'Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein abuse fuelled my teenage drug addiction', accuser claims

It’s more than 20 years since Carolyn (only using her first name in court) was at Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach home. Yet, in court, she still described the house in the present tense.

It no longer stands, demolished in the years since, but in Carolyn's mind it is ever present. Her testimony to the court would suggest it always will be.

She says she was 14-years-old and desperate for money when she first went there. She was taken by her friend Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, who would go on to accuse Prince Andrew of sexual assault - claims he has always categorically denied.

“I said okay because I was going to make a lot of money,” she told the court.

During a day in the witness box, Carolyn’s testimony was graphic and gritty.

She needed the money to buy drugs, partly due to the abuse she had endured since the age of four, she said.

The abuse she claims at the hands of Maxwell and Epstein fuelled her addiction and her need for their money.

As a result, over four years she visited two to three times a week.

Carolyn said when she was 14, she told Ghislaine Maxwell she was too young to persuade her alcoholic mother to get a passport and travel with the pair.

Even so, she would be booked to visit when Maxwell and Epstein were heading to town, she said.

As the bookings mounted she grew more comfortable, she told the court, and would take her clothes off ahead of sexually explicit massage sessions - some alone with Epstein, at times with others present.

She told the court the woman she called Maxwell, because she couldn’t pronounce her first name, touched her breasts, hips and bottom complimenting her on a “great body”.

Carolyn would get $300 (£227) on her own but $600 (£453) if she took a friend, the court heard.

When she was 16-years-old, Carolyn said she tried to break the cycle and ran away to Georgia with her boyfriend and got pregnant - but still went back.

“I was so young when I had my baby, I needed money to buy stuff,“ she told the jury, but went on to describe how Epstein then asked if she had younger friends she could send round.

“That’s when I realised I was too old,” Carolyn said. She was 18.

Maxwell has denied charges she groomed underage girls for Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019. Her lawyers say the government is making her a scapegoat for Epstein’s sex crimes.