The first involved “engaging in lies and deception” to build a relationship with the victims including giving gifts such as “fancy clothes and jewellery”. Ghislaine groomed her victims in three stages. But we now know she also used it to make the young, uneducated girls that Epstein favoured feel that what she asked them to do was OK because she was doing it, too. Most recently, Maxwell used it to curry favours in business such as getting her closest friends to join the board of her dodgy environmental non-profit, the TerraMar Project. Marketing men have long relied on it for celebrity endorsements as in, if George Clooney drinks this coffee then it must be good. The halo effect, of which charm plays a huge part, not only makes you trust the person but it also makes you buy what they’re selling. Not to mention as alive as a sniffer dog to anyone who might possess something useful to her. I remember her appearing at every party – quick-witted, attention-seeking and the complete darling of her set. Our entry hadn’t been updated since the Eighties when we knew many people in common (none of whom will speak openly about her now, though I recently spoke to one of her closest friends, who is in a state of shock). Those people we know whose entries were circled are very nervous indeed. In my husband’s circle at Oxford she used it to enthral male classmates – Johnson recalled entering Balliol JCR to find the “shiny glamazon with naughty eyes holding court astride a table, a high-heeled boot resting on my brother Boris’s thigh” – and later to fill the pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s “little black book”, where my husband and I discovered, last year, we had been rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bill Clinton, Naomi Campbell, Prince Andrew and Tony Blair. Flirtatiousness has always been her superpower. Maxwell, on the other hand, has it in buckets. And her conviction will have sent shockwaves rippling through the set that once bathed in its glow: people like her – like them – don’t usually go to prison.īy all accounts Epstein had no charm. We know now that the jury weren’t blinded by Maxwell’s halo, but I’ve seen it when Ghislaine turns on the light: it’s pretty blinding. And, according to one of countless studies, why jurors are less likely to believe that attractive people were guilty of criminal behaviour. It’s why we often think our favourite celebrities are intelligent when we have no proof whatsoever. The halo effect is sometimes referred to as the “physical attractiveness stereotype” and the “what is beautiful is also good” principle. When we think someone is charming, we also think they are smart and trustworthy. Coined by psychologist Edward Thorndike in a 1920 paper titled “The Constant Error in Psychological Ratings”, it describes a “cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character”. Ghislaine was on trial for her life but she was behaving as if she just popped into 5 Hertford Street and happened to spot some friends at another table. There were giggles and little girl laughs. There were hugs and air kisses directed at her lawyers and even her poor sister Isabel (who looked like she was the one on trial). Ghislaine showed up in full Angelina Jolie armour a soft turtleneck sweater, grey flowing trousers and a new blow-dry that she kept tossing about. Were Ghislaine to have entered the downtown Manhattan courtroom downtrodden, in a cheap suit with her hair falling out, we might have kept mirroring – but no. “It explains why we cannot help but respond when a baby cries.” All humans have what are called “mirror neurons” or “sympathy neurons”, says Dr Mitchell W Sedgwick, senior fellow in the department of social anthropology at LSE. Rachel Johnson came under serious fire last month for finding it “hard not to feel a bat squeak of pity for Ghislaine Maxwell – 500 days and counting in solitary confinement” but, before the trial began on 29 November, many of those who knew Ghislaine a bit (like me) admitted (behind locked doors) to feeling some sympathy. The jury, supposedly unburdened by knowledge of anything related to Jeffrey Epstein, may have been none the wiser but the rest of us quickly became hybrids of Inspector Clouseau and Sigmund Freud. Watching the Maxwell trial unfold was like taking an armchair psychology course on speed.
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