In a document filed in federal court, a US prosecutor asked that the socialist British Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to a sentence of at least 30 years in prison for helping the late child molester Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse minors.
Maxwell, 60, was found guilty last december of sex trafficking of minors for the then financier. His sentencing is scheduled for Tuesday.
For their part, her lawyers asked the court for mercy, after alleging that she had suffered a traumatic childhood and that she had been unfairly accused because Epstein escaped a trial, by commit suicide in a New York jail in 2019.
A 1991 photo of Ghislaine Maxwell. The woman faces a possible sentence of 30 years. Photo: AP
But in the document filed Wednesday night with the New York court, the prosecution argued that Maxwell should be sentenced to between 30 and 55 years in prisonas he has shown a “total lack of remorse” for his crimes, Manhattan court prosecutor Damian Williams wrote.
The prosecution’s reasons
In her denial, Williams noted that “instead of showing a sign of taking responsibility, the defendant makes a desperate attempt to shift the blame anywhere.”
“Maxwell was an adult who made her own choices. She chose to sexually exploit many minors,” she added.
“He chose to conspire with Epstein for years, working as criminal partners causing devastating damage to vulnerable victims“, completed the prosecutor.
The prosecution considers that Ghislaine Maxwell was a “key” piece of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal empire. Photo: AFP
Maxwell, the Oxford-educated daughter of former British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, is in jail since his arrest in the summer of 2020.
During the trial, the prosecution stated that Maxwell was “key” in the scheme assembled by Epstein to recruit young people to give them massages, during which he abused them.
The 60-year-old woman was found guilty on five of the six counts that accused her, which can lead her to spend the rest of her days in jail.
In one of the fringes of the same case, one of his friends, the Prince Andrew of England, reached an economic agreement in February to end an abuse lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre, who claimed that Epstein and Maxwell goaded her into having sex with the prince when she was a minor.
Ghislaine Maxwell pictured during the trial. Photo: REUTERS
The charges against Maxwell
The accusations against Ghislaine Maxwell were based on events that occurred between 1994 and 2004. Two of Epstein’s alleged victims testified that they were only 14 years old when Maxwell allegedly began grooming them and to arrange for Epstein to be given massageswhich ended in sexual activity.
The defense had insisted that Maxwell was the victim of a vindictive prosecution that had the objective of doing justice to women who were deprived of the main villain when Epstein committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial.
Observers believed that the jury’s deliberations were working in Maxwell’s favor because many of his requests to review statements and evidence ran along the same lines as questions raised by Maxwell’s defense about the inconsistency of the evidence.
These tests have been based mainly on the testimonies of four women –of which three requested and obtained anonymity– who declared that they had been contacted and tricked by Maxwell into moving to some of the mansions that Jeffrey Epstein owned and where, under the name of “massages”, he subjected them to sexual abuse while they were minors.
Source: AFP
