been approved by the relevant UK court.

[LM K]

And this is why many victims say nothing ... shame.

[Maybenaut]

I don't expect the names of those other than Epstein and Maxwell to be mentioned except in passing.

That strikes me as a little odd. Given that Maxwell is on trial for trafficking, then one might think that all instances of trafficking would be pretty relevant to securing a conviction.

I am interested in this "decision" not to prosecute Prince Andrew. Is there any info on who/when/how this decision was made?

IIRC there is a separate court case against Prince Andrew. It may have not been consolidated cause there are probably legal implication of him being a foreigner without US residency. IIRC the discovery process has been approved by the relevant UK court.

As I understand it, that’s a civil case filed by one of the victims. There was some issue with service if process, but that’s been done, I believe. I don’t think the US has charged him criminally.

[Res Ipsa]

I don't expect the names of those other than Epstein and Maxwell to be mentioned except in passing.

That strikes me as a little odd. Given that Maxwell is on trial for trafficking, then one might think that all instances of trafficking would be pretty relevant to securing a conviction.

I am interested in this "decision" not to prosecute Prince Andrew. Is there any info on who/when/how this decision was made?

IIRC there is a separate court case against Prince Andrew. It may have not been consolidated cause there are probably legal implication of him being a foreigner without US residency. IIRC the discovery process has been approved by the relevant UK court.

No, you do not recall correctly. There are no criminal proceedings in the US against Prince Andrew.

Giuffre has filed a civil suit against him. That has nothing to do with this criminal proceeding.

I think the government only has to prove that the purpose of the travel was sex with Epstein, even if some of the victims also had sex with others.

The victim who testified affirmatively denies having been coerced into abuse by others.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... mp-14.html

However, Jane claimed that she was never directed to have sex with any of Epstein's associates nor was she asked to recruit other girls.

The notion that the victims were part of the "secret child abuse cabal of powerful people" is going to eventually require calling Epstein's victims liars.

The government has no ability to "leave out" whatever it is the witnesses respond to when questioned about what they went through. What the victims testify to is not up to the prosecutors.

So, are we going with "She's too traumatized to remember anyone other than Epstein", "She's lying" or something else?

[LM K]

"Matt" is "Jane's" ex boyfriend. He's using a pseudonym to protect Jane's identity. Matt and Jane were together for 8 years.

[Notaperson]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... mp-14.html
However, Jane claimed that she was never directed to have sex with any of Epstein's associates....

That Dailymail article contradicts itself:

Menninger asked Jane to describe the other women who took part in the 'orgies'.

One of them was named Sophie and....was an actual masseuse.

A second woman was named 'Eva' and asked if she 'knew the routine' as well, Jane said: 'Yes.'

A fifth woman was older and named Kelly and Jane agreed that she 'thought she was a model.'

So Jane appears to have testified that associates of Epstein were involved in her abuse.

The notion that the victims were part of the "secret child abuse cabal of powerful people" is going to eventually require calling Epstein's victims liars.

I could be wrong, but I think it's only Virginia Giuffre who has claimed to have been abused by many powerful people (I too see reasons to doubt this claim). Apparently Jane is not making this claim.

So, are we going with "She's too traumatized to remember anyone other than Epstein", "She's lying" or something else?

I'm confused by your question. Are you referring to Jane? She clearly does recall others being involved, but she is not claiming it was a "cabal of powerful people."

[LM K]

The notion that the victims were part of the "secret child abuse cabal of powerful people" is going to eventually require calling Epstein's victims liars.

The government has no ability to "leave out" whatever it is the witnesses respond to when questioned about what they went through. What the victims testify to is not up to the prosecutors.

So, are we going with "She's too traumatized to remember anyone other than Epstein", "She's lying" or something else?

Bring in Elizabeth Loftus.

Loftus is brilliant. Her research on memory has changed psychological theories on memory completely. I regularly use her research in lecture.

The defense is going to claim that the victims don't really remember what happened. The victims aren't lying ... they believe what they're testifying about. But for reasons x,y,z, no one can know if their memories are accurate. Thus, jurors can't rely on anything the victims, well, alleged victims, say.

The defense isn't going to call the victims liars. Their going to try to get the jury to doubt the accuracy of the victims memories.

But will Loftus' testimony help or hurt the defense? Jurors are being asked to doubt the victims memories. Loftus' research comes down to this:

-Are the victim's memories accurate enough? Loftus' will say it's impossible to know.

-Can we trust the victim's memories to be the truth? Loftus will say it's impossible to know.

Which brings jurors back to where they started. Do they believe the victims and/or what victims say happened?

Fair warning: I might lose my shit during Loftus' testimony. Why? I admire Loftus as a scientist. I don't respect her decisions to testify in trials of high profile defendants who's goal is to manipulate juries. Her research that can't give jurors solid info about the victims in that specific trial. Loftus will probably be a blind witness. She'll testify about her research, but won't testify about the actual case. Thus, the defense lawyers will be left to instruct the jury on how to apply Loftus' testimony to the victim's testimony.

But, I'm probably biased because her work is being used to create doubt on victim's memories. Most psychologists will agree with me, though. But they're probably just as biased.

Elizabeth Loftus was in Argentina, giving talks about the malleability of memory, in October, 2018, when she learned that Harvey Weinstein, who had recently been indicted for rape and sexual assault, wanted to speak with her. She couldn’t figure out how to receive international calls in her hotel room, so she asked if they could talk in three days, once she was home, in California. In response, she got a series of frantic e-mails saying that the conversation couldn’t wait. But, when Weinstein finally got through, she said, “basically he just wanted to ask, ‘How can something that seems so consensual be turned into something so wrong?’ ”

Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century, according to a list ­compiled by the Review of General Psychology. Her work helped usher in a paradigm shift, rendering obsolete the archival model of memory—the idea, dominant for much of the twentieth century, that our memories exist in some sort of mental library, as literal representations of past events. According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. "Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-­like creature.”

George A. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, once said in a speech to the American Psychological Association that the way to advance the field was “to give psychology away.” Loftus, who is seventy-six, adopts a similar view, seizing any opportunity to elaborate on what she calls the “flimsy curtain that separates our imagination and our memory.” In the past forty-five years, she has testified or consulted in more than three hundred cases, on behalf of people wrongly accused of robbery and murder, as well as for high-profile defendants like Bill Cosby, Jerry Sandusky, and the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, in 2006. “If the MeToo movement had an office, Beth’s picture would be on the ten-most-wanted list,” her brother Robert told me.


She testified for roughly an hour, pre­senting basic psychological research that might lead a jury to think that neutral or disappointing sexual encounters with Weinstein could have taken on new weight in light of revelations about his predatory history. “If you are being urged to remember more,” Loftus said at the trial, “you may produce, you know, something like a guess or a thought, and that then can start to feel like it’s a memory.”

“Can an event that was not traumatic at the time be considered traumatic later?” Weinstein’s lawyer asked.

“If you label something in a parti­cular way, you can distort memory of that item,” Loftus said. “You can plant entire events into the minds of oth­erwise ordinary, healthy people.” She ­explained that in one experiment, her most famous study, she had convinced adults that, as young children, they had been lost in a mall, crying. “The emotion is no guarantee that you are dealing with an authentic memory,” she said.


The next week, at the U.C. Irvine law school, where Loftus teaches classes, she passed by a colleague who specializes in feminist theory. “Harvey Weinstein—how could you?” the professor said. “How could you!” (Loftus remembers that the conversation occurred at the buffet table at a faculty meeting, but the colleague told me, “I know that it didn’t, because I would not have stood next to her in a buffet line.”) Loftus said, “I was reeling. How about the presumption of innocence? How about ‘the unpopular deserve to have a defense’?”


Her friends and family were also skeptical of her decision to testify for Weinstein. Her ex-husband, Geoff Loftus (whom she calls her “wasband,” because they still treat each other like family), an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, said that he thought, “Oh, God, Beth, really? Come on.” Her brother David told me, “Here these women are blossoming into a world in which people are finally going to listen to them, and then they’re going to have some professor on the stand—someone they’ve never met before—tell the jury that they can’t be believed.”


Defense lawyers began calling on her to testify about the ways that memories are distorted by leading questions, sloppy police lineups, and cross-racial identification of faces. (The chance of misidentification is greatest when the witness is white and the defendant is Black.) James Doyle, a former head of Massachusetts’s Public Defender Division, who co-wrote a book with Loftus, said that she “obliterated the idea that there is a permanent, stable memory capacity in humans.” He told me, “Her work changed the whole story of what an eyewitness case was about, and destabilized a solid and routine part of the criminal caseload.”

Beginning in the early nineties, Loftus began getting questions about a new kind of case. Incest had entered the American consciousness, and women in therapy were uncovering memories of being abused by their fathers. The discovery was reminiscent of a similar one, a century earlier, when Freud realized that his patients had suppressed memories of being sexually abused as children. Within a few years, Freud had changed his mind, arguing that his patients were afflicted by fears and fantasies surrounding sex abuse, not by memories of the actual thing. In doing so, Freud walked away from a revelation—that sexual abuse of children was prevalent—but also proposed a more complex theory of the mind.


Loftus emerged as perhaps the most prominent defender of her field. She could find little experimental evidence to support the idea that memories of trauma, after remaining dormant for a decade or more, could abruptly spring to life, and she worried that therapists, through hypnosis and other suggestive techniques, were coaxing memories into being. As she began testifying on behalf of men who she believed may have been wrongly accused, she came to be seen as an expert who was complicit with, rather than challenging, institutions of power.


Loftus rose to prominence at a time when the computer was becoming the dominant metaphor for the mind. Social and cultural forces were treated as variables that compromised memory processes, turning people into unreliable narrators of their own experiences. "That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth,” Loftus wrote in Psychology Today, in 1996.

But social influences on memory, however transformative, need not lead to a “horrifying” result. Janice Haaken, a professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, who has written several books about memory, told me, “Scholars who look at the history of trauma understand the importance of groups—often created by political or social movements—in holding on to memories. There is always a contest over versions of truth in history, and, if you don’t have other people to help you hold on to your memories, you are going to be disqualified, or seen as crazy.”

Haaken, who has been deeply involved in feminist activism for forty years, added that she is cautious of slogans, popularized by the MeToo movement, urging people to “believe women.” She said, “I think, in some areas of the women’s movement, white feminists have not dealt with our country’s history of putting people in prison, usually those of color, based on eyewitness testimony that is wrong.” Few psychologists have been more influential than Loftus in revealing how standard police procedures can contaminate memory. Haaken said, “We have enough history behind us as a movement to demand more than the principle ‘believe women,’ which reduces us to children and denies us the complexity and nuances of everyday remembering.”


Nicole was silent for a few seconds. “You know, I realized something,” she said. A few weeks earlier, she had exchanged e-mails with a woman whose memories of abuse Loftus had cast doubt on at a civil trial. “We kind of realized together that we are survivors of Elizabeth Loftus,” Nicole said. For years, she’d had intrusive thoughts. “I’m not sure if there is a greater sense of ­outrage than that of having your own memories challenged,” she said. She had felt terror at the idea of seeing Loftus at psychology conferences. Recently, though, “I stopped wanting to hide under a chair every time I thought she might be at a conference and decided, No, I’m going to stand here and let her see me,” she said.


“Leave Weinstein out of it,” Loftus said. “You know, because honestly—I was a blind witness. I didn’t even talk about any specific people. It was just stuff about memory.”
"

[LM K]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... mp-14.html
However, Jane claimed that she was never directed to have sex with any of Epstein's associates....

That Dailymail article contradicts itself:

Menninger asked Jane to describe the other women who took part in the 'orgies'.

One of them was named Sophie and....was an actual masseuse.

A second woman was named 'Eva' and asked if she 'knew the routine' as well, Jane said: 'Yes.'

A fifth woman was older and named Kelly and Jane agreed that she 'thought she was a model.'

So Jane appears to have testified that associates of Epstein were involved in her abuse.

The notion that the victims were part of the "secret child abuse cabal of powerful people" is going to eventually require calling Epstein's victims liars.

I could be wrong, but I think it's only Virginia Giuffre who has claimed to have been abused by many powerful people (I too see reasons to doubt this claim). Apparently Jane is not making this claim.

So, are we going with "She's too traumatized to remember anyone other than Epstein", "She's lying" or something else?

I'm confused by your question. Are you referring to Jane? She clearly does recall others being involved, but she is not claiming it was a "cabal of powerful people."

Jane said she wasn't directed to have sex with anyone else. She is saying that on occasion there were others in the room when she was being abused. To my knowledge she hasn't said that she was or was not physically assaulted by anyone else during the orgies.

[Res Ipsa]

[
Jane said she wasn't directed to have sex with anyone else. She is saying that on occasion there were others in the room when she was being abused. To my knowledge she hasn't said that she was or was not physically assaulted by anyone else during the orgies.

Look, the entire premise of the “Epstein didn’t commit suicide” contingent is that he was killed to protect the secrets of powerful people.

The entire reason why her testimony is conflated in the press with “Ooh, Clinton and Trump flew on his plane” is to feed that same notion.

My question, as it has been for a long time now, is a pretty simple one. It is now compounded by the fact that while it was necessary for “them” to kill Epstein (after stupidly drawing attention to him by arresting him in the first place), why was it not necessary to kill Maxwell in order to keep the same stuff from coming out?

A good deal of the attention in this case is driven by this “any day now” fantasy that this ring of powerful people will be exposed. It is the core narrative of everything from “Jews drink the blood of Christian babies” to Qanon.

This has nothing to do with a dissertation on Loftus or anyone’s personal experiences. I simply want to know how long we can expect people to cling to their pet conspiracy theories.

[Res Ipsa]

That Dailymail article contradicts itself:

Menninger asked Jane to describe the other women who took part in the 'orgies'.[\quote]

One of them was named Sophie and....was an actual masseuse.

A second woman was named 'Eva' and asked if she 'knew the routine' as well, Jane said: 'Yes.'

A fifth woman was older and named Kelly and Jane agreed that she 'thought she was a model.'

So Jane appears to have testified that associates of Epstein were involved in her abuse.

The article does not contradict itself. It’s clear from context that “Epstein associates” is intended to refer to the wealthy and connected people with whom he hobnobbed, and not to other women/girls who were involved in his twisted scheme. I mean, obviously, Maxwell was an “Epstein associate”.

What drives a lot of the popular interest in this case is not that one guy who most people never heard about, roped a lot of girls from troubled situations into satisfying his criminal proclivities.

Maybe this is a surprise to some here, but there is a widely shared belief that Epstein was a procurer of young women to Trump, Clinton, and a whole roster of yet-unknown political and business figures for whose protection Epstein was murdered, and the murder was covered up.

And, again, maybe nobody here ever heard of such things, but I’m fascinated by the obvious problem that “they” didn’t kill Maxwell, but put her on trial.

[Maybenaut]

[
Jane said she wasn't directed to have sex with anyone else. She is saying that on occasion there were others in the room when she was being abused. To my knowledge she hasn't said that she was or was not physically assaulted by anyone else during the orgies.

Look, the entire premise of the “Epstein didn’t commit suicide” contingent is that he was killed to protect the secrets of powerful people.

The entire reason why her testimony is conflated in the press with “Ooh, Clinton and Trump flew on his plane” is to feed that same notion.

My question, as it has been for a long time now, is a pretty simple one. It is now compounded by the fact that while it was necessary for “them” to kill Epstein (after stupidly drawing attention to him by arresting him in the first place), why was it not necessary to kill Maxwell in order to keep the same stuff from coming out?

A good deal of the attention in this case is driven by this “any day now” fantasy that this ring of powerful people will be exposed. It is the core narrative of everything from “Jews drink the blood of Christian babies” to Qanon.

This has nothing to do with a dissertation on Loftus or anyone’s personal experiences. I simply want to know how long we can expect people to cling to their pet conspiracy theories.

I think most of the discussion in this thread is about testimony that has been admitted or actually will be admissible at trial. That’s why no one here has been talking about conspiracy theories.

[Dave from down under]

Vast conspiracy theories are not complete without the obvious flaw..

[LM K]

From NYT

Hidden Content

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Epstein and Maxwell are brilliant groomers. So disturbing.

[LM K]

[
Jane said she wasn't directed to have sex with anyone else. She is saying that on occasion there were others in the room when she was being abused. To my knowledge she hasn't said that she was or was not physically assaulted by anyone else during the orgies.

Look, the entire premise of the “Epstein didn’t commit suicide” contingent is that he was killed to protect the secrets of powerful people.

The entire reason why her testimony is conflated in the press with “Ooh, Clinton and Trump flew on his plane” is to feed that same notion.

My question, as it has been for a long time now, is a pretty simple one. It is now compounded by the fact that while it was necessary for “them” to kill Epstein (after stupidly drawing attention to him by arresting him in the first place), why was it not necessary to kill Maxwell in order to keep the same stuff from coming out?

A good deal of the attention in this case is driven by this “any day now” fantasy that this ring of powerful people will be exposed. It is the core narrative of everything from “Jews drink the blood of Christian babies” to Qanon.

This has nothing to do with a dissertation on Loftus or anyone’s personal experiences. I simply want to know how long we can expect people to cling to their pet conspiracy theories.

You know the answer to that. These conspiracy theories will never die. They'll gradually receive less and less attention as the next theory comes along.

I follow the trial on Twitter. The number of Epstein/Maxwell conspiracy theorists is disturbing. I didn't realize how invested QAnon was in this trial.

[Res Ipsa]

I didn't realize how invested QAnon was in this trial.

Ah.... 4.9M results....

Screen Shot 2021-12-02 at 8.49.15 AM.png (302.75 KiB) Viewed 1130 times

What's masterful about the Epstein conspiracy nexus is that it plays both sides of the street. The Qanon cabal of powerful people harvesting vital essences from children - almost the literal medieval "Jews are drinking the blood of babies" - was confirmed by the arrest of Epstein. But, from there, the conspiracy accommodates "Trump/Barr/RWers had him killed" and "Another notch in the Clinton body count". It's a game the whole family can play!

"Epstein didn't kill himself" has its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_d ... ll_himself

That is the entire reason for shoehorning "Trump" and "Clinton" and "Victim Testifies" into headlines and other reports this week. They know what drives clicks and eyeballs, and it is the fact that gazillions of media consumers are looking to have their conspiracy theories confirmed in the course of this trial.

[Kendra]

Maxwell's lawyer: My grandfather liked to take me to the Bronx Zoo. Was that grooming?
[Yes, he went there.]

[sugar magnolia]

Maxwell's lawyer: My grandfather liked to take me to the Bronx Zoo. Was that grooming?
[Yes, he went there.]

"Only if he planned on fucking me when we got home."

[Maybenaut]

Maxwell's lawyer: My grandfather liked to take me to the Bronx Zoo. Was that grooming?
[Yes, he went there.]

"Only if he planned on fucking me when we got home."

Yes.

Also… while grandparents and other family members often engage in grooming behavior, Epstein and Maxwell weren’t related to any of these children. So the grandparent thing is not really an apt comparison.

[Kendra]

#Breaking: The black books of Epstein and #GhislaineMaxwell have just been brought up by the US, questioning Epstein's maintenance man Juan Alessi. Might take a while, but it's on. #UNinTheBook #BlueBook Inner City Press is live tweeting:

[Kendra]

Important bullet point:

—"Check fence for holes where Max can get out."

That's Maxwell's "Yorkie."

Remember "Jane's" testimony?

She testified when she met Maxwell, she was walking with a "cute little Yorkie."

[LM K]

[Kendra]

[Chilidog]

As reprehensible as these people are, I still LOLed at the dildo bit.

[Kendra]

I hope SNL doesn't do a skit on this. I feel like I need a hot shower.

[PaulG]

Important bullet point:

—"Check fence for holes where Max can get out."

That's Maxwell's "Yorkie."

Remember "Jane's" testimony?

She testified when she met Maxwell, she was walking with a "cute little Yorkie."

Not Jimmy Savile then.