Introduction
I'm going to start with the elephant in the room. Why would an Australian woman think she has any right to dictate anything to an American woman?
I'm not dictating anything. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of the nuances of American female culture. I didn't grow up there and I don't personally know anyone who did.
What I am presenting to you is the results of the research I have done. What I can see as an outsider looking in.
This book started as a conversation with my Husband. We had finished watching "Epstein: Filthy Rich" on Netflix. The whole thing was extremely distressing. So many girls were left scarred, damaged and ashamed by a grown man and a grown women.
It occurred to me that each of those girls either exploited themselves and/or other girls they knew, sometimes their friends. They knowingly asked their friends to 'come and give some old guy a massage' before bailing on them and leaving them alone with Epstein.
Some of them continued it for years. Some of them gave Epstein and Maxwell access to 40 or 50 underage girls in the time they were a part of it.
I want to be VERY clear about this, I do NOT blame those girls for what they did. They were under the coercive control of a grown man named Jeffery Epstein. In many cases, he had already sexually assaulted (at the very least) the girls he was asking to bring him friends. Epstein normalised the behaviour.
After a rage rant about Epstein, I turned my attention to Ghislaine. Why would she deliberately target vulnerable girls and lure them to be sexually assaulted and raped? So I looked into her.
Born in France in 1961 Ghislaine Maxwell and was one of 9 children born to Elisabeth and Robert Maxwell. She attended Balliol College of the University of Oxford. She served as the director for the Oxford Football Club, started the Kit-Cat Club, she started The TerraMar Project in 2012* and was ultimately charged with and convicted for sex trafficking minors and is currently serving 20 years in a Florida prison.
She met Epstein in the early 1990s, though they never confirmed they were in a romantic relationship Epstein employees stated in a 1992 interview that Maxwell was handling Epstein's public and private affairs and was referred to as "the lady of the house".
The victims that came forward made it clear that Maxwell had been the one procuring the girls for Epstein*. I went through as much of her history as I could find and the hardest part about it was how unremarkable her life seemed in terms of trauma. She had lived a rather sheltered and privileged life.
That was when I made the decision to start looking deeper. What was it that compelled, first Maxwell and then these exploited girls, to betray and set up other girls to be sexually assaulted or worse, raped?
The following work is the result of months of research, examining case studies, hearing stories from real women & girls and examining victim statements. What I discovered shook me to my core.
This is not new behaviour. From the Salem Witch Trials to Jeffery Epstein and more, women and girls in America have been sabotaging, attacking and setting each other up for hundreds of years. I am hoping to open some eyes and break some cycles.
