In the opening pages of The Lasting Harm , journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley travels to West Palm Beach to meet “Carolyn”, a victim-survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network. Her testimony supported the most serious charges in the prosecution’s case against the co-conspirator Epstein described as his “best friend”: his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. “Carolyn” has never spoken to a journalist at length and is anxious to know why Osborne-Crowley wants to write the story.
I answer honestly, “I was sexually abused and groomed as a child [...
] And I’m still living with the effects of it. I want the world to understand it better.” Osborne-Crowley is a survivor of sexual abuse, perpetrated against her by her gymnastics coach from the age of nine.
She was later violently raped by a stranger in a Sydney public toilet, aged 15, compounding her trauma. She first disclosed it ten years later, aged 25. Review: The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell – Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin) She has written two books about her experiences and the effects of trauma on victim-survivors more broadly.
Common impacts include substance addiction, eating disorders, addiction to abusive relationships and chronic self-harm. These symptoms, Osborne-Crowley argues, were “weaponised against Epstein’s survivors on cross-examination at trial, in an attempt to undermine their credibility, their morality, their memories”. “I can tell you t.