Elizabeth Stein’s voice trembled with raw pain as she recounted the “horrifying” abuse she endured from Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, starting when she was just a teenager groomed into their trafficking web.
Stein, then 18 and an aspiring model working at Henri Bendel in New York, met Maxwell in 1995. Maxwell, elegant and persuasive, complimented her beauty and invited her to Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse for “career advice.” What began as flattery quickly turned sinister. “I thought they were my friends,” Stein testified in Maxwell’s 2021 trial and later in a 2024 Law&Crime podcast. “Then she handed me over to him.”
Over three years, Stein alleged Maxwell and Epstein subjected her to repeated sexual assaults, with Maxwell often present or directing. “Ghislaine would tell me what to do, how to please him,” she said, detailing bondage and coercion. She claimed trafficking to other men, including a “famous politician,” though unnamed on stand. Stein recognized the trafficking pattern only in 2019 upon Epstein’s arrest.
Waiving anonymity, Stein confronted Maxwell at her June 2022 sentencing: “You deserve to spend the rest of your life in a jail cell.” Her testimony helped secure Maxwell’s 20-year term. Now an advocate with World Without Exploitation, Stein channels trauma into reform, speaking at September 2025 Capitol rallies for Epstein file releases.
Her courage, echoed in Virginia Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl (October 21, 2025), exposes grooming’s cruelty: glamour as bait, trust as trap. Stein’s trembling voice endures—a testament to reclaiming power from predators who once wielded it unchecked.
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