The Times - UK (2022-01-01)

34 Saturday January 1 2022 | the times

NewsSaturday interview

Maxwell PR machine. They killed

story after story.”

Vicky Ward, a Vanity Fair journalist

who profiled Epstein, published a

transcript this week of a telephone

conversation from 2002 in which a

furious Maxwell demanded that she

drop from her story allegations from

Annie Farmer (a crucial witness at

the trial) that when she was 16,

Maxwell made Annie strip and

massaged her chest. “You’re just

taking some kid’s story and printing

it,” Maxwell said. “You can’t do that.”

To Ward’s “eternal regret”, Vanity Fair

cut Farmer’s claims.

“Maxwell was saying: ‘Who are you

going to believe, me, your friend and

fellow socialite, or these two know-

nothing girls?’” Boies says. “It was

the kind of class bias that we

confronted for so long.”

Sigrid McCawley, Boies’s

colleague, took an initial

deposition from Maxwell

in April 2016. “One of

the reasons I took the

second deposition was

that she essentially

stonewalled in the

first deposition,”

Boies says. He is

regarded as a

master of the art,

a Michelangelo of

deposition-

taking: capable

of taking an

unresponsive

block of

David Boies at his New York home.

‘Maxwell should have cut a deal, but

David Boies took on Jeffrey Epstein and his former

partner over their sexual abuse. Now his sights

are set on their collaborators, Will Pavia writes

W

hen Ghislaine

Maxwell completes

the plunge from her

former life and lands

in a federal prison

cell, with plenty of time to ponder

how it happened, she may perhaps

recall a morning in July, a glass

skyscraper in midtown Manhattan

and a gravel-voiced lawyer with pale

blue eyes. David Boies has not

forgotten it. “I got a pretty good sense

of her,” he says. He thought she was

arrogant. He also felt that she was

getting bad legal advice.

Boies, an icon for American

lawyers, is known both as a hired gun

for billion-dollar corporations and as

an old-fashioned trial attorney. He

has been at the centre of some of the

most consequential battles in recent

history: for press freedom; for Al Gore

in the disputed 2000 election; and for

marriage equality. On Tuesday he will

appear in court for Virginia Roberts

Giuffre in her sex assault case against

the Duke of York. The duke denies

her allegations.

Boies is speaking from an island in

the Gulf of Mexico, almost exactly

24 hours after a jury found Maxwell

guilty of sex trafficking and of

“transporting” and “enticing”

teenagers who were sexually abused.

He is 80 and has 12 grandchildren,

most of whom he is supposed to be

minding as he talks to me.

“The jury, which was obviously a

very thoughtful, careful jury, listened

to the evidence,” Boies says. “They...

concluded that... these victims were

telling the truth. They may not have

perfect memories and they may not

be perfect people, but these victims

are telling the truth. The core truth

that they were sexually abused and

sexually trafficked was inescapable.

The jury’s rejection of the blanket

denials and the jury’s acceptance of

the truth is something that I think

foreshadows what will happen in the

Prince Andrew case.”

He pauses for a moment, then says:

“Hold on!” There’s a silence and I

think I can hear the wind and the sea

and the sound of someone hurrying

across a boardwalk. “Sorry,” he says,

after a minute. “One of my

grandchildren was wandering a little

farther afield.”

Giuffre did not appear at the

Maxwell trial, even though she was

named as a victim. But she kept

popping up in evidence. One

journalist compared her to Banquo’s

ghost at the feast: absent but also

present, spoiling things for the

preternaturally composed Lady

Macbeth figure at the defence table.

Boies says Giuffre is the reason that

there was a trial at all. Before she took

on Prince Andrew, she sued Maxwell.

“I think if Virginia had not been

prepared to bring that lawsuit in 2015,

Maxwell might be free today,” he says.

He also thinks that the moment the

case against Maxwell cracked open

was that day in July 2016 when she

sat down with him to give a

deposition.

B

oies took on Giuffre’s case

pro bono in 2014. She had

accused Jeffrey Epstein and

Maxwell of trafficking her

to a series of prominent

men, including Andrew. When

Maxwell denied it, Boies filed a

defamation suit and began deposing

witnesses.

Epstein was always careful not to

say anything in depositions — there

are videos of him answering every

question by pleading his fifth

amendment right against self-

incrimination – but Maxwell did not.

“I think it was partly arrogance,”

Boies says. Also, “I think Epstein may

have had better lawyers than she did.

I don’t think her lawyers did a good

job of protecting her. I have said

publicly for five years that she was

making a mistake in not going in and

trying to cut a deal with

prosecutors. She could have cut a

very good deal early on but she

passed up that opportunity. I

think that’s proven to be a

fatal mistake.”

Then again, even Boies,

with all of his resources —

the firm he co-founded

has 300 lawyers —

struggled to get

prosecutors

interested in taking

on Maxwell. “I

contacted

prosecutors, I

contacted the

media,” he says.

“No one would

pay attention

until we actually

pursued the case

... No one was
really willing to
take on the
Epstein-