A New York judge on Tuesday sentenced UK socialite and Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to twenty years in prison for helping the financier sexually exploit underage girls.
The Manhattan federal court judgement means that sixty-year-old Maxwell will spend most of her remaining life behind bars. The ninth and youngest child of media baron Robert Maxwell and French scholar Elisabeth (née Meynard) Maxwell, Ghislaine was convicted last year on five of six counts. The most serious of charges against her was for sex trafficking minors.
Lawyers representing her claimed she had a traumatic childhood and asked for leniency based on the fact that Epstein escaped trial. They asked for a prison term of no more than 5 years while the prosecutors had pushed for 30 to 55 years in jail.
The NDTV reported that, “During Maxwell’s high-profile trial in late 2021, prosecutors successfully proved that she was “the key” to Epstein’s scheme of enticing young girls to give him massages, during which he would sexually abuse them.
Two of Epstein’s victims, identified as “Jane” and “Carolyn,” testified that they were as young as 14 when Maxwell began grooming them for Epstein. Maxwell’s lawyers insisted their client had “a difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father.”
“It made her vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met right after her father’s death,” they wrote in submissions filed earlier this month.
Sixty-six-year-old financier Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial for his sex crimes. Using this fact, her attorneys pleaded saying that, “Ms Maxwell cannot and should not bear all the punishment for which Epstein should have been held responsible.”
The prosecution’s rebuttal was that Maxwell “was an adult who made her own choices,” and showed “utter lack of remorse” for what she had done. Maxwell’s heinous crimes were committed between 1994 and 2004.
The US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams said that, “today’s sentence holds Ghislaine Maxwell accountable for perpetrating heinous crimes against children,” adding that “this sentence sends a strong message that no one is above the law and it is never too late for justice.”
