It is a sigh of relief that the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their accomplices – among whom Prince Andrew would appear – pushed when they heard the sentence of Manhattan federal court judge Alison Nathan. After months of lifting the slightest mystery on the Jeffrey Epstein affair, the businessman at the origin of this scandal, justice has spoken. Convicted of sex trafficking of minors, and for crimes “hateful of a predator“According to the judge, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Ghislaine Maxwell, medium-length hair, masked and dressed in black pants and a gray shirt, remained almost impassive. But just before being fixed on her fate, the sexagenarian, imprisoned in New York for already two years, had for the first time expressed her “sympathy for all the victims“and said to herself”sorry for the pain felt” for sexual crimes committed between 1994 and 2004 against adolescent girls aged 14 to 17. Ghislaine Maxwell, however, placed the main responsibility on her former companion and accomplice Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in prison in New York in August 2019, “a manipulator (…) who deceived everyone in his orbit.”
Judge Nathan replied that she was “not punished instead of Epstein” and federal prosecutor Damian Williams blasted his “heinous crimes against children” by welcoming that “no one is above the law” in the United States. The victims welcomed this condemnation: “Ghislaine must die in prison. I spent the last 17 years in my own prison for what she, Jeffrey and all the accomplices did to me. I have been raped several times. Sometimes I was raped three times a day (…). There was a constant influx of girls who were raped over and over again.“
After her trial in New York last November and December which found her guilty of sex trafficking of minors for Jeffrey Epstein, the sixty-something faced up to 55 years of criminal imprisonment. His lawyers, who announced that they would appeal the sentence, had already requested a sentence of less than 20 years in prison in mid-June and denounced the solitary confinement of their client in his New York prison, the prison administration citing a risk of “suicide“. The lawyers had also invoked, in vain, the responsibility and the harmful influence of the British press magnate Robert Maxwell – a father “authoritarian“died in 1991 by falling mysteriously from his yacht – and Jeffrey Epstein.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were in a relationship in the early 1990s before becoming professional collaborators and accomplices in their sex crimes for nearly 30 years. The financier, with powerful economic and political networks in the United States and abroad, was himself accused of having sexually assaulted and raped young girls, but his suicide in August 2019 extinguished the public action against him.