Ghislane Maxwell trial: Jeffrey Epstein pilot Larry Visoski says cockpit door always closed

Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime pilot, Lawrence Paul Visoski Jr., said under cross examination that he never witnessed sex acts or underage girls without their parents aboard several private aircraft that he piloted for the multi-millionaire paedophile.

“I never saw any sexual activity, no,” the New York Post reports Mr Visoski as telling defence lawyer Christian Everdell, who quizzed the pilot on the stand about the 1000 or so flights he piloted from the early 1990s to 2004.
 

However, Mr Visoski said the cockpit door was always closed during flights, making it impossible to see what was going on in the passenger area.

Mr Visoski, who worked for Mr. Epstein for nearly 30 years, was the first witness called by prosecutors in the sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion.

He said that Epstein did not mandate that the cockpit door be closed, and that he had invited them to walk to the back of the aircraft if, for example, they had to use the rest room.

He said Ms Maxwell was Epstein’s “number two” and that he always viewed their relationship as “more personal than business.”

He testified that Ms Maxwell was approximately 30 when he met her in 1991, and claimed “we interacted quite often. She was on a lot of the flights.”

On day two of Maxwell’s trial Mr Visoski said he did not notice any underage girls without their parents on the planes.

That included both Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts and a victim identified as “Jane” at the trial.

Mr Visoski said he flew Roberts in the mid to late 90s, but believed her to be a “shorter woman with dirty blonde hair.”

He added that he believed a passenger named Jane was a “mature woman with some piercing powder blue eyes.”

Prosecutors entered a birth certificate for Jane into evidence under seal.
 

Yesterday, a jury heard Maxwell enforced a “culture of silence” in Epstein’s houses to ensure that his crimes never came to light.

“Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend and right hand,” said Lara Pomerantz in an opening statement for the prosecution.

The daughter of the British press baron Robert Maxwell was not merely an aide to Epstein’s abuse of minors, Ms Pomerantz said. “She was essential to this scheme. As an adult woman she was able to provide a cover of respectability.”

Ms Maxwell helped Epstein to recruit, befriend and groom victims, Ms Pomerantz said. She said the teenagers targeted by Maxwell and Epstein were drawn from poor families and that the two preyed particularly on the children of single mothers.

Epstein was the owner of palatial homes in Manhattan, Paris and Palm Beach, as well as an entire island in the Caribbean, she said.

She suggested that Ms Maxwell acted to keep her erstwhile partner happy, “to ensure that Epstein’s sexual appetites remained satisfied.”
 

Ms Maxwell, 59, is charged with conspiring to lure and “transport” four teenage girls between 1994 and 2004, encouraging them to travel to Epstein’s properties in New York, Florida and New Mexico.

She also faces charges of sex trafficking in relation to one of those alleged victims, who says she was recruited in 2001 at the age of 14 and was paid to engage in sex acts with Epstein and to recruit other girls.

Epstein was charged with sex trafficking in 2019 and took his own life in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.

Ms Maxwell was arrested nearly a year later in New Hampshire and has been held in a Brooklyn jail, without bail, for 16 months.

She denies all the charges.

The trial continues.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and is republished here with permission