Lucia Osborne-Crowley has endured threats and sexual harassment to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s chief enabler. Maxwell’s conviction was only the start of the quest for justice, she says
On 9 September 2022, Lucia Osborne-Crowley flew from London to Miami and caught a Greyhound bus north to West Palm Beach. The writer and journalist had arranged to meet Carolyn Andriano, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein andGhislaine Maxwellfrom the age of 14 until she was 17, starting in 2001. Andriano had been a crucial witness in the trial against Maxwell in 2021.
When the two women met, Andriano said she had just been visited by a private investigator – a man in his 60s, who had heard she was talking to someone about a book. In a restaurant that afternoon, Osborne-Crowley was approached by a man in his 60s. What was she writing, he wanted to know. He offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. When the manager asked him to leave, he waited in the car park; Osborne-Crowley had to escape through a staff exit.
She had been following the Epstein case for six years by then and had written a book about the Maxwell trial,The Lasting Harm; this was just a taste of what others had experienced. In November 2025, 28 Epstein survivorsreleased a statementsaying many of them had received death threats. They all asked for police protection.
With Epstein dead and Maxwell in jail, who was paying these men? “It could be any of the people who are not yet facing charges,” says Osborne-Crowley when we meet. “Firstly, they can afford it. The weekend I was in Miami, there was a person following me, a person following a survivor in South Africa who was in my book, and a person following a survivor in the UK. Just so that we all were aware.” Two women withdrew from The Lasting Harm after receiving threats. “Ghislaine used to tell them: ‘If you ever tell anyone what’s going on here, no matter how far into the future, we will find you and we will stop you.’ And in a lot of ways, that promise was kept.”
Osborne-Crowley, 34, is sitting on my sofa after making a fuss of my cat, in a lunch break between filing court reports for the legal news service Law360. She wears black cowboy boots and keeps her scarf on, apologising in a just-detectable Australian accent (she moved to London from Sydney in 2018) when she needs to answer a work email. It’s a busy week, with a class action against Amazon, a landmark disability claim and the latest round in a lawsuit backed by Ronnie O’Sullivan against snooker’s governing body. But it is the constant stream of Epstein revelations to which she returns, specifically their effect on the women she has come to know as friends.
This is her frustration: that the coverage centres Epstein, Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and tries to unpack their psychology and connections, finding it easier to talk about political corruption than sexual abuse. The human collateral gets lost, as does the survivors’ agency. “This would never have happened if these women hadn’t campaigned for this act [the US’s Epstein Files Transparency Act]. We don’t need more articles or books saying: ‘Ooh,Jeffrey Epstein, how do we understand him?’ There are a lot of things that need more scrutiny, but it’s not the yachts and the islands and the opulent wealth. This is a story about grooming and the girls who lived through it.”
As well as Andriano, Osborne-Crowley writes in her book about Jane, who was approached by Maxwell and Epstein at a summer camp in 1994, when she was 14. There is Annie Farmer, who was invited to a weekend retreat for bright students at Epstein’s ranch when she was 16, only to find no other children there. Kate, 17, was promised an introduction to a music producer in London. Liz Stein was a 21-year-old personal shopper in a New York department store. Jess Michaels was a 22-year-old dancer when Epstein raped her after a massage, as long ago as 1991.
Reading their stories, what strikes you is the similarities – the love-bombing, the identification of weakness, the financial help, the gifts of lingerie, the name-dropping – as well as how that playbook was finessed over time. In 2004, when Andriano got too old for Epstein, he asked her to recruit younger friends from school. “Why would I want to be friends with girls younger than me?” she said at Maxwell’s trial. “That would be so uncool.”
Andriano died in a hotel in May 2023, eight months after Osborne-Crowley’s visit. The autopsy recorded an accidental overdose of methadone and fentanyl. It was a shock to those who knew her. “She’d been clean for so long and I spoke to her the day before,” says Osborne-Crowley. “It didn’t feel like she was about to relapse for the first time in 10 years.”
For the Epstein survivors, the recent release of files has been vindicating and re-traumatising, she says: “It’s so complicated. They feel very validated on some levels.” At the same time, central figures were concealed andsurvivors’ names left unredacted.“It’s hard to be shocked at this point, but it does feel really shocking that the Department of Justice would do that. And they are very angry that the cover-up is so brazen. The law says that the only things that can be redacted are the names of the victims. So you’ve got the executive branch breaking the law, and in a way that’s sloppy.”
Epstein abused hundreds of women, most of whom prefer to remain anonymous. Does belonging to that group, “the Epstein survivors”, minimise them – an interchangeable mass of Jane Does, as Epstein saw them?
“It’s both good and misinformed,” Osborne-Crowley says. “Good because they have voices and the attention of politicians. But it is frustrating to be treated as though you have the same opinions. Carolyn was 36; Liz is in her 50s. This operation was very different in the 90s than it was in the mid-2000s, so people’s experiences are different. I’ve seen people latch on to that as ‘infighting’. It’s ridiculous, because there’s no world in which it would make sense for them to agree on everything, given how sophisticated this operation was.”
As a child, Osborne-Crowley was a star gymnast. At 12, she represented Australia at the world championships. She did triple somersaults in the air and held a handstand with one arm. The training was relentless: camps where she was woken for a 5am run by Rihanna’s Pon de Replay on full blast; a diet of raw eggs, protein powder and milk. “I had to be strong and powerful and graceful and light, all at the same time,” she writes in her 2019 memoir, I Choose Elena. “I had to smile.” The judges nicknamed her “the smiling girl”.
She was training for her second world championships, at 15, when she was raped by a stranger in Sydney. A man in his 30s marched her into a McDonald’s toilet and she escaped only by smashing a bottle on the floor and startling him. She didn’t go to the police, but gradually dropped out of gymnastics and began to develop chronic pain symptoms, later diagnosed as endometriosis and Crohn’s disease. Over years of treatment, she surfaced memories of being abused by a gymnastics coach – and realised she wasn’t the only one.
