At a Manhattan Federal Court hearing Tuesday, July 14, former collaborator and lover of financier Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, pleaded not guilty to trafficking in minors and inciting prostitution.
A jet-set personality, she is accused of having recruited young girls, some of them minors, for Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019.
An "extreme" risk of escape
Tuesday's hearing should also be an opportunity for the daughter of former British media mogul Robert Maxwell to apply for bail. It has offered guarantees of up to five million dollars for this. Manhattan federal prosecutor Audrey Strauss opposed the request, saying that the accused posed an "extreme" risk of absconding.
The heiress has fifteen bank accounts totaling up to $ 20 million, said the prosecutor. She has a network of acquaintances abroad and holds three passports, including a French one: if she took refuge across the Atlantic, she could escape extradition.
Portable wrapped in aluminum
The conditions of her July 2 arrest in New Hampshire also suggest that she may be tempted to flee. When the FBI entered the property where she was hiding and asked her to open the door, Ghislaine Maxwell did not respond and took refuge in another room, according to court documents cited by the New York Times . When the house was searched, the police found a cell phone wrapped in aluminum, proof that they had tried to cover the tracks.
His run fascinated Americans for almost a year. A few days after the announcement of Jeffrey Epstein's suicide, a photo of her, sitting at a Los Angeles fast-food restaurant, a book on spying under her nose, made the headlines. It was his lawyer friend who took the picture, the intention of which is still unclear to this day: was it a provocation?
If so, it did not last very long: Ghislaine Maxwell then lived in hiding until her arrest. The prosecutor's office gave some details about her last months in New Hampshire. The 63 hectare property was purchased in December by a front company. His brother hired former British soldiers to keep him safe on the spot and a warden did his shopping for him.
Golden childhood
A reclusive life, far from his jet-set years and his golden childhood. Born in France in Maisons-Laffitte in 1961, the heiress of the Maxwell empire is the youngest of nine children. Raised in luxury in England, she attended British high society after studying at Oxford.
His father Robert, at the head of a fortune estimated at $ 1.9 billion, died in 1991 in troubling circumstances. He went overboard on his yacht, named "Lady Ghislaine" in honor of her favorite child, off the Canary Islands, when he was in serious debt. Ghislaine Maxwell always believed that he had been murdered. She inherits a pension of $ 100,000 a year and embarks on real estate in the United States.
It was in New York in the early 1990s that she met Jeffrey Epstein. They will rub shoulders with the upper East Side elite, including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. The relationship between the two characters remains mysterious. Ghislaine Maxwell is in turn described as the ex-partner, the best friend, the superintendent and the mother madam of Jeffrey Epstein.
Sordid stories
A wealth of testimony emerged last August, when more than 2,000 pages of documents related to a defamation complaint filed in 2015 by an alleged victim, Virginia Giuffre, were published. Several women accuse Ghislaine Maxwell of having recruited them to satisfy the sexual needs of her friend and famous personalities like Prince Andrew of England or Jean-Luc Brunel, French boss of a modeling agency. Virginia Giuffre even claims that Ghislaine Maxwell participated in the abuses that the financier subjected her to. Another woman, Johanna Sjoberg, says that she heard Ghislaine Maxwell speak of one of her recruits as her "sex slave".
Sordid stories accumulate in these justice documents. An accuser, Sarah Ransome, claims that the couple withdrew her passport when she was abused on the millionaire's private island… a Caribbean island nicknamed "Pedophile Island". A former butler said he saw "more than 100 girls" parade through his Palm Beach residence over a period of ten years. After each visit, he cleaned up the massage room and assured that he was putting away "the sex toys" ... in Ghislaine Maxwell's closet.
Well-kept secrets
If the latter admitted in 2016 to having hired masseuses for Jeffrey Epstein, she refutes any sexual character in these meetings. As of 2008, when the financier was convicted of soliciting a minor prostitute, she ceased to appear in public with him. But the past caught up to her last year after the arrest of her former companion. Jeffrey Epstein is no longer alive to face his accusers, Ghislaine Maxwell is now at the center of the matter.
Faced with six charges, including those of participation in a pedophile network and incitement to prostitution, she faces life imprisonment.
With AFP
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