This article references rape, grooming, and sexual assault.

In June 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein abuse young women and girls. During the trial, four women testified that they’d been groomed and abused by Epstein – and that Maxwell had played a crucial role in facilitating this abuse.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a journalist and survivor of sexual abuse and grooming, witnessed the explosive trial first-hand. She speaks to GLAMOUR about her new book on the trial, the powerful relationships she formed with Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, and why she’s calling for urgent law reform to protect all victims and survivors.

Cast your mind back to the last ‘true crime’ documentary you watched. How often did you hear the victims speak? Perhaps they appeared for 30 seconds, faces blurred, to describe the crime’s catastrophic impact on their physical, emotional, and financial health. Or perhaps they made no appearance at all; perhaps they were already dead.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a journalist and survivor of rape, childhood grooming and sexual assault, never felt particularly comfortable with this format. And when she decided to report on Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial for recruiting and trafficking women and girls for sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, she was determined to bring survivors’ stories to the forefront.

“When we talk about true crime, we’re often too fixated on the perpetrators,” she tells me over Zoom a few weeks before the release of her book about the trial, The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. This is undoubtedly the case when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “We have this obsession with wealth and power, and we allow ourselves to get caught up in the details of all Jeffrey’s houses, his island and his private jets… That is just not that interesting to me. Nothing about him is that interesting to me.”

Lucia argues that stories about perpetrators, such as Epstein and Maxwell, get told “all the time” but little thought is spared for the survivors who actually lived through it.

In 2021, Lucia temporarily relocated to New York to report on Maxwell’s trial. For five weeks, she woke up at 1:30 am to ensure she was first in the press line, where she met swathes of other reporters eager to get their scoop. “They were focusing on the kind of really splashy celebrity stuff rather than the people who were willing to show up to court and be re-traumatised by the justice system,” Lucia explains. “So I really wanted to focus on them and their bravery and what this trafficking meant for them, but also what it meant for them to come to court and speak about it.”

In December 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five sex-trafficking-related counts. This was only possible thanks to the testimony of four women: Jane, Kate, Carolyn and Annie Farmer, whose lives were utterly derailed by Epstein and Maxwell, who endured intrusive, triggering cross-examinations in court, and who deserve to share their stories on their terms. Lucia, having already written two books about the “long shadow” cast by her own trauma from sexual abuse and grooming, is devoted to doing just that.

The similarities between Lucia’s trauma and that of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims were at the forefront of her mind throughout the trial. “Not only was I violently raped at 15 years old — as some of Epstein’s victims were,” Lucia writes in The Lasting Harm, “but more importantly, I was groomed and sexually abused from a young age, in a very similar scenario to the one set up by Epstein.”