Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexual exploitation of minors

Ghislaine Maxwell, the “socialite” friend of British royalty and of many powerful cream and cream of politics and finance, was sentenced this Tuesday to 20 years in prison for participating in a scheme of sexual exploitation and abuse of minors for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein over a decade.

The daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who also has American and French nationality, did not react when Judge Alison Nathan announced the sentence in the Southern District Court of Manhattanwhich had generated enormous expectation.

The judge described Maxwell’s crimes as “abominable and predatory” and made it clear that although “Epstein was central to this criminal scheme, Maxwell is not being punished in his place or on his behalf, but rather for his conduct.”

The financial billionaire committed suicide in prison in August 2019 while waiting to be tried for these crimes.

According to the prosecution, for a decade, Maxwell aided, facilitated and participated in the child abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, helping him to recruit, lure and abuse young people he knew to be under 18 years of age.

The sentence was more lenient than the 30 to 55 years in prison requested by the New York prosecutor’s office, but a little more than what is established by the scale for each of the five crimes of which she was found guilty by a jury on December 29. , which would add between 15.6 and 19.5 years.

Nathan justified the sentence in “the seriousness of the facts” despite recognizing the mitigating factors such as the defendant’s apologies to the victims, that the events occurred between 1994 and 2004, that she has not had problems with the law before or in the last almost 20 years in addition to her good behavior in prison, where she has been held since her arrest in the summer of 2020.

For prosecutor Damian Williams, the sentence “sends a strong message that no one is above the law and that it is never too late to do justice.”

During the three hours that the hearing lasted, with a break of half an hour in between, Maxwellwith medium dark hair, dressed in a short-sleeved gray blouse, and underneath a thin white long-sleeved T-shirt and black pants, seemed nervous and did not stop taking sips of water from a glass that she constantly refilled or moving in the room. chair.

“terrible damage

After the prosecution had criticized his “total lack of remorse” and the testimonies of several victims who, with broken voices, recounted the ordeal that the Epstein-Maxwell couple made them experience and with which they continue to deal almost three decades later, the socialite acknowledged “the terrible damage he did to too many women”.

“It’s hard to hear and even harder to accept,” he said before adding, “I deeply sympathize with all the victims of this case” and “I feel the pain you are experiencing”.

Two of Epstein’s victims, identified as “Jane” and “Carolyn,” testified at trial that they were 14 years old when Maxwell began luring them for the financier’s solace.

“I think Jeffrey Epstein was a manipulative, cunning, controlling man who led a deeply compartmentalized life and deceived everyone in his orbit,” Maxwell said.

– Appeal

His lawyer Bobbi Sternheim, who after exhausting all the resources to invalidate the trial asked the judge for clemency in mid-June for his client, said that they will appeal the sentence.

“I think there are strong legal as well as factual reasons for the Court of Appeals … to overturn the conviction,” he said.

Maxwell and Epstein were a couple in the early 1990s before becoming professional collaborators and accomplices for nearly 30 years.

“For me and for many others, you opened the door to hell for us,” Virginia Giuffre, one of the couple’s victims – although she did not appear in the case – told Maxwell in a statement read by her lawyer this Tuesday in the audience.

In one of the many ramifications of this case, Giuffre sued Prince Andrew of England for sexual abuse when he was a minor. Last February they reached an out-of-court economic agreement for which the son of the queen of England would have paid, according to the press, 13 million dollars, thus avoiding an embarrassing process for the British royal family.