A woman whose testimony was key to Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex trafficking conviction has died of a drug overdose, authorities confirmed.
Carolyn Andriano, a 36-year-old mother of five, was found dead in a hotel in Palm Beach County, her mother, Dorothy Grunert, told the Miami Herald. Although her death was discovered on May 23, it was not announced until this week in a report issued by the World Health Organization. Daily Beast.
However, Grunert disputes the coroner’s findings, and questions the thoroughness of the West Palm Beach police investigation.
The Herald was unable to obtain the police and coroner’s report on Monday.
But Jack Scarola, Andriano’s longtime attorney, said he was confident in the findings regarding her death.
“The distraught mother is responding emotionally. I’m sure she’s having a major grief reaction,” Scarola said.
“Caroline was having a very difficult time after her experience in New York,” Scarola said, referring to Andriano’s testimony against Maxwell in federal court in Manhattan in Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial in December 2021. He said she continued to have drug problems after the trial. .
He said: “It is well known that Caroline’s experiences with Jeffrey Epstein had an enormous impact on her life and were clearly the cause of her tragic death.”
Andriano is not the only Epstein victim who died as a result of addiction. In 2018, Lee “Sky” Patrick was found dead of an accidental drug overdose at another hotel in Florida. Patrick was also abused by Epstein when she was 16 years old.
“My sister has suffered greatly,” Selby, Patrick’s twin sister, told DailyMail.com in a 2019 story. “And it started with Epstein. Something happened inside her when she met him that blew her out of control.
“She has struggled with addiction since she met this man. She went to rehab several times. She struggled hard, but eventually succumbed to addiction. We miss her.”
After the trial ended, Andriano and her husband, John Bates, moved to North Carolina to start over, Scarola said. It’s not sure why she was in Palm Beach at the time of her death, but several sources said she was still in the throes of addiction and had come to Palm Beach for treatment. The sources said that she was staying at the Double Tree Hotel with her husband and children at the time of her death.
During Maxwell’s trial, Andriano, identified only by her first name, said she was first brought to Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion when she was 14 years old. At the time, she had dropped out of middle school and had a difficult childhood. She testified that an older relative had sexually abused her when she was four years old and that her mother was an alcoholic. By then, she was already experimenting with drugs.
She was introduced to Epstein and Maxwell by Virginia Giuffre, another victim of Epstein.
Andriano testified that she returned to Epstein’s house more than 100 times in order to obtain the money she used to buy drugs.
She tearfully described the trauma she experienced in the years that followed, saying she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived in fear that her children would be kidnapped.
Andreano told the jury that Maxwell and another associate of Epstein’s would summon her two or three times a week to visit Epstein, a New York financier who died in prison awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.
“There was something sexual going on every time,” she said during the trial.
Under questioning by Maxwell’s attorney, Andriano said she received $2.8 million in compensation from Epstein’s estate as part of a compensation fund set up for victims.
“But no money will be able to fix what happened to me,” she stressed.
She was among the four victims who testified at Maxwell’s trial. Maxwell, 61, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on trafficking charges. She is serving her sentence at the federal women’s prison in Tallahassee while she appeals her conviction.
