Jeffrey Epstein famously kept a novel by the Marquis de Sade entitled Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue on his desk in his Manhattan townhouse. There has been conjecture as to whether Ghislaine Maxwell read Justine and it’s fascinating to speculate how a literary fetish may have informed their alleged sex trafficking. Maxwell’s fate certainly resembles de Sade’s in her failed efforts to evade the law, although it’s questionable if she too will end her days behind bars.

     The main motive behind Maxwell’s purported actions appears to have been what the New Yorker called ‘brutal self-interest’ to the tune of thirty million dollars transferred to her account by Epstein. But it wasn’t the only one. Maxwell reportedly revelled in being the ultimate party hostess, passing round girls like post-prandial mints. She may well have been regarded by the politicians, royalty and celebrities who joined Epstein’s carnal caravan as an honorary man, but the foot-massaging photographs reveal her as little more than a lackey to Epstein’s desires.

     In the early nineties, when Maxwell and Epstein first became intertwined, there was a revival of interest in the Marquis de Sade. A boyfriend gave me a copy of de Sade’s Complete Works in a self-avowed effort to corrupt me. In a nightclub, he asked me to pick out a challenge for him. I was to select a woman and he’d attempt to get her phone number while I watched on. I hated such games, manipulation and deceit, but the point of this anecdote is that de Sade acolytes are inveterate players. As prosecutors in Ghislaine’s Maxwell’s trial contended, she followed a ‘playbook of abuse’.

     One of the testifiers ‘Jane’ described how she was approached, aged fourteen, by Maxwell at an Arts Youth Camp. After they’d started chatting, Epstein joined them. The intimation was that Epstein and Maxwell identified their prey from afar and, infused with the thrill of the hunt, colluded that Maxwell would be the first to move in.

     It’s worth examining Justine in fine detail in order to shed light on its potential influence on Epstein and Maxwell. Justine is the virtuous twelve-year-old ingenue who sets out on a journey only to be sexually abused and exploited by everyone she meets. The repeated cycle of abuse juxtaposed with Justine’s unfailing faith in God lends a highly ironic and blackly comic flavour to the novel. Interestingly, her tormentors’ arguments in favour of amorality are persuasive, even if de Sade himself suggests they are sophisms. ‘In a century that is thoroughly corrupt, the safest course is to do as others do,’ is a quote Maxwell might have used in her defence.

     The hook by which Jane was apparently snared was the promise of an art scholarship. Epstein, however, was far from a philanthropist. As the landlady in Justine succinctly puts it, ‘Do you imagine that men are so stupid as to give charity to a young girl like you without demanding interest for their investment?’ Epstein and Maxwell ensured respectability by inviting Jane’s mother to tea and, while there has been criticism in the press for the parents letting their daughters spend so much time at Epstein’s mansions, I have sympathy for those buying into the dream of the selfless benefactor. When you are in financial trouble you’ll believe in anything.

     Looking back, Epstein’s behaviour was part of the inequitable times. Men were the all-powerful oligarchs and the world was loaded against women. It was difficult for an ambitious single female to make it, even for Maxwell with all her social contacts. It’s important to remember the stigma she bore from her father’s fraud. She’d witnessed the precariousness of life when his ill-gotten millions evaporated overnight. While most of the abusers in Justine are male, there are also female vitiators like Dubois who argue that ‘the hard hearts of the rich justify the conduct of the poor’. In Dubois’ thinking, one must become a victimizer in order not to be victimized.

     When Maxwell arrived in New York in the early nineties, she was enamoured by fame and wealth, as was Justine’s sister Juliette for whom ‘the road to riches was a thorny one’. In Juliette’s case, she goes to extreme lengths for money, ruining and even poisoning her husbands, but de Sade alights on another underlying motive of how the body is ‘inflamed by moral weakness’. He states that ‘the intensity of pleasures experienced is in proportion to the number of laws broken’. It’s highly likely that Epstein and his circle were erotically stimulated by the illegality of his alleged sex trafficking.

     Maxwell’s defence team accused the victims of ‘false memory syndrome’, as if they were part of a collective female hysteria. We can all be guilty of twisting our memories until we believe we behaved better than we did, but to accuse so many girls of ‘doctoring’ their memories purely for financial gain is risible. The girls may not have been locked up or subjected to extreme violence, as in the darkest of de Sade’s visions, but they were often transported to Epstein’s private island from which there was no escape. Even though they were paid, they were still psychologically trapped.

     Maxwell is often viewed as the scapegoat for Epstein and his male cronies, but the allegations have definitely damaged Prince Andrew’s reputation. Last year, he was accused of sexual assault in 2001 by Virginia Giuffre who had been hired by a masseuse by Maxwell. One small offshoot of this is that a council debate on whether a street name, Prince Andrew Way, should be changed is to be held in Carrickfergus this very autumn. I’m not sure what names are under consideration, but bearing in mind Andrew’s many-storied history with women, I’d like to throw my own suggestion into the hat with Prince Andrew Has His Way.

     In the Epstein saga, the whole notion of who is a victim becomes blurred. The girls claimed they were encouraged to procure other girls and become complicit in the trafficking, to become criminals themselves. Maxwell seemed to have inculcated a ruthlessness into the girls which would return to bite her. Ironically, the supposed huntress became the hunted and Virginia Giuffre became her bête noire.

     There is another famous French novel of the late eighteenth century, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, in which Epstein and Maxwell arguably find their literary counterparts. The dissolute Vicomte de Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil are two erstwhile lovers who execute a plan to seduce a fifteen-year-old girl. They set about their games of revenge and seduction primarily out of wealthy ennui and it’s notable how Giuffre stated that neither Epstein nor Maxwell appeared to do any work. At the end of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil’s letters proved to be her downfall, just as Maxwell was exposed in court by her little black book of contacts. For both women, their comeuppance is rooted in their fall from society and depletion of their fortunes through lawsuits, although one major difference is that nature also punished de Merteuil by disfiguring her beauty with smallpox.

     Sympathy for Maxwell recedes after the guilty verdict on her sex trafficking charge, but it’s uncertain if she influenced events in the way that de Merteuil did. Epstein was without doubt the initiator due to his sadistic obsession (or ‘satyriasis’, as a friend conveniently excused it). Besides, Maxwell is patently more innocent than Epstein, since after leaving him she has not become embroiled in new allegations.

     The Epstein scandal epitomises the exploitative neoliberal era. Back in the nineties, I met a millionaire who got a particular kick out of having sex with escorts and persuading them to leave their agencies and come to work for his property company. There was no altruistic motive in this. I believe he did it because of the pleasure of stealing these women from other men. His predatoriness emanated from the Sadean belief that ‘society is made up only of the weak and the strong’.

     I’ve researched sex trafficking for my new play Silent Trade and, in many cases, the girlfriend of the trafficker is the one who organises bookings and interacts with the girls. While this is common, it’s still surprising that anyone as educated as Maxwell might conceivably share the belief system of Justine’s abusers who assert that ‘women exist solely to serve men’s pleasure’. Virginia Giuffre opined that Maxwell was worse than Epstein as she used her ‘womanly abilities to make me feel comfortable’. Personally, I have difficulties with Giuffre’s argument as surely a woman must be judged on the same basis as a man. Female on female crime shouldn’t be viewed more seriously than male crime against women simply because of presuppositions about an idealized female solidarity.

     It remains to be seen if the millions Maxwell has lavished on her lawyers will eventually acquit her. She has always maintained her innocence and, rather than fleeing to France, has put her faith wholeheartedly in ‘the fate that inevitably saves the criminal while sacrificing the virtuous’, as de Sade called the justice system. The Epstein affair shines a light on the corruptibility of power, but the most important lesson for society is never to allow the wealthy to use poverty-stricken under-agers like playthings or to use classic literature as the fuel with which to enact cruel fantasies. As far as Maxwell goes, the party is over.