A Forensic Breakdown of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Testimony
Two top officials dismissed the Epstein survivors without reading their statements, but the DOJ wanted to hear from Ghislaine Maxwell. With Dr. Dobson, I unpack what she dodged and why it matters.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
This week, the Justice Department basically spat in the faces of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors. First, the FBI’s Kash Patel admitted he didn’t even read the Epstein victims’ depositions before deciding they weren’t credible.
“There is no credible information — none — that he trafficked to other individuals,” he told the House Judiciary Committee. “And the information we have is limited.”
Limited? There are depositions, testimony, and interviews from the victims. Many are available in the FBI vault, like Virginia Giuffre’s, which name the men they were trafficked to, although most names have been redacted. And yet Patel decided that their testimonies and other witness-interview records (302s) were not credible without even reading them himself. This is the same man who vowed in podcast interviews that he would go after the pedophiles once he was in charge.
And then there was Alex Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney in Florida who crafted Epstein’s sweetheart non-prosecution agreement in 2008. He also admitted to lawmakers that he never read the victims’ statements himself. This, despite the fact that lead prosecutor Marie Villafaña worked tirelessly to gather accounts from teenage girls—girls Epstein had manipulated into believing they were “teenage prostitutes.” He even supplied them with his lawyers, convincing them they were in the wrong because they brought their friends to him for $300 in a pyramid scheme he ran out of an outer Palm Beach high school.
Villafaña put together a 53-page memo recommending 35 charges, including trafficking of minors as young as 14, sexual abuse, recruitment by paying “bounties,” and transport of minors for sexual activities. I know how hard she worked on this case because I interviewed Jane Doe 1, Courtney Wild, for Broken: Jeffrey Epstein who was willing to testify after Villafaña gained her trust, and I interviewed Villafaña’s colleagues about the case. This was a tireless prosecutor with a bulletproof case.
At yet, Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost told reporters after the closed-door hearing, that Acosta to them, “essentially said he didn’t have faith in the victims, their stories and their ability to tell their own story and their own testimony,”
Instead, Acosta was willing to drive from his office in Miami to an airport hotel in West Palm Beach to sit down with Epstein’s lawyers, Jay Lefkowitz and Ken Starr, and hammer out a deal. A U.S. Attorney never meets directly with defense attorneys like that.
Even more damning, Acosta made it clear he “holds no remorse and does not feel, even in hindsight, that Jeffrey Epstein received a sweetheart deal,” according to Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), who briefed Capitol Hill reporters.
Here are two top law enforcement officials involved in the Epstein case admitting they didn’t even care to read the victims’ testimonies before deciding they weren’t credible. They don’t want to hear their stories. This was never about them. What a dark day for justice. If the credibility burden is always on victims, how can they ever be believed when leaders in this country literally plug their ears and avert their eyes?
Meanwhile, in the YouTube video above, you’ll see the dissection of someone the Justice Department under President Trump did care to hear from—Ghislaine Maxwell. A federal jury convicted her on five of six federal charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. She was sentenced to decades in prison, yet she never once took the stand in her own defense. The survivors never heard her voice in court. But Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche did. Over two days, he sat down with Maxwell, a woman already charged with perjury, for six hours of deposition tapes. She was offered immunity in exchange for answering questions, and days later she was quietly moved to a lower-security prison.
It took time for me and my team to condense those hours of testimony and select the clips that best reveal Maxwell for who she is: a manipulator who survivors say groomed and abused them.
In the video above, and on The Tara Palmeri Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, we’ve pulled together the most telling moments. We bring in Dr. Leslie Dobson, a forensic psychologist who has interrogated criminals and trained lawyers in some of the highest-profile cases, to help decode Maxwell’s performance. She points out what most of us might miss: the rehearsed lines, the slips, the silences. Together we unpack what’s said, what’s avoided, and who Maxwell may be protecting, and why it matters to survivors and to the historical record.
If you want to understand Maxwell beyond the headlines and legal jargon, watch the video. It’s sharp, it cuts through the fog, and I’d love to hear what stands out to you. I’ll be reading your thoughts in the comments and in the next edition of The Red Letter.
Thank you Tara for keeping this front and center. The work you do is incredible and you have americas support. Mostly
One main reason they're not releasing the Epstein files is because the Patron Saint of Epstein massage survivors, Virginia Giuffre, was established by the government to be totally untrustworthy. This is why the government preferred to instead call to the stand a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices in her head and admitted to being a perjurer. If such a dubious witness was considered more credible than Giuffre, that kind of says it all.
Giuffre was a druggie, a Qanoner, an anti-vaxxer and she almost certainly sex trafficked far more underage girls to Epstein than Maxwell was ever dubiously accused of. Please stop giving cover to this fantasist who extorted millions based on false claims.