The judicial declaration that the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell lent in 2016 about her dealings with millionaire Jeffrey Epstein, imprisoned for child abuse and hanged in his cell, has been made public this Thursday, despite the fact that the British woman, who appears in the pedophile plot as a girl achiever for members of international high society, among them presumably Prince Andrew of England, he has tried by all means to keep it a secret. Before the judge, Maxwell said he had never witnessed “inappropriate activities with minors” by his friend Epstein, according to the transcript of testimony released in a Manhattan court, which does not reveal the names of others involved.
Maxwell, 58, then pleaded not guilty to helping the financier, who committed suicide in a Manhattan jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial, to recruit and cajole girls, some as young as 14, into the financier sexually abused them in the nineties. He also pleaded not guilty to perjury for having denied his involvement in any pedophile network, when he testified under oath.
Maxwell’s statement, in April 2016, came as a result of a lawsuit filed against Epstein by Virginia Giuffre, who accused the millionaire of having held her as a sex slave with the collaboration of Maxwell. “I have never seen anyone have sexual relations with Epstein, ever”, declared the British, “and no inappropriate activities with minors. Never. And never ever participate in anything with Jeffrey and Virginia, who for the record is an absolute liar, “he stressed.
The lawyers of Maxwell, who was Epstein’s girlfriend and continued to be his partner, argued that their client expected that the statement would remain confidential, and that therefore the publication of its content could violate his constitutional rights and especially the guarantee of not declaring himself. guilty herself. His defense also stated that making the statement public could call into question the possibility of having a fair trial. “If the order to disclose [la declaración] it is concrete, intimate, personal and sensitive information about Maxwell will run like a tongue of fire on the Internet, ”his lawyers had warned in August. The trial is scheduled for July 2021.
A lawyer for Giuffre said in a statement that the release of the statement is “a long-awaited and celebrated step in proving the scope and scale of the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking ring.”
When the suicide of Epstein in his cell seemed to contribute to extinguish the echo of the scandal, which reached a great media coverage for coinciding with the global campaign to report abuse Me TooMaxwell’s arrest last July on a Bradford, New Hampshire farm that he had bought in cash a few months earlier to hide himself again attracted media attention. The scandal had all the necessary ingredients to attract attention: a rich and famous culprit – among his circle of friends he counted Donald Trump and Bill Clinton -, implicated personages such as Prince Andrew and a rosary of testimonies of girls captured by the red, with the necessary assistance of the achiever Maxwell, who remains in preventive detention in a Brooklyn jail for risk of escape.
After being arrested, Maxwell said that the work she did for Epstein consisted of hiring assistants, decorators, cooks, gardeners or those in charge of maintaining the six mansions that the millionaire owned. “A small part of my job was to occasionally seek therapeutic massage professionals for Jeffrey,” he explains in the statement, “but when I say hire, it is not in the sense that you mean. [captar o reclutar]; I just went to spas and met people, if they went to Jeffrey’s house, he was the one who hired them. I am not responsible for hiring anyone ”.
However, Maxwell clarified: “I cannot testify about what Jeffrey did or did not do. I can only testify to what I know and to the fact that she [Giuffre] He has lied about me from start to finish and makes me question anything I can say all the time. ” The British, daughter of media mogul Robert Maxwell, admitted to having traveled with Clinton in one of Epstein’s planes, but could not say that the two men were friends, and that she never saw Clinton on one of the financier’s private islands. . “One of the lies [de Giuffre] is that President Clinton and I coincide on the island. A 100% absolute lie ”, justified Maxwell.
The main prosecution witness in the process has been Giuffre, who accused Epstein of forcing her to have sex with friends of hers, including Prince Andrew. In an interview granted in December 2019 to the BBCGiuffre stated that Epstein took her to London in 2001, when she was 17 years old, and introduced her to the son of Queen Elizabeth II, with whom she claims to have had three sexual encounters. The prince has denied the allegations, but his refusal to testify in the process has smeared the image of the British monarchy.
In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution crimes in Florida, and his confession landed him a settlement that, in light of subsequent events and the known details of the pedophile plot, many do not hesitate to call too lenient.