My innocent sister Ghislaine has fallen prey to lynch mob
As I await my sister’s sentencing next Tuesday there is one question that’s constantly in my mind. It’s why? Why did she not get out of America and go to France from where there is no extradition to the US, if there was the slightest chance of her being arrested? She has French citizenship. She has many friends in France and she could now be cooling her heels in the Med rather than sitting in the third world hellhole that is New York’s Metropolitan Detention Centre.
It’s a question to which I know part of the answer but it still puzzles me. I believe she stayed because she had a clear conscience. I believe her when she says that she has committed no crime and, the fact of her staying convinces me even more.
Her trusting faith in the US justice system betrayed her and that really puzzles me. She has lived in the US for 30 years and she must know that it’s a strange place, where politicians are easily swayed by lynch mobs.
These can spring from nowhere. As David Aaronovitch wrote in The Times last week, the film Sibyl prompted a “sudden increase in the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MED) in the US from under 100 to several thousand. [This] led to false narratives of forgotten abuse, innocent people being sent to prison and loving families destroyed.”
I also ask why former US Attorney General William Barr appears to have launched a vendetta against Ghislaine?
The most obvious answer is that Barr was embarrassed by his failure to keep Jeffrey Epstein alive in custody. The Epstein verdict is suicide but some believe he was murdered, including his own brother Mark, and there is forensic support for that.
However he died, he was unable to stand trial and the case achieved such notoriety that a vacuum demanded to be filled. Barr accomplished that by pointing the finger at Ghislaine which led directly to the TV press show post her arrest that branded her guilty in the eyes of the world. It would never have happened in the UK.
I’ve been travelling in and out of America pretty well all my adult life. Mercifully, I’ve never sampled its prison system but Ghislaine’s experience has shown me that there’s only one word for it – disgusting.
This is a country that has 4 per cent of the world’s population but houses 20 per cent of the world’s prisoners. The Milwaukee County circuit judge, Joe Donald, said: ‘We lock up close to 2.4million. We’re locking up more people than China or Russia”. China comes second to America with 1.6million prisoners and Russia third with 642,470, according to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research.
Observers have often referred to the “Cowboy Culture” that rots the soul of the American people. It leads to mass shootings and mass hysteria.
In 2021, 693 mass shootings in the US left 703 dead and 2,842 injured in a total of 3,545 victims.
The mass hysteria is well documented: a 2020 survey by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders found that 35 per cent of Americans think the number of children who are victims of sexual trafficking each year is about 300,000 or higher whilst 24 per cent think it’s much higher. It’s a perfect example of “bandwagon” hysteria: kidnappings do occur but, according to the FBI, the number hovers around 100. There is sex trafficking, of course. In 2019, the US National Human Trafficking Hotline recorded contacts with 14,597 likely victims. The average age when first trafficked was 17.
“In 1996,” The Atlantic recounted, “the National Child Safety Council (NCSC) printed photographs of missing children on three billion milk cartons”; the article noted that “a person would have to be paying attention to notice that the photographs were of the same 106 faces.”
These panics have a huge effect on politicians hungry for votes who are pushed long by the tide of public opinion, no matter how crazy. The elected judiciary is in much the same position. It’s what has led to the charges against Ghislaine.
The white slavery panic of the early 1900s led to the passage of the Mann Act, criminalising transporting across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery”. It was wielded against black men who travelled with white women and later against sex workers who were accused of trafficking themselves.
The 1980s hysteria about child sex abuse preceded the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act which made sharing child sex abuse material over a computer illegal but also broadened the list of crimes for which the government could obtain wiretaps.
Today, the difficult problem of child sex abuse material on the internet is being offered as a rationale for law enforcement to obtain access to encrypted communication or for Congress to obligate social media companies to surveil their users constantly. In other words, institutionalised state spying.
I feel great sympathy for anyone genuinely abused but their abuse doesn’t give them the right automatically to be believed when they make unsubstantiated allegations, especially when those allegations are immensely well rewarded financially. That is what has happened to my sister.
Accusers have made vast sums. Lawyers in the Epstein case have been riding a gold-plated gravy train and made at least $60million in cahoots with an ethically failed administration that is running scared of MeToo.
Ghislaine’s key accuser, throughout, has been Virginia Giuffre. She has paraded herself outside the court as a serial victim. But here’s the thing, she was never called as a witness for the prosecution in my sister’s trial.
Within a few months, however, Ms Giuffre will be unable to avoid being cross-questioned in court by Alan Dershowitz, arguably America’s top lawyer. He alleges that she has lied about him and defamed him. He has also stated that he believes she has committed perjury, for which she could go to prison for years.
That’s not going to save my sister from being sentenced on Tuesday but we will be throwing all our efforts behind appealing against her sentence.
I know that Ghislaine is innocent and that she would never have been found guilty in any civilised country. We will never stop fighting for justice to secure her release.
‘I believe her when she says she has committed no crime and, the fact of her staying convinces me even more’