In this courtroom sketch, Ghislaine Maxwell listens as the guilty verdict in her sex abuse trial is announced, New York, December 2021.In this courtroom sketch, Ghislaine Maxwell listens as the guilty verdict in her sex abuse trial is announced, New York, December 2021., is a question about who is permitted to speak on the subject of sexual, particularly childhood, abuse.
“I have been accused many times of being a biased journalist because of my history of abuse. To that I say: yes, I am biased. Everybody is, whether we own it or not.” She goes on to say, “the journalists I met at the Maxwell trial – mostly men in their 40s – who did not have any experience of sexual trauma are also biased.
Later, once the guilty verdict is in, this question rears up again, after Osborne-Crowley secures an interview with one of the jurors, who tells her of his own childhood abuse – an experience he did not disclose in advance but which he shared in the jury room, and which, for several weeks, threatens to derail the outcome as the defence files a motion for a retrial.
Osborne-Crowley walks a fine line with this approach. She intercuts the 2021 narrative, her eyewitness account, with chapters set in the 90s and 00s in which she partially dramatises the stories told by the four women, Jane, Annie, Kate and Carolyn. You can understand the reason for this as an authorial choice: she wants the reader to see the scared and vulnerable teenagers pressured into situations they did not have the resources to escape.
The reliability of memory is central to the trial, and in an impassioned section later in the book, Osborne-Crowley argues persuasively that every case of this nature should feature impartial evidence from experts on the neuroscientific advances in understanding of PTSD and trauma memory, so that a victim’s failure to recall exact detail could be better understood as proof of trauma rather than proof of lying.