It’s tough to see Ghislaine Maxwell’s team toy with such sad, broken women | John Sweeney

Justice at work is difficult to watch when big-money lawyers go in hard as they try to discredit witnesses

The slut-shaming - or something very much like it - of the four key witnesses against Ghislaine Maxwell and her late lover, Jeffrey Epstein is, almost, a thing of beauty, a dark wonder to behold. You've got to admire the way Maxwell's multimillion-dollar attorneys break her accusers on the rack of their own human frailty. No one dare call it torture: we're watching justice at work, the Ghislaine Maxwell defence team way.

In order of appearance witness Jane" was challenged as a drug user from a wealthy but deeply unhappy home; witness Kate" was a drug user with a troubled mother; witness Carolyn - to give her some privacy the court accepted her request to use only her real first name - had a single parent mother who was an alcoholic and a drug addict, who became an alcoholic and a drug addict herself, who left school when she was 14, who did not, said her ex-boyfriend Shawn have the reading ability" to say Ms Maxwell's first name, Ghislaine. So Carolyn called her Maxwell. Witness Annie Farmer - her full real name, was 16, the child of a divorced single mum but not herself broken, not at all.