Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, Girl Recruiter for Pedophile Tycoon Jeffrey Epstein, Starts in New York | Society

The British heiress Ghislaine Maxwell will sit in the dock this Monday to charge, say her relatives, with her faults and with all those that Jeffrey Epstein did not purge, whose pedophile plot Maxwell (Paris, 59 years old) served as the old priestesses to the idol of pagan cults: with human sacrifices. Dedicated with zeal and ardor to making life pleasant for her lover – a relationship that adds perversion to the story – Maxwell is charged with six crimes based on the recruitment of minors to satisfy Epstein’s voracious sexual appetite, for which He faces a sentence of up to 80 years in prison. The woman has defended her innocence at all times with different strategies; the last, a twist in the Copernican script: his defense aims to convince the jury that such a mediated case has vitiated the process and will distort the verdict.

The millionaire Epstein committed suicide at age 66 in his cell in the summer of 2019, just a month after entering a Manhattan jail, without giving time to be tried for child abuse, rape and pedophile plot since the middle of the years ninety; Some of the girls he abused, or offered his important friends as a generous host, were only 14 years old at the time of the rapes and, according to the 2,000-page summary, were recruited even outside their schools. The one in charge of doing it was Ghislaine Maxwell.

With Epstein dead, it is his partner who brings the disgrace. Based on the testimony of four victims, who will be identified by their initials, prosecutors believe it has been proven that Maxwell cajoled the young women, gained their trust by taking them shopping or to the movies and, once recruited, handed them to the pedophile Epstein. , but also friends of the latter such as Prince Andrew of England and important financiers. Epstein also frequented the Clintons, prompting Donald Trump to see conspiracy theories surrounding his death, a suicide.

The toxic trail of the case includes countless resignations, the latest being that of Jes Staley, head of Barclays bank, who would have concealed the strength of his ties with Epstein and his visits to a Caribbean island mansion, one of the scenes of the abuses. The son of Queen Elizabeth of England, who has been bruised but unharmed for the moment – legally speaking, not in terms of reputation – has until mid-July to testify about his three encounters with Virginia Giuffre, who at the time of the facts was 17 years old. It seems as if the death of Epstein instead of closing the case has only left loose ends.

But the strongest thread to pull is Maxwell. The cliché of the poor rich girl, the disgraced glamor, becomes in her case that of the poor perfidious girl, judging by the facts that prosecutors try to demonstrate, such as that she witnessed or even participated in some rapes. Unaccounted for for a year after Epstein’s arrest, Maxwell was detained in the summer of 2020 in a hidden New Hampshire mansion and has since awaited trial in a crowded Brooklyn, New York jail, whose conditions have been degraded by the pandemic, like those of the entire prison system of the country.

The little and favorite daughter of media mogul Robert Maxwell, who named the yacht next to which he was found drowned in her honor in 1991, Lady Ghislaine, has done everything possible to escape from pretrial detention. Give up French and British nationality as a guarantee that you do not plan to elope. A five million dollar settlement. Or a house confinement, guarded by armed guards. Also the gruesome account, cruelly filtered by his lawyers, of his sufferings in prison, such as hair loss or burns on the eyelids as a result of the permanently lit light in the cell, a cubicle measuring 1.8 by 2.7 meters With a toilet and a concrete cot in which he has remained, the defense argues, guarded and “almost in isolation.” But all his regrets have been in vain: the judge has denied him provisional release four times in a row, except for a brief prison leave at Christmas.

Some lawyers for the private prosecution define Maxwell as the CEO, the executive director, of the Epstein abuse network. But the description that the witnesses offer of her represents her halfway between the governess and the madam. A villain, according to the FBI agents, master of manipulation and who exercised relentless control over the girls, to increasingly please the leader of the plot. The old rhetorical figure of the woman who sacrifices herself for the man she loves, or who fears, or idolizes, while serving as superintendent of the millionaire’s mansions.

Within hours of the trial, the defense has achieved its first triumph, by getting the Manhattan district judge to grant permission to testify to Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist specializing in “false memories.” The idea is to show that the victims came to believe what they were saying due to a temporary distortion in their experiences, without deliberately lying; In other words, what they heard about the event – in a media case par excellence like this one – altered their memories of the experience. To the prosecution this line seems to be taken with pins, but Loftus has testified in hundreds of trials, including that of film producer Harvey Weinstein, a sexual predator whose abuses originated the movement. MeToo. Loftus has always been called by the defenses, although in Weinstein’s case he did not achieve his goal, when he was convicted. Federal prosecutors have asked the judge to limit the statement of Loftus, whose thesis they consider unreliable. The defense will also call another psychologist, Park Dietz, to testify to refute the perfidious and deceitful deception in the recruitment of the girls.

But the case has taken even more pirouettes in recent days. Maxwell’s family denounced his “arbitrary detention” to the UN on Wednesday. Maxwell’s brothers allege that he has been “in solitary confinement for about 500 days” and that his right to defense and his presumption of innocence have been violated, for which they have resorted to two lawyers who are experts in human rights to file a complaint with the Group of Work on the Arbitrary Detention of the UN.

The lawyers, François Zimeray and Jessica Finelle, argue that Maxwell is subjected to “unusually rigorous” conditions, something they describe as “unjustified and discriminatory”, and suggest that the US wants to keep her alive “at all costs”. “It is as if Ghislaine Maxwell is suffering the consequences of the failure of the US Administration to guarantee the life of Jeffrey Epstein,” they say. Not by chance, the newspaper The New York Times published on Tuesday a summary of the 2,000 pages held by the prison system for the month Epstein spent in jail. And yes, the suspicions of negligence, or at least negligence, on the part of the officials in charge of monitoring the tycoon are confirmed, black on white, in the documents. It is another asset that Maxwell’s defense wields: that with the heir, the Administration shows a strong hand to heal in health and silence criticism about the lack of authority of the officials who facilitated Epstein’s suicide.

Demonization, case tainted by the light and stenographers, doubts about impartiality, media prejudices; justice or revenge: the caso Maxwell promises to run even more rivers of ink. Making newspapers was the old business of his father, a communication magnate also posthumously disgraced, when he discovered, after drowning when he fell from the yacht in the Canaries, that he had diverted part of the pension funds of his employees to plug holes in its deficient media conglomerate. It was then that Ghislaine left Europe and began a life of glamor and luxury that ended in a filthy New York jail cell.