Maxwell ‘in on it from the start’

Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were ‘‘partners in crime’’ in the sexual abuse of teenage girls, a prosecutor said yesterday, while Maxwell’s lawyers said she was being made a scapegoat for a man’s bad behaviour as the British socialite’s sex trafficking trial got under way in New York.

Assistant US Attorney Lara Pomerantz said at the start of Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial that the British socialite and Epstein enticed girls as young as 14 to engage in ‘‘so-called massages’’ in which sex abuse came to be seen as ‘‘casual and normal’’ after vulnerable victims were showered with money and gifts.

The prosecutor sought to make clear to a jury of 12 that there was no confusion about whether Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion, was his puppet or accomplice.

She described Maxwell, 59, as central to Epstein’s sex abuse scheme, which prosecutors say lasted over a decade.

‘‘She was in on it from the start. The defendant and Epstein lured their victims with a promise of a bright future, only to sexually exploit them,’’ Pomerantz said, as US Attorney Damian Williams looked on from a spectator bench.

Maxwell ‘‘was involved in every detail of Epstein’s life,’’ the prosecutor said. ‘‘The defendant was the lady of the house.’’

Even after Maxwell and Epstein stopped being romantically involved, the pair ‘‘remained the best of friends,’’ Pomerantz said.

She said Maxwell ‘‘helped normalise abusive sexual conduct’’ by making the teenagers feel safe and by taking them on shopping trips and asking them about their lives, their schools and their families.

The prosecutor spoke from an enclosed plastic see-through box that allowed her to take off her mask as Maxwell at times wrote and passed notes to her lawyers.

When she finished, attorney Bobbi Sternheim said her client was a ‘‘scapegoat for a man who behaved badly,’’ just like so many women all the way back to Adam and Eve.

‘‘She’s not Jeffrey Epstein. She’s not like Jeffrey Epstein’’ or any of the powerful men, moguls and media giants who abuse women, Sternheim said.

She called Epstein ‘‘the proverbial elephant in the room’’.

‘‘He is not visible, but he is consuming this entire courtroom and overflow courtrooms where other members of the public are viewing,’’ she said.

Sternheim said the four women who would testify that Maxwell recruited them to be sexually abused were suffering from quarter-century-old memories and the influence of lawyers who guided them to get money from a fund set up by Epstein’s estate after his August 2019 suicide in a Manhattan federal jail as he awaited his own sex trafficking trial.

The lawyer said ‘‘accusers have shaken the money tree, and millions of dollars have fallen their way’’.