The Packages and the Sick Attorney - Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Day 9

“Carolyn also said that Epstein had sent her Victoria’s Secret lingerie by FedEx to her childhood home in West Palm Beach…this morning…testimony confirmed that Epstein had indeed sent packages to Carolyn’s address in 2002.”

Proceedings ended early around 10:30 AM Thursday, after the jury heard just one witness.  That was because one of the prosecution’s attorneys had a health issue.  The judge, Alison Nathan, said it wasn’t Covid related.  When asked to comment, Maurene Comey, the government’s lead lawyer on the case said “sorry, I can’t comment.”  But the attorney was likely Laura Pomerantz, who has taken the lead in examining the accusers for the government.  Annie Farmer, who says she was first abused by Epstein when she was 16 years old, was set to testify today.

The issue seems to have come as a surprise.  After the court broke, Comey was pushing a plastic trolley loaded with binders and documents into the elevator, one of three such trolleys pushed by two other members of the prosecution.  Evidently, they had been expecting to stay in the courtroom much longer.

Before the abrupt end to the day, the government examined Tracy Chapell, the senior paralegal at Federal Express Corporation.

She verified a series of invoices that showed packages sent to Carolyn, one of the government’s key witnesses, in 2002.  

In her testimony earlier this week, Carolyn told the court how she was 13 years old when she met Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  She said the first time she’d went over to Epstein’s Palm Beach house, he’d sexually abused her.  And Maxwell, Carolyn testified, had told another girl, Virginia Roberts, to “bring [Carolyn] upstairs and show her what to do” before Epstein abused her.

Another time, Carolyn testified, Maxwell came in on Carolyn while she was naked, setting up the massage table for Epstein.  Maxwell groped Carolyn’s breasts, hips, and buttocks, examining her, then told Carolyn that she had “a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”

Carolyn also said that Epstein had sent her Victoria’s Secret lingerie by FedEx to her childhood home in West Palm Beach.  Carolyn had given Maxwell her address, she told the court Tuesday.

This morning, Chapell’s testimony confirmed that Epstein had indeed sent packages to Carolyn’s address in 2002.  Chapell explained that the files were so old they weren’t in FedEx’s digital system anymore, and she’d had to validate their authenticity by comparing them against physical copies stored in FedEx’s archives.

She explained how the invoices were from Jeffrey Epstein’s Federal Express account.  That account was used by others, including Ghislaine Maxwell and one of Epstein’s assistants, Sarah Kellen, to send packages.  

The defense argued that the name actually in the sender field for packages sent to Carolyn wasn’t Maxwell’s.  Instead, the packages sent to Carolyn from Epstein’s account came from either Kellen or Epstein.  

“There is no transaction…where Ghislaine Maxwell is sending a package to someone named Caroline?” asked Maxwell’s defense attorney Christian Everdell.

“Correct,” she replied.

On one invoice of a package sent to Carolyn, entered into the record as gx802, the sender was listed as J. Epstein.

“Well, safe to say that J. Epstein is not Ghislaine Maxwell,” Everdell said.

Everdell also brought up the fact that the government only had Chappel verify three invoices from one account.  The defense had sent Chappel “several hundred,” Chappel said, from two different accounts which she’d been asked only to confirm the authenticity of.

“I went back to the paper copies,” Chappel said, “and verified each individually one by one.”