Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Witnessing the trial of Ghislane Maxwell with Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of The Lasting Harm, spotlighting the survivors who brought her to justice

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

On today’s episode Emma-Louise is joined by a truly incredible woman: Lucia Osborne Crowley.  She’s a Journalist, reporter and the author of three books including ‘The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the trial of Ghislane Maxwell’, which they discuss in length during this episode. It was one of the best books we read this year, FYI. Her prior two books, I Choose Elena (2019) and My Body Keeps Your Secrets (2021) both explored the myriad ways in which trauma affects the body. Prior to becoming a journalist, Lucia trained as a lawyer and worked as a paralegal before jumping over to the reporting side of things as a court reporter. She now balances her brilliant investigative work with a full time job at Law360, a US newswire covering courts and crime across the world. This was one of the most powerful, poignant and heart-wrenching interviews we’ve hosted at Sex Talks. Not least because of how personal Lucia’s reporting is to her own experience of sexual abuse. While Lucia and Emma-Louise delve deep into the Maxwell trial and what it took to cover such a monumental court case, it was Lucia’s very personal description of trauma, of the way it changes a survivor’s relationship to their body, to their sense of self, that proved the most important and affecting part of this conversation.  Someone commented at the end of the event: “the tension of overwhelming compassion and female rage bubbling in the air was palpable.” We think that's a perfect description of this event. Trigger warning: this episode contains mention of sexual abuse; eating disorders and trauma, so please take care when listening. If you’re affected by anything you hear in this episode please seek help via the below: Rape Crisis are open 24/7 for anyone who has experienced something sexual without their consent. Call free on 0808 500 2222 or visit their website here. Samaritans are open 24/7 for anyone who needs to talk. You can visit some Samaritans branches in person. Samaritans also have a Welsh Language Line on 0808 164 0123 (7pm–11pm every day). 116 123 (freephone) [e-mail] Freepost SAMARITANS LETTERS samaritans.org

Hello and welcome to the live version of the Sex Talks podcast, with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more open, honest and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing in changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship for sex tells us so much about who we are. and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'm joined by new guest whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine and do well just that.

From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to attend a live recording of the podcast, click on the Eventbrite link in the show note. On today's episode, I'm joined by a truly incredible woman, Lucia Osborne Crowley. She's a journalist, reporter, and the author of three books, the most recent of which is called The Lasting Harm, witnessing the trial of Galane Maxwell, which we discuss in length during this episode. It was, I should mention, one of the best books I read all year. Her priority books, I Choose Eleanor, and My Body Keeps Your Secrets, both explored the myriad ways in which trauma affects the body,

something she touches on in depth in the most recent book, too. Prior to becoming a journalist, Lucia trained as a lawyer and worked as a paralegal before jumping over to the reporting side of things as a court reporter. She now balances her brilliant investigative work with a full-time job at Law 360. God knows how she does it. A US newsware covering courts and crime across the world. Now, before we get started, I just wanted to say that this was one of the most most powerful, poignant and heart-wrenching interviews I've done at sex talks, not least because

of how personal Lucia's reporting is to her own experience of sexual abuse. Well, of course, we delve deep into the Maxwell trial and what it took to cover such a monumental court case. It was Lucia's very personal description of trauma, of the way it changes a survivor's relationship to their body, to their sense of self. There was, for me, the most important and affecting part of this conversation. Someone messaged me after the event, saying the tension of overwhelming compassion and female rage bubbling in the air was palpable. And I think that sums up the evening perfectly. Right, before we go into the episode, I just want to give a quick trigger warning. The episode contains mention of sexual abuse, eating disorders and trauma. So please take care when listening. If you're

affected by anything you hear in this episode, we've linked to place you can get help in the show notes. All right, I hope you enjoy this episode. So let's get started to here. As a journalist and specifically a court reporter, you've covered numerous trials throughout the speed of your career. Why did you want to cover this trial specifically and not only cover it in your journalism, but write a book about it? So I realised very, very early on that I wanted to write a book about this and I knew it had to be a book and not an article or even a piece of long-form journalism for a couple of reasons. I became very interested in the Jeffrey Epstein case

when the first major investigation was done in 2015. And I've always worked in this space. My journalism has always revolved around trauma, sexual violence, and its aftermath, but also I myself was in quite a similar situation as a child, in a situation of kind of organized child sexual abuse, which was similar in its playbook, certainly not in its... you know, the kind of worldwide nature of it, but similar in its playbook to what Jeffrey and Galane did. And so it immediately was interesting to me that after getting away with this

for so long, an investigative journalist, Julie Kay Brown, had done all this incredible work and people were finally paying attention. And then he got arrested. And I thought, oh, my God, we're going to have a trial. And as someone who's legally trained and covers trials all the time. I know that they're a very important public event, you know, and they give us a chance to reckon with really difficult concepts. And organised child sexual abuse is not something that we really like to reckon with. It's very difficult. And I thought, wow, we're going to have a very public high profile trial about something that a lot of people really don't understand because we don't like talking about it. So I decided immediately that I would find a way to go to that trial.

And then that trial didn't happen because he escaped justice one way or another. And then Gillane was indicted and then she went missing for a year. And so then I thought maybe this trial's not going to happen. And they finally found her. And they set a trial date and I thought, okay, I have to be there. And it's just, as I said, these kind of these really tricky concepts, things like grooming, coercive control, delayed disclosure. You know, there's all these statistics that I know in my own reporting about the fact that people who are abused as children and teenagers will almost never come forward when they are children or teenagers.

In almost 100% of cases, it doesn't happen until well into adulthood. That's what all the neuroscience shows us. That's what all the clinical evidence shows us. And yet we still have this idea that if someone comes forward 10, 20 years later, that that story is not reliable or credible. When in fact, if you look at the science, it makes it more credible, not less. So there are all these things that I really wanted people to understand, and I knew that a jury of 12 people would have to get to grips with this science, and that at the same time the world would be watching. And I also kind of knew what would happen with the headlines,

which was that every day of the trial, I went back to my hotel room every night, and I read the daily news, and it was just headline after headline about the trappings of wealth and power about private yachts and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and nothing about the victims and nothing about the science of, you know, the neuroscience of trauma, nothing about the process of grooming, nothing about child sexual abuse or sexual abuse in general. And I wanted to dedicate a book to kind of exploring those things because I had the sense that they wouldn't be explored in the media. And with that mind, I mean, you, much the book is set in that courtroom in New York, where Maxwell has tried, and where you were there,

every single day, which, you know, at huge cost yourself. I mean, first of all, you're from London. We're living in London now, not necessarily from London. And, you know, you had to go to New York for a month. And you had to get up and get to the court every single morning after 1.30, 2 a.m. And, I mean, I've lived in New York in the winter. And it is not a great place to be. It's cold.

It is so cold, like minus 13 degrees. why was it so important for you to be there physically, to be present in that courtroom as one of only four reporters who are actually allowed to be there physically? Why was that so integral for you? Well, I think once I'd made this decision, and a couple of things, once I'd made this decision to dedicate my kind of investigative capacity to this, you can't really do that by half. You know, there is no way of half doing something like this if you want to do it justice.

that would have been unfair to the survivors and everybody impacted by these kinds of issues. So I knew taking it on that I had to really throw my whole self into it. And also, I just, I knew that with cases like this, it is so important to actually be in the room and be able to watch people as they give evidence. I mean, the four victim witnesses who gave evidence in this trial were unbelievably brave and incredibly resilient. in it, they were treated absolutely terribly by defense lawyers in cross-examination, and yet they sat there for hours and hours and hours and did something that is really, you know, it's unbearable, and I think the least that we can do if we want to write about it

is be in the room with them while they're doing it. And I thought that was really important. And I also, if you're not there, you don't get to see the jury. You don't get to see how the jury is reacting to things like expert evidence, to things like nasty cross-examination. You know, a huge thing I noticed in this trial was that the defence team had completely misread the fact that society had changed, its views about sexual abuse and sexual violence, and the nastiness with which they treated these victims was really jarring to this jury. So these were 12 people who lived in a different world from the world that these defence

lawyers lived in and they took they they put all their eggs in that basket of kind of discrediting and being nasty and cruel to these victims and it didn't work um and that sense is not something i could have gotten if i wasn't there or if i was watching on a live stream because because you don't get to see the jury so yeah i just i thought it's one i mean we just stoked about this before i never do things by half anyway like sometimes to a fault often to a fault actually um and three books in five So this is kind of how I do my life anyway. But I particularly wanted to do it with this because I just don't think as someone who was not victimized

by one of the biggest and longest running sex trafficking rings in global history, I don't think it's fair of me to purport to speak about this unless I was willing to be there and show up and invest in it. And I thought, you know, I just didn't want to write about it unless I could prove that I was willing to do the work. I mean, it adds such incredible texture to the book, the fact that you are just there.

Those kind of little nuances, as you say, you were able to pick up on. And what I was really struck by was how Galane behaved. And at one point, I mean, she brings out her notebook and begins drawing you. And I think you've said an interviewer, you since, that she arrived in quite like a chummy fashion, kind of quite in a jovial way with the prison guards and seemed to be treating a sex trafficking trial more like a cocktail party. What was that like to see in person? Incredibly bizarre. I mean, Gilein's demeanor throughout the almost six weeks of this trial was really shocking to me. And it's quite

hard to shock me because I've been reporting on this stuff for 10 years. But I was, you know, I read everything about her and everything about her family. But it was still something else to see how Blase she was about it. The way she walked into that room every day, she gave off an impression, like we were kind of wasting her time, like she had better things to do. She was very relaxed. She didn't seem like she was taking it very seriously. And yeah, she did things like Jane, the sketch artist for Reuters was in the seat next to me, and we were kind of directly, we were the closest to Galane, apart from her family who got, you know, treated very, very well and got front row seats and didn't have to line up and, you know, all sorts of, they

got treated like celebrities, basically. So apart from her family, we're the closest people to her, and Jane is allowed to stand up because she has to sketch Galane. And Galane is for the first time in her life in a position where she's not in control of what's happening. And, you know, I don't know her. I didn't interview her for this book, and that was a conscious decision. But from what I do know about her, it seems that that's not a situation that she likes very much. So she decided to turn around and start drawing Jane drawing her, which is a very weird power. She just had like a legal pad and a biro. And Jane's like an artist.

She's covered every big trial for the last 40 years. She's 75 years old. She's one of the most interesting people I've ever met in my life. What I can imagine. Oh my God. And so, Gell Elaine starts drawing her and, like, showing her these, like, stick figure sketches of Jane. And I noticed that. And then I was like, this is so bizarre. This dynamic is really, really weird. And then I kind of said to one of my colleagues in the press gallery who was sitting next to me, I said, are you seeing this? And because we were so close to her, she heard me say that.

So she knew that I knew that she was sketching Jane, sketching her. so then she started sketching me watching her sketching Jane sketching her and then she showed it to me and it was so weird like this was deep in the Omicron wave we were all wearing K-95 masks so you could only see her eyes but she would show me and she just had it like she just the reporter next to me he said this afterwards he was like I have never seen someone hold a stare that long she was looking right at me and she just wouldn't and I was like like, I'm not going to back down. Like, I don't want to be the first person to look away. And it went on, like, my colleague afterwards, he was like, that was literally minutes,

but you were just, like, locked in this. And it was very strange. And so things like that, like, she just really, she really wasn't taking it very seriously. I think she very much expected to be acquitted. She wouldn't look any of the victims in the eyes when they were testifying. She was obviously running his defence, which was based on the fact that they were all liars and so yeah the and the story about the cocktail party is because she turned 60 on Christmas day and that was in week four of the trial so we had Christmas day off and then we came back and Galanin had her birthday in prison and she walked in her cashmere and her slacks which she wore to every day of the trial and all her lawyers and the so it was just her lawyers

the prosecution and the four journalists that were allowed in and she walked in all her lawyers and the prison guards were like, happy birthday, gee, happy birthday, G, kissed her on both lips. And she curtsied to us, journalist, as if we were going to wish her a happy birthday. And it really was just like, you are treating me like I'm a guest at your 60th birthday party and not at your own federal sex trafficking trial, like really alarming. And I really do think, like, there were indications that she was starting to set up interviews from immediately after the trial.

she was really sure that she was going to be acquitted. And she was really shocked when she wasn't. So I found that very confronting, especially as someone who's been through this myself. And my perpetrator also had a kind of female enabler as well. And I just felt so strongly for the victims having to watch her behave like that because it is just so upsetting to see someone who has had such an impact on your life, who's left you with lifelong injuries, be that bazae about being finally brought to justice 30 years too late

you said earlier on there that you didn't approach her for an interview at any point for your book and that was intentional why was that well there are a number of reasons I mean I gave her a right of reply obviously but I didn't want to give her space for an interview here firstly because I think she just had plenty of oxygen I mean like she was interviewed by the Daily Mail from a federal prison. I've never seen that before. I don't know if you guys watched it. Google it. It's completely insane. Like, she's on the phone, like, in a federal prison talking about being innocent after she's been convicted and with a pending appeal. Like, it's just, it's crazy. It's just not something you ever see in journalism or law. And I don't

think it's appropriate for someone who's a convicted child sex trafficker to be given a platform like that and so I didn't want to give her any more of a platform but also I'm very conscious even though I had a book it's still finite you know like my first draft of this book was twice as long and in order to keep readers attention and not just have me like ranting on about how much I care about this you know you have to keep it to a certain length and any space I gave to her would by definition be space I was taking away from from victims and I think that's what we don't really realize, you know, as journalists in kind of the daily news media, you know, I have to write headlines and news articles every four stories a day every day as well. And you do forget that

when everyone is doing more and more with less and less, if you give space to perpetrators and their private yachts and their private islands and all of that, the column inches and their modern equivalent are finite. So you are, by definition, taking space away from the voices of the people who were actually impacted by this and I didn't want to take any more space away from them and I thought any interview I did with her would just kind of necessarily be taking away from that

and I didn't think that was appropriate and I want us to go into the stories of the survivors and the kind of specificity of what they experienced during this trial but I just want to touch on one thing before we do because I was struck in reading around the book

that this wasn't an easy book to get published in the first place despite seeming such an important book and a book that tells such vital stories as you've just articulated. And you touch on this briefly in the book, but the courts are pretty hostile to public interest journalism. And I wonder if you could just explain why that is and how that affected your ability to report on this trial and to write this book. Yeah. So this was a huge part of the journey where this book that I kind of naively didn't expect. I was 26 or 27 when I started writing this and I didn't have experience with kind of trying to report on a subject that a lot of very, very powerful

and very wealthy people would very much like you to not report on. And so I went into it thinking that if I could prove, you know, I went to law school, right? And what they teach you is in a defamation case, if you can prove the substantial truth of an allegation made in a news article, then it's legal. You know, it can't be defamation if it's substantially true. That's what the books say. It's not what happens in courts in England and Wales. There is a huge divide between what the law says and what the law does in this jurisdiction. And that's because this jurisdiction is famous for pandering to the wealthy and powerful. You know, it's a huge site for money laundering and things like that.

but it means that these powerful people can bring defamation suits that are totally unmeritorious, but they would still cost me tens, hundreds of thousands of pounds to defend. And I was told by a lawyer who was telling me that I couldn't report things, that I have emails to prove, you know, I have photographs from the island that are dated that I paid to get forensically analyzed, I could prove were from the date that the victim said they were from. And I did, you know, all of this. And I went to the lawyer and I said, here's all my evidence. Like, I can well clear the balance of probabilities, which is the legal standard to prove substantial truth in a defamation case. But he said, no, no, that doesn't work anymore. Even though on the

books, that's how it works. He says, in courts now, defamation judges will expect a reporter to be able to prove every allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. So that's putting a criminal standard into a civil case. And that is hugely significant. And it's not written down anywhere because it's not how the law is supposed to work. But I looked at the cases he was citing to me and he was absolutely right. You know, the case law shows how this jurisdiction has become more and more hostile to public interest journalism. So basically, if I was to be able to report these things that I know. I would have to not only be an investigative journalist while also keeping a full-time job and writing this book, but I would also have to be a public prosecutor because those are

the people who understand reasonable doubt and, you know, prosecuting a case beyond a reasonable doubt, that's another job entirely. And it shouldn't be a journalist job to do that. That is not how it should work and it's not how it's designed to work. But unfortunately, in jurisdictions like this, where there's a lot of people who are very happy to have the wealthy and powerful live here and have their businesses here and use the courts here. It just has become a very bad environment for journalists. So basically, I was told anything that I couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt, can't go in the book. And, you know, I'd just seen a case where the prosecution did manage to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, but barely.

and they had been working on this for five to ten years, just proving this beyond a reasonable doubt, you know, not doing the writing or the reporting. So it's just, it's an impossible standard and it means that so much of what I was told was taken out of this book because, you know, publishers and editors are not, don't have the money to take those risks in this jurisdiction.

And it's just, it's really unfair. And I think the law should change. And with that, so many people who remain totally unaccountable for their participation and facilitation of Epstein's sex trafficking ring, people who walk free now. Absolutely. I mean, this infuriates me because I became very close to lots of the survivors over the five years of this investigation. And they told me about lots of people that they met and were trafficked to during the time that they were trapped by Gillane and Jeffrey. and these are names that you would recognise, but names that you would never have heard in connection to Geoffrey Epstein, ever.

So they are just out there living their lives, having managed to avoid being connected to this, and not only living their lives, but like living the best lives that money can buy because these are very, very wealthy people and they have managed to avoid investigation, indictment, arrest, for lots of different reasons. And that makes me really angry.

And it just shows that there's really a lack of legal and political will to hold people accountable for crimes of this scale when the people involved are so powerful. And it kind of speaks to this nexus between the government and the courts, which is very worrying and very, very problematic. You know, a lot of these people that I'm talking about are or were politicians. And so then the courts, especially in America where judges are appointed by politicians or run for election, as politicians do, becomes very, very, very difficult to convince them

to hold these people accountable. And so far they haven't done it. Gellane is the only person. There have been more victims jailed in their lifetimes in this story than perpetrators. So lots of the victims I know have been jailed for drug use. All these things that we know are connected to childhood trauma. They get thrown in jail. They've been in and out of jail.

Many of them. And between them, they've spent more time in jail than any perpetrator. I mean, it just makes your blood run cold. And I think for me reading this book, what I found it so particularly powerful and why it was kind of just sat in my brain for days, weeks after, is I think what you do so, powerfully, is

showcase how deep an imprint sexual trauma leaves on survivors. It sits with them for the rest of their life. Meanwhile, as you've just said, oftentimes the perpetrators of this violence, maybe they will be held accountable, but most likely not,

depending on money, status, etc. So let's turn now to the survivors whose stories you tell so poignantly in this book you've mentioned there how the kind of the symptoms of childhood sexual trauma

such as drug abuse in the context of a trial context fragmented memory not being able to recall what actually happened to be able to timestamp when it happened

I mean if anyone can recall anything in their past with such accuracy I'd be amazed but what was so jarring reading about how the trial ensued was the way in which the defendants

interrogated these survivors and used the symptoms of their sexual abuse against them. And there was one bit that just, I found particularly harring, one of the defence lawyers levels the accusation towards one of Epstein's victims, Carolyn, and says

you're just a drug addict. Why on earth should we believe you? And just hearing that and imagining the context of that being said to someone who has had the most, you know, unspeakable trauma inflicted upon them. I just, I kind of found it so, so, so hard to read. Why does the judicial system operate in this way? And what do you think needs to be changed in order

for us to better support survivors in this specific type of case? It's such a good question. And there are kind of so many, so many layers to this. And the first thing I'll say is exactly as you said, Emma, we have this situation where we have a really, really strong body. of scientific evidence, neurochemical and neurobiological evidence about the impacts of trauma in childhood or teenagehood and the fact that it leaves you much, much more likely to be affected by drug addiction,

low self-esteem, memory problems, self-harm, things like that. And then what we see is instead of having experts, and I think this is, the prosecution did a really good job of this trial, but I think they could have done this part a bit better, instead of having experts come up and say, if you will get told stories about drug arrests,

and you will get told stories about self-harm, and you'll get, you know, told stories about the difficult lives that these women have had, and that does not mean that this didn't happen, if anything, it is evidence that it did. That is where the science is at now. Unfortunately, we didn't hear that, and so the defence were able to,

exactly as you said, use all of this symptomatology that's very clear if you're an expert in trauma against them. So Carolyn is a really devastating example of this because she told the jury very, very early on because the prosecutors, you know, they expected this. They expected better than I did how nasty the defence team were going to be. So in their direct examination, which comes before cross-examination, they said things. to her like, Carolyn, have you ever taken drugs? And she said very, very honestly, and this happens to a lot of survivors, she said, yes, I started taking drugs when I was being abused by Jeffrey in order to block out the memories. She said that to the jury. She started taking

opiates when she was 14 years old because it helped her deal with what she was going through multiple times a week. So she said it directly. She was able to, you know, and I was so impressed by that, that she was able to kind of directly tell the jury that that's what happened. And even after she'd said that, the defence got up and just said over and over and over again, you know, that she was a drug addict and that she'd been arrested for this and that. And, you know, they got a memory expert to say that drug addict's memories can't be trusted

and, you know, things like that. And then their closing argument, so after all the evidence has been heard, the defence stands up. And they really hone in on Carolyn, which is, which is, again, a awful misjudgment by them because I spoke off the record to a number of members of the jury. And Carolyn was one of the people who really made this a conviction. She really had a huge impact on that jury. The defence totally underestimated her. and they stood up after everything in their closing arguments and they said

beyond reasonable doubt means that you would trust someone with a matter of importance in your own life and they gave some examples like buying a house or something which is already very jarring in this context and then she was sneering when she said that she looked at the jury and she said would you really would you really make a decision of importance in your own life based on the word of Carolyn and it was so nasty and the truth is they would and that's what they decided when they decided to convict Galane

but the defence as I said underestimated her and didn't know that and they thought that it would be effective to attack her credibility in that way and it's just really it's really sad because you know in this case we have victims who are telling us

that they started using drugs in order to cope with trauma and that is so often how it happens and then that is used to try and prove that the trauma itself didn't happen. I mean, that defies logic and the law is supposed to be a logical endeavour. So that's very tricky. And the other thing about this is that in terms of grooming,

all of Geoffrey and Galane's victims were kind of hand-selected based on the environment that they were in. So what happens in these kind of situations is that children are targeted because they have certain needs that are not being met at home, they're not being parented in certain ways, and the perpetrator finds ways to kind of fill those needs in order to gain access to the child and gain the trust of the child's parents or whoever is around them. So whether it's financial help, Jeffrey used to help their parents pay rent,

whether it's promising to make them famous, you know, which would help their families get out of poverty or whether it was just giving them something to do in the afternoons, you know, so that they were being looked after by some people other than their parents who for all sorts of different reasons were unable to parent them. So Carolyn's was in this situation where she had lots of drug addiction in her family and she was already exposed to that in childhood. And that is why she was targeted. So there's just so many levels on which using this against her is so unfair

because Galane and Jeffrey already knew this about her and that's why they chose her. and then she herself fell into using drugs because of what they were doing to her. So then 30 years later, to turn around and try and use it against her is just really unfair. And again, even if you didn't feel emotional about it, which I obviously do, because I have personal experience with it, you know, the law is meant to be a rational thing and those premises are not rational. They don't lead to that conclusion in the way that the law is supposed to work. So I really think that, to actually answer your question, sorry, in terms of how things should change,

I really think that there should be stricter rules around cross-examination. We are all obviously well acquainted with the idea of a fair trial and that everyone deserves the defence and I absolutely believe that as a lawyer myself. But that doesn't mean that you should be able to ask questions that have no foundation in science and that are intended to undermine someone in a way that is not rational or law. And for a profession that prides itself on rationality, I think there really should be rules to stop people from asking these kinds of questions in cross-examination, or at least if we can't do that, then at least allow judges to instruct a jury when something has been

said in cross-examination that is unscientific. So that the jury knows, you know, it's like that thing on Twitter, you know, which is the worst placed on earth now, but like it has that thing where someone posts something that's completely untrue and they can add some context that fact checks it. It's like that. So if someone says, oh, you're just a drug addict, so why can't you trust you? Why should we trust you? A judge should be able to turn to the jury and say, here's the science on this, you know. And I think that would be a really easy change to make. And I don't understand why it's still allowed to happen. You've touched there on some of the kind of symptoms that crop up amongst survivors and have such a

devastating impact on someone's life. And really interesting to hear there about how those very kind of vulnerabilities were also pride upon by Geoffrey and Galane. And I want to go a little bit deeper on that, the point of how the trauma, I guess, manifests amongst survivors. So touch there on drug addiction, kind of memory loss. How does trauma manifest kind of physiologically amongst survivors, specifically of sexual trauma. So this is such a great question, and I'm going to refer to a phrase that you used earlier, which I really love. You talked about the kind of imprint of this on someone's life,

and that just made me think of something that I haven't thought about in years. When I was writing my first book, I was 25, and I came across this piece of writing, and you're going to have to, excuse me, I've been in and out of hospital all summer, and I'm not very well, and I can't remember who said this. So it's like one of those things where you're like, I heard this thing on a podcast, and then you can't remember. what it is. So this is very unhelpful. We can reference it post, add it in the podcast, tag it to the event. It's in the bibliography of my first book. So it's like, you know, I can find

it, but it's just not in my head right now. So there is a very famous trauma scientist who in the 70s or early 80s came up with a description of a traumatic event and the kind of the way that a memory of a traumatic event is different from a banal memory or an everyday memory. And he calls it a death imprint. So, you know, you use the phrase, you know, imprint on someone's life. And that, you know, made me think about this phrase. And that really helped me to understand, firstly, how it had impacted my life and how the brain processes traumatic memories differently.

So basically, what we know is that when something happens to you that your brain perceives is life-threatening. So that is completely different depending on who you are in the circumstances that you're in when you're a child. It's very, very different to when you're an adult. But for example, if you have your phone taken away from you or your Pager, as it was at the time, and get flown to an island on the Caribbean and you don't have any money and you're a teenager and you don't have any way to contact your parents, and then you realize that the situation you're in is about to turn abusive. The moment that you realize that is this idea of a death imprint. It's the concept that you're in a life-threatening situation that you're not

in control of and that you don't have agency over. And that is when, so basically the brain, we feel, we experience memories or narrative events in our lives in the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that's responsible for fear and emotion. But then once an event is over, the amygdala sends it to the brainstem, where it gets stored as a long-term memory. And the brain stem is what tells stories. So we preserve memories as stories with the beginning, a middle, and an end. That's why as human beings, we're kind of always drawn to stories as a form,

because it's how our brain works. But if a memory is traumatic and you have this overpowering fear, for your life or the control of your life. So it doesn't have to be a violent encounter. This is really important. If you have that moment, basically the amygdala gets stuck in survival mode or fight or fight or fight, fight, freeze or fawn mode. And that memory becomes imprinted in the amygdala and it does not get sent to the brainstem. It does not get processed in a narrative way in the same way that our everyday memories do.

So it stays in the amygdala for life and less than until you can access the very expensive therapy that helps you process a very traumatic memory. And what that means is that it can't be recalled properly. It cannot be recalled in a narrative way because it just hasn't gone through that mental process. And that means that the amygdala will bring it back up. every single time you're reminded of that memory in any sensory way. So this is not narrative. This is not cognitive. This is not, oh, I'm seeing a wall and there was a wall when I was on Jeffrey's Island. It is not at the level of thinking. It's completely subconscious. It acts on a subconscious level. It smells and sounds and sites that you don't necessarily remember

hearing, seeing or smelling, but it will remind you of what happened. And what that does is it means that you live in a chronic state of fight or flight. So in a non-traumatized nervous system, we go through different phases. So if you have a big presentation at work or something, your system will give you a boost of adrenaline. You'll have a version of fight or flight mode, a very kind of low version of it. And then you can come out of it when it's over. And that's kind of how a healthy nervous system works. But when you get stuck in a chronic fight or flight response, which is when the brain is giving you reminders of something that you don't cognitively remember, then that puts an enormous amount of physical stress on your body.

So not only is it terrifying, but what happens when you're in survival mode is that all of your quote-unquote non-vital organs shut down. So when you're in survival mode, your digestive system, it stops. Which is really, there's a huge connection between trauma and digestive diseases. And this is why. It's because all the blood from your brain is sent to your legs to run away or to freeze or whatever it is. And things like digest it. When you hear someone call that non-vital, it's like quite alarming. But that's what the brain thinks. It thinks, you know, if I need to run and I don't need to digest anything, you know, if these are my last 20 seconds on earth, like it doesn't matter if I digest anything or not. And with the body coming in and out

of that frozen state. It starts to break down the organs and the systems that regulate the organs. So it's a lifelong dysregulation that you end up with from having these memories that are not processed in the way that our ordinary memories are. And we live in a world. And this is why this problem is specific to sexual violence and any stigmatized trauma is that we live in a world that has taught us that we shouldn't tell anyone when these things happen to us. So what that means is that we can't access help until much, much later in life. And that means the longer you spend in a chronic fight or flight response, the more damage is done to your body.

And if we lived in a world where it was okay to go to parents and say, this person is sexually abusing me and I know he's helping our family, but, you know, he's hurting me, then people could intervene at a point where it is much easier to reverse the damage that's done to the body. But unfortunately, shame and stigma mean that we have to kind of live in silence. And what we don't realize, we think we're doing that to protect ourselves, right? Because we see the news. We see how victims are treated. We see how cruel people are to victims who come forward. So we think we're protecting ourselves by saying nothing. But we're

not protecting our bodies. Our bodies are being kind of broken down and dysregulated the longer we don't speak about it. And that's why it's so important to kind of understand these issues and and create safe spaces where people can talk about them because it gives every person, this happens to an opportunity to intervene at a point where that damage can be reversed and doesn't have to necessarily be a lifelong imprint. I mean, thank you so much for explaining that so articulately

and I'm sure that is a huge amount to digest because I think it just feels so goddamn unfair fundamentally, so unfair that anyone should have to go through something like sexual trauma and then not be able to receive the help and the care that they need to then be able to process that and kind of, you know, and begin to process that. And I know you've written before that you suffer with three chronic health conditions now. Four actually, as of this month. Oh, God. I'm so sorry. Four chronic health collecting them at this point. Chronic health conditions. And ones that you've written

And to your point, as you've just suggested, there could have been prevented, had you been given proper support earlier? And you've written really beautifully before, or very powerfully, about how doctors continually dismissed your pain and dismissed your kind of, I guess, cries for help at a younger age. And I just wonder, I believe it was 17 when you first experienced extreme abdominal pain or went to the hospital for it. and that pain was dismissed by doctors. It wasn't taken seriously. Knowing what you know now and having gone through everything you've gone through, what do you wish had happened at that point? What should doctors have done? How should they have responded? That's such a good question. Two things. Firstly, you know, it is just, it really brings home how unfair this is when you compare it to other crimes, right? So when I was growing up, I was in an institutional gymnastics setting.

was training every single day with a very, very dangerous person. And if there was, you know, a driver who was, you know, intentionally driving into my car, say I was old enough to drive, I wasn't, I was nine, but say I was old enough to drive. And every single day of the week, for years and years and years, someone intentionally crashed into my car, I would tell someone about that. You know, I would, I would be able to say, this guy's crashing into my car every day and tell the police and tell doctors about my injuries from those car accidents but that is what was happening to me

but I couldn't tell anybody about it because we just treat it so differently we treat this crime so differently as a society so that's one thing that I really really wish we're different in a kind of bigger picture way but the question about doctors is a really good one and I've spoken to doctors all across this country

and all across Australia in response to my first two books because doctors and medical schools have come to me and said, what do we do here? And what I really wish had happened when I first became involved in the medical system when I first got sick was when you look back now on my, I did a whole kind of legal process where you can get access to every single one of your hospital admission records.

And it is, it just paints a really textbook picture of someone who is living with post-traumatic stress disorder. and the pain and physical symptoms that come from that. And I just wish that we could have trauma-informed emergency doctors who could look at a patient presenting in that way and not dismiss them and not say this is a mystery and I don't understand because I can't see it on a scan. They could look at the set of symptoms and say,

it is possible that this person is having a trauma response and it just takes one person to ask that question and then that person, that patient could have access to help and the reason I make these two points in one answer is because the second point is not always enough because as I write in my first book there was one doctor who did this for me when I was 18 I was on loads of morphine I just had a surgery

no one could figure out what was wrong with me and he came into a room and he said, I think you have Crohn's disease and there's a very, very, very high correlation between Crohn's disease and sexual abuse in childhood. And he said, he just asked me straight out, did that ever happen to you? And I lied. I just said no, because I was a teenager

and I was scared of what would happen, and I was terrified of naming this person. And it was the middle of night, and I was afraid. And I lied. So, you know, the two things have to happen at once, right? Because there was one person who was, willing to ask the right question. But I still lived in a world where I was too afraid to answer it honestly. And if I had answered it honestly that night, the whole course of my life could have

been different. So it's not that there aren't doctors out there. It's also the combination of having to change the culture that we live in so that I wasn't lying there thinking not about myself or about my own protection or my own safety or my own health. I was thinking about everybody else. I was thinking about how everyone else would feel if I spoke up about this person. I was thinking about how many people would feel guilty, who would get in trouble, whether I would get in trouble, whether I would be believed, you know, all the things that would count against me. That's what I was thinking about. Even when totally off my face on morphine, all those things was just coming into my head being like, you can't say this. Even though it could lead to

life-altering treatment, I still couldn't do it. So both things have to happen. And there are a lot of doctors now who are very committed to being more trauma-informed, and that is really pleasing, but we also have to live in a world where those doctors ask the question and people feel safe enough to answer it. Gosh, can I ask you to it? How does the trauma that you've described just there, and that fear that's come with that, and the pain, the fear of disbelief, and all suddenly all these people who are suddenly involved, I guess, in that kind of pain process and what we're going through. What does that trauma do to a survivor's relationship with themselves, with their own body? What was your relationship like to yourself and to your body

throughout this process? This is a really good question and it's something that one of the victims I spoke to for this book answers really, really beautifully in the book. And so I use it as a refrain even before we meet her in the book. And basically, so I'll answer using her story first, basically we were doing an interview about her encounter with Jeffrey Epstein and how it had been set up and how she had been groomed to kind of go along to this appointment that turned into a sexual assault. And she said she walked out of the room and she said all she could think to herself, there was just this loop in her head that said, I will never trust myself again. And it's really interesting.

You know, I'd already written two books about this. I've been writing about this for almost 10 years at that point. But it wasn't until she said it to me that I realized that that's exactly how I started thinking when I was nine years old. You know, that's what it leaves you feeling because it is so confusing to be victimized in this way. And what it does is it totally undermines your agency and it totally fractures your sense of sense. and because the world blames victims, because we are all, even as children, we already absorb the way that victims are blamed for these kind of crimes rather than perpetrators. You know, we already know this. I'd seen it in the movies. I'd seen it on TV. I heard it on

the news. I knew instinctively that I would be blamed or that I would be disbelieved or that I would get in trouble, which is how I thought about it. That's a very childlike way of thinking about it. And so you kind of, you're in this situation where you think something bad is happening, but you also think that if you speak up about it, that you'll get in trouble. So you start to mistrust your own experience of the world. And also when you're being, when you're in a situation where there's a serious abuse of power, you're being told by the perpetrator that they're not hurting you and they're actually helping you. That's often part of the kind of playbook. So then when you're young and you have adults in a position of authority or in a position

of power over you telling you what the world is, that is what you take to be true because that's how we operate. And then it really fractures your ability to have your own sense of the world and to develop a picture of the world that is from your own perspective. Instead, you have to adopt a picture of the world from a perpetrator's perspective. And that's why it is so hard to come forward. So it really does, and I, you know, I really didn't realize this until Jess said to me, you know, I just remember thinking, I will never trust myself again, because she immediately blamed herself for what had happened. She immediately thought, why didn't I know this was going to happen? Why didn't I see the signs? When she's, you know, we were talking about a very experienced

criminal who knows exactly how to make sure that people don't see this coming. And that, what she's, she's taught me a lot about that sense of, you know, when you lose connection with your own instinct, really. And you start to prioritize other people's views of the world over your own. And that leads into a lot of the symptomatology that we're talking about in terms of PTSD and adulthood. It really comes from not being able to trust yourself, trust your instincts, and having to rely on getting a sense of the truth of the world from other people. And that leaves you open to further abuses of power. I'm so sorry that you had to go through this.

And for all the women and all the women who weren't represented in the trial, of which there were many, as you know in the book, and as I'm sure every single person sitting in this room just feels that kind of bubbling rage of the injustice of it all that anyone should ever have to go through any of this and live with that lifelong imprint, as we've discussed. And you mentioned that idea here that you, that kind of that fracturing, that learning to kind of mistrust yourself that can happen at that young age.

And so I just want to kind of round up by asking, how do you feel talking about it now and how have you felt in the process of writing this book? Because you, you know, incredibly talented journalist, reporter, but this is an incredibly personal investigation. and one that I know has taken a toll on you personally. So how does it feel talking about it now? It feels very complicated, and I think that's because for my first two books, I had this sense.

Firstly, they kind of happened by accident. I didn't mean to write a book about what had happened to me. I wrote a long-form article that I was going to publish under a pseudonym, and then at the very last minute, I realized that I'd received all of this medical help once I'd made a disclosure for the first time, and what I wanted through this article was for other people to know that that help is out there and to know that they shouldn't be ashamed

and I realized it was like the middle of the night and I realized that if I published it under a pseudonym I'm giving kind of conflicting ideas there right I'm kind of being a hypocrite if I'm saying I'm no longer ashamed of this but I'm not willing to tell you who I am so at the last minute I wrote to them and I said put my name on it, publish it now

before I changed my mind and that article got picked up by a publisher and turned into a book, and then the second book grew from there. So it was never intentional. And I think part of that meant that I wasn't being intentional about it. So I was writing about these experiences, and I knew that writing and talking about them was important to me, but I didn't know enough about how damaging that can be for every survivor who speaks up.

And I just thought, I have to be bulletproof. I have to be the person who was able to do this and not be affected. by it, which is actually another symptom of trauma is being kind of a perfectionist and being able to be like, look what I can handle. You know, I can handle it because a lot of trauma survivors, especially in a family environment, you're often the one who is always fine. You're the one who's never a problem, can handle anything, can tolerate anything, and just, you know, keeps going. And I felt like I had to be that for the first few years of, you know, and for the first two books. And then with this book, it affected me so deeply that I had a very, very, very hard time

at one point with it. And I got some extra professional help. And I started to realize that I really had to interrogate my relationship with disclosure and the kind of retraummatization that I'm putting myself through in order to prove to people that I can handle trauma. You know, it's a very, It's a very strange thing, and I think I hadn't been intentional enough about it. And then I did a lot, a lot of work on that. And now I have a very different perspective. So, you know, when I think about who I was, when I wrote the first few books, I really had no, I had no concern for myself at all.

I really just wanted to serve, you know, which is another trauma symptom. I wanted to just say to the world, like, let me be useful to you. Let me show you that I can be useful to you because then I'll be worth something. And I didn't realize that I was kind of playing out one of my trauma symptoms in my writing. And in this book, I was forced to reckon with that because it did overwhelm me. You know, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. And it got to a point where I really, really needed help. And a lot of professionals helped me to understand that pushing through in terms of disclosure

is not necessarily a good thing. and that part of learning to deal with trauma is learning to look after myself and not have this idea that I only have worth in this world if I can be useful to people. And that really changed my perspective because it kind of split me into a version of me before I was able to disclose all of this while it was happening. A version of me after disclosure where I was able to talk about it but I wasn't really able to witness myself in that role. And then there's a version of me now who is able to kind of understand

that if I want to be useful, I have to actually be present and I have to be here and I have to be well. And that means, you know, being really conscious of how retramatizing it is to make these disclosures and write books about it. So from here on out, you know, all the next books that I'll write about this, I will take a very different approach and I think that's something I get a lot of young writers asking me about this and that's something that I always tell people is that the work will benefit if you look after yourself and other people will benefit if you look after

yourself because nobody wins if you sacrifice yourself to the altar of kind of being useful that you know that's a lesson that was that I was taught very early and it's hard to shake that I'm working on it so you know I'm getting there please look after yourself because you give so much the world and your value is just tremendous and your writing is so powerful as anyone who's read this book or is about to read it because you're all going to buy it I know we'll definitely agree so again just thank you so much of your work what do you want people to take away from this what is one thing that you would love every reader to finish that book and to be left thinking about. It's another really good question. It's really

difficult because this has been such a big part of my adult life, you know, the last, from kind of 26 to 31. It's really, it's been so overwhelming. And so I never really thought about kind of one thing that I wanted people to take away from it. But I have had a chance to think about it now that it's in the world. And I've been touring this book for three months now. And really, I think it comes down to this. You know, this book is about systemic corruption. It's about abuse at an unfathomable scale. It's about one of the worst criminal rings in history and, you know, one of the worst examples of impunity in history. That's very hard to wrap out heads around. It's very hard to get up and say, what do I do about this? So instead of trying and feeling kind of despondent about

that what I would really like for people after reading this is to feel connected to the victims who are generous enough to speak to me for this book, feel their humanity and their lives and see the moments in their lives where interventions were made that made things easier and understand that we can, we can't, you know, we can't change whether presidents or former presidents involve themselves in sex trafficking rings on our own. But what we can do is wake up every day and be someone who is willing to have difficult conversations with people around us and who is willing to be a safe person to receive disclosures. It doesn't mean you have to make disclosures yourself every day. It doesn't mean you have to get up and start talking overnight

about everything that's ever happened. It just means that when you start to get hints from people, because another part of the science is that trauma victims will test the ground in terms of disclosing, they will start with very vague comments and then if someone is not responsive, they'll shut down. But if someone is open to that conversation, then they will be able to keep going and they will slowly be able to tell a story. And telling a story to one person could completely change the course of that person's life because of everything we've said about, you know, the way that this affects us when we are forced to keep it to ourselves. So I think that one thing you can learn is that we can all choose to be that person. You know, it's something that

everyone has the power to do. Every interaction you have, you can say, is this person trying to tell me something? And even if I'm stressed or tired or whatever, can I just take a second and choose not to shut it down? Because we do, we have a completely understandable cue and instinct to shut it down. But we don't have to give into that instinct. It's just about being mindful of it and thinking what can I do right now to stop and be in this moment and make sure that I don't stop this story halfway through because stopping a story halfway through is what keeps people from getting help. So I just, that's what I want.

I learned a lot about that from these survivors much more than I had on my own journey before I met them. And I think that they have so much wisdom that they can give to readers and that's one thing that I hope people will learn from them. I love that. And what a wonderful way to end. Such an incredible conversation. Lucia, thank you so much for writing this incredibly important book

and for speaking so candidly and informatively, God, I have learned so much in the course of this conversation. Thank you for all that you do. And thank you for continuing to shout out loudly the names of the survivors and tell their stories and give voice to women who might not otherwise have their stories told. and they are goddamn important stories. So thank you so much.

And thank you for being here this evening. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Emma, of having me. Thank you, Sex Talks. I'm really, this was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton.

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