New York, November 28, 2021 – Opens tomorrow November 29 on process a Ghislaine Maxwell, the British heiress accused in the United States of luring teenagers to ‘offer’ them to the tycoon Jeffrey Epstein who sexually abused it.
A year after his sensational arrest, after several months on the run, the prosecutor wants to prove that Maxwell helped Epstein – that he committed suicide in a New York cell in August 2019 – to “recruit, prepare and ultimately abuse” young victims, some of whom did not more than 14 years old.
Accuses him
According to the indictment, Maxwell earned the trust of young women, often chosen in economically and socially disadvantaged environments, by taking them to go shopping or to the theater and then persuaded them to massage Epstein naked in one of his residences, before forcing them to having sex with him in exchange for money.
The suspicion is that the woman has at times participated in the alleged abuses both in her London home and in Epstein’s homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach and New Mexico. The case has received enormous media attention. Among the powerful friends of the pedophile financier also the Prince Andrew, third son of Queen Elizabeth II, Bill Gates and the former US president, Bill Clinton.
Who is Ghislaine Maxwell
Cultured, used to frequenting the jet-set, but probably linked to Epstein by a toxic relationship of dependence, Maxwell, who had also been the partner of the financier, risks a maximum of 70 years old jail if found guilty of the activity to satisfy the erotic appetite of the partner. The 59-year-old Brit has been behind bars for months in a detention facility, the Brooklyn Metropolitan Jail, where she was taken immediately after her arrest in July 2020 to a mansion in New Hampshire after disappearing for a year after Epstein’s suicide. .
Scion of a family of publishers, daughter of the much talked about businessman owner of the tabloid “The Daily Mirror”, Robert Maxwell, the defendant has repeatedly found innocent but she has always been denied bail because she is considered to be at high risk of escaping, given that she has high-ranking contacts and three nationalities (British, French and American).
The detention
Recently, her brothers denounced in a letter to the United Nations that her detention is “arbitrary”, claiming that she has been “mistakenly held in solitary confinement for about 500 days”, which violated her right to defense and her presumption of innocence. The trial officially began on November 16 with the selection of the jury, which the judge of the case, Alison Nathan, decided to render public, despite Maxwell’s lawyers asking for it to be done behind closed doors to avoid giving more publicity to an already very high profile case. Nathan, however, argued that the first amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, prevails.
The process
The judge has so far rejected almost all defensive requests, for example to remove the anonymity of victims who will testify in the hall under a pseudonym; and to protect their identity it has also banned the work of designers usually hired to sketch accused and witnesses in trials and of whom it is not possible to take photographs. Maxwell’s attorneys, Francois Zimarra e Jessica Finelle, have publicly denounced on several occasions the unsanitary and inhumane conditions in which their client finds herself, who would be subjected to 24-hour surveillance that does not allow her to rest: they claim that she is “perceived and treated” as guilty even before the verdict .
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