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Carole Radziwill is in the hot seat.

During the Tuesday (October 13) episode of Real Housewives of New York City, the 63-year-old Emmy-winning journalist was grilled about her past friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell.

If you are unaware, Maxwell, 64, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Jeffrey Epstein‘s sex trafficking web back in 2022.

Carole and Maxwell used to be friendly years ago and Maxwell snapped the photograph of Carole featured on the back of her 2005 best-selling memoir What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love.

“If you Google me right now, it says that my name is in the Epstein file,” Carole said as the RHONY women spent time on Erika Hammond‘s private island.

Carole‘s past ties to Maxwell resurfaced earlier this year when Carole‘s name was included in the Epstein Files. She has remained adamant that she did not know Epstein.

She emphasized to her co-stars that she “never knew Jeffrey Epstein” and that Maxwell “never spoke about him.”

Sai De Silva then pressed Carole for more details about her relationship with Maxwell, asking whether they were “really good friends.”

“If you read the press, we were … but she was never one of my close friends,” Carole insisted.

In a confessional, Carole explained that she was “friendly” with Maxwell, with whom she shared mutual friends.

“In the early 2000s, it would be strange if you [went] out to a really big event in New York and Ghislaine wasn’t there,” she said, once again noting that that Maxwell “never talked about” Epstein.

Sai continued to press Carole with questions, asking how she first met Maxwell and how they stopped speaking.

“You know, it’s like any friendship that sort of wasn’t that deep. We just kind of drifted apart,” Carole said, calling Maxwell “a social climber” who was attracted to money and power.

“If you lined up 10 women and said, ‘Which one was part of an international sex trafficking ring?’ It would not be her,” Carole said.

Carole‘s answers apparently didn’t squash Sai‘s concerns, and as the discussion grew more tense, Sai explained that the Epstein scandal “pains me to my stomach,” especially since she is the mother of a teenage daughter.

In another confessional, Carole said, “I get that people would be curious about it, but there’s a fine line between curiosity and accusation. Why are you using your daughter as a shield? And then also a sword to grill me with questions? … This is not what we should be talking about.”

For Carole, the bigger question was, “why under two administrations, the Department of Justice [and] the FBI never investigated any of the men.”

“That’s what I’d be talking about if I had a teenage daughter,” she added.

As Sai remained skeptical, Carole flipped the conversation, and asked, “How do I know you don’t know a predator?”

“Maybe you just don’t know it yet. That’s my point,” she added. “This is a story as old as time.”

Carole then added that she thought that Epstein “got what he deserved” when he was arrested, before opening up about her own experience with sexual assault.

“Like a lot of young girls, I had a situation where I was sexually assaulted in college. So I was sensitive to that. This was a college professor,” she recalled. “And believe me, this professor was celebrated. This professor had lots of friends who didn’t know that he was assaulting young students. … It does shake me to think that I knew someone and would even, like, call her a friend, who then 20 years later, turned out to be a monster.”

Carole‘s confession made co-star Daisy Toye emotional.

“Poor Carole that she has to bring up such a disgusting, painful time in her life, just to justify herself to Sai,” Daisy said in her confessional. “I know Sai is very blunt, but nobody should be treated like this. I didn’t know we had a f***ing federal prosecutor on this trip.”

If you didn’t see, fellow RHONY star Jessel Taank addressed the controversial comments she made about Carole‘s late close friend Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

New episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City air on Bravo on Tuesdays at 8pm ET and available for streaming on Peacock the following day.

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