Lawyers for British Socialist Ghislaine Maxwell have pardoned the convict, asking the judge on Wednesday to ignore the suspension section’s recommendation of a 20-year prison sentence for sexually abusing her and her role in ten-year-old sexual assault. Jeffrey Epstein. A statement from Manhattan Federal Court said Maxwell was lenient, calling it a “parody of justice to face a sentence that would be appropriate for Epstein,” who committed suicide while awaiting a federal sex trafficking lawsuit in New York in 2019. “Epstein was the mastermind, Epstein was the main abuser, and Epstein orchestrated the crimes for personal gain,” the lawyers wrote. “Indeed, if Ghislaine Maxwell had never had the deep misfortune of meeting Jeffrey Epstein more than 30 years ago, she would not be here.” They added before the June 28 verdict that Maxwell “is not an heir, a bad or a stupid socialist” and that she did not deserve the “drum of public condemnation that she wanted to be shut down permanently.” They said her life had been ruined and she had faced harsh and punitive prison conditions since her arrest on July 2, 2020, which would have helped the request for a significant deviation from the sentence instructions that would otherwise require her to spend almost 25 years in prison and up to 30 years. Lawyers wrote that she now lives in the general prison population, but had recently been the target of a credible death threat from an inmate who told at least three others that she had been offered money to kill Maxwell and that he planned to strangle her. in her sleep. However, they added, she has impatiently helped other women detainees by providing GED classes. Their submission included letters from six brothers. Lawyers said Maxwell had been put on alert for suicide after the verdict and a psychologist told her she was against it, but her professional opinion was circumvented by a directive from Washington, DC. Lawyers said she also deserved pardon because she had a “difficult, traumatic childhood with a relentless, narcissistic and demanding father” who made her “vulnerable to Epstein”. In a separate submission, lawyers said the suspended sentencing guidelines were wrong and that he should face no more than four to five years in prison. Maxwell met Epstein shortly after her father, British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, died in 1991 under suspicious circumstances after falling from a yacht named after her and facing charges of illegally looting pensions. of. “It’s the biggest mistake she’s ever made in her life and she will never do it again,” they said of their client, who was Epstein’s girlfriend for a time in the 1990s. They added that she had two devoted, long-term, love affairs with men who had young children at the age of 15 since her relationship with Epstein ended. They cited an eight-year relationship with a Miami lawyer and a 2013 relationship that led to a marriage in which they wrote that “he could not survive the negative impact of this case nor the relationship of the husband with his dishonest wife.” The conviction also set Maxwell as the only target for prosecutors to fill the “empty chair of Epstein” after his suicide, saying four other women were named as Epstein conspirators or accomplices in the Florida prosecution before a decade, but no charges were brought against any of them. Prosecutors declined to comment through a spokesman. They will submit their own written arguments before sentencing. In its final report, the watchdog department proposed a 20-year prison sentence, which would be a slight departure from what the sentencing guidelines would otherwise require, Maxwell’s lawyers said. Maxwell, a 60-year-old American, British and French national who studied in Oxford, was convicted in December of recruiting teenage girls for Epstein for sexual abuse from 1994 to 2004. In April, U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan upheld Maxwell’s conviction, saying he was “directly supported” by extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence in a one-month trial. Earlier this year, Nathan refused to dismiss Maxwell’s conviction on the grounds that a juror told other jurors during the hearings that he had been sexually abused as a child, although he had not disclosed this in response to questions about previous sexual intercourse. abuse in a written questionnaire given. to the jurors.
