Ghislaine Maxwell trial: 'I wanted to see my tormentor': accuser Sarah Ransome on the socialite's trial

Sarah Ransome, an alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, arrives to the courthouse for the start of Maxwell's trial in New York, Monday, Nov. 29, 2021. Photo / AP

Sitting in the public gallery of the Thurgood Marshall federal courthouse in New York last week, Sarah Ransome reflected on just how far Ghislaine Maxwell had fallen.

She had first met Maxwell back in 2006 on Jeffrey Epstein's private island in the Caribbean. The British socialite skipped off a helicopter in dark glasses carrying her little Yorkie "Max". "We were told to line up and greet her, as if she was a celebrity," Ms Ransome recalls. "I'll never forget standing there as she looked me up and down."

Ransome is no old friend of Maxwell's, but one of her alleged victims.

For nearly a year aged 22, Ransome says she was subjected to regular mental and physical abuse by the couple, including "starvation, body shaming, and rape".

Ransome has travelled from her home in England to New York to face Maxwell, not as one of the four accusers in her US trial but as one of the many other women alleging she groomed them for Epstein.

"I wanted to see her, my tormentor," she told The Sunday Telegraph after Maxwell's lawyers rested their case on Friday. "And I wanted her to look at me."

Ransome, now 37, was born in Johannesburg to British parents. Her maternal grandfather was Lord Gordon Macpherson, the second baron of Drumochter, who moved in the same circles as Ghislaine's own father, Robert Maxwell.

Her parents, who worked in advertising and lived under apartheid, argued endlessly until they eventually split and her father left. Ransome, who has a South African accent with a British inflection, remembers her life taking a dark turn after she was raped aged 11 by one of her mother's boyfriends.

The family swapped Johannesburg for the Scottish Highlands, where she attended Grantown grammar school before taking up place at Edinburgh University. Not long after she dropped out - no longer able to afford the fees and wanting to escape an abusive relationship.

She picked up and left for New York, in the hope of landing a job in fashion.

It was at a nightclub several weeks later she met a young woman, "Natalya". The woman walked over and the pair began chatting. "She seemed so nice. I didn't know anyone in the city, and here was the girl who I thought I could be my friend, someone to have coffee and go to the theatre with."

Natalya offered to introduce her to a rich financier friend by the name Epstein, telling her: "He helps a lot of young girls achieve their dreams."

"She preyed on my vulnerability," Ms Ransome says. "She said Epstein could pay for me to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology, and to help me get a visa to stay in the US."

The woman, who she believes was coached by Maxwell, then invited her to visit Epstein's US Virgin Islands home. "What 22-year-old would say no?" she says.

Once there, she quickly realised it was not quite as it seemed. The island was full of young-seeming women giving Epstein massages.

Everything changed when Ms Maxwell arrived four days in.

Sarah Ransome, an alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell is accused of acting as Epstein's chief enabler, recruiting and grooming young girls for him to abuse. Photo / AP

"She looked at me and she walked over and she said, 'Jeffrey wants you.' And I completely froze...she grabbed my arm and marched me into Jeffrey's room, where I was then raped," she remembers. "When I walked out of the room she smiled with these black eyes like a great white shark. She enjoyed knowing what had happened to me."

Ms Ransome then recalls Maxwell taking naked pictures of her by the pool. "I don't know what she did with them," she says. The Manhattan court heard last week that Maxwell kept photographs of naked women and girls on the desk of her office at Epstein's Palm Beach home.

Ransome would be raped up to three times a day while on the island. She tried to escape on several occasions, but says she was stopped by Maxwell.

While she was on Epstein's island, which he nicknamed Little Saint Jeff, high-profile friends of the financier's would visit. She remembers Sergey Brin, the Google founder, showing up at dinner with his then-fiancée, 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki. "Ghislaine had given strict instructions ahead of the gathering. 'You are not to talk to the guests'," she says.

She wondered what they must have made of the situation - Jeffrey and Ghislaine, a seemingly respectable couple, surrounded by these beautiful, silent young women. "How I wish they would have noticed us," she says. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Brin and Wojcicki.

When they returned to New York, Ransome moved into an apartment owned by the Epstein family. Alone, terrified of her abusers and still clinging to the promise of a place at the fashion school, she stayed.

The pair controlled every aspect of her life, Ransome says - her homes, food, medical treatment, her physical appearances.

She recalls being held to an impossible standard by Maxwell, who called "heifer" and "piglet" and scolded her for her weight. Jeffrey liked skinny women, Maxwell would tell her.

Ransome weighed a healthy 10st 5lb for her 5'9 frame, but she says Maxwell wanted her to reach the oddly precise 114 pounds. "It looks like we'll need to cut down on your cucumbers," the heiress is alleged to have said to her.

Why did she not leave, or call the police? "I'd like to make it very clear. This was not transactional. Rape is rape," she says. "It doesn't matter if I was living in Jeffrey's apartment at the time."

After one particularly brutal series of assaults by Epstein in May 2007, Ransome escaped back to England. So afraid of Epstein and the powerful friends he boasted of, she moved nearly 50 times and changed her appearance almost as frequently.

Ghislaine Maxwell, left, sits at the defense table before the start of her trial with defense attorney Bobbi Sternheim, Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021, in New York. Photo / AP

A decade later, she sued Maxwell and settled out of court. She has now written a memoir, Silenced No More: Surviving My Journey To Hell And Back, which was released this week in the UK. Writing has become a "catharsis", she says.

Ransome says "it makes her sick" to see Maxwell's defence team portraying her as a government scapegoat for Epstein's crimes.

"There wouldn't have been a pyramid of sexual abuse without Ghislaine. She was the acceptable face of what was happening. She recruited and trained girls for abuse. She normalised what was happening," she says.

Ransome, who has been following Ms Maxwell's criminal trial closely the past three weeks, has recognised similarities in her experience with the accounts of the accusers in the case. "I realised listening to all this that there was a pattern of grooming - the gifts, the philanthropy, the promises to pay for education," she says. Each of the women were from broken homes. "With Epstein and Ghislaine these girls were like a seal bleeding in the water," she says.

She says she is surprised, and hurt, not to have been included in the prosecution's case. Four accusers are named in the government's 2020 indictment. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

"I think it was because of the timeframe, and the statute of limitations. There are so many laws protecting abusers," Ransome says.

"The message I'm getting as a survivor who was raped every day by Epstein is that I don't matter. It makes me so angry that my voice is not heard, because I have a lot to say."