Ghislaine Maxwell, accused Jeffrey Epstein madam, arrested
MIAMI – Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been arrested by federal authorities and is in the custody of federal authorities. She was arrested Thursday morning in a residence in the small town of Bradford, New Hampshire.
The British socialite allegedly helped procure girls for the financier, who died in August 2019 in a jail cell after being arrested himself a month earlier on federal charges of sex trafficking.
Maxwell has been charged with four counts of sex trafficking a minor and two counts of perjury, according to the federal indictment.
The charges against Maxwell involve three girls who were under the age of 18 when Maxwell allegedly recruited them to engage in sexual acts with Epstein between the years of 1994 and 1997. Maxwell allegedly groomed the three girls for Epstein and, in one case, took part in the sexual activity. The girls were allegedly abused at multiple locations, including Epstein’s New York mansion, his estate in Palm Beach, his ranch in New Mexico and Maxwell’s personal residence in London.
“Maxwell’s presence as an adult woman helped put the victims at ease as Maxwell and Epstein intended,” said Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney, in announcing the charges against Maxwell at a Thursday news conference.
Speaking about the perjury charges brought against Maxwell, based on statements Maxwell made in 2016 in a civil suit brought by one of Epstein and Maxwell’s alleged victims, Strauss said, “Maxwell lied because the truth, as alleged, was almost unspeakable.”
Federal prosecutors asked that Maxwell be held without bail, saying she “poses an extreme risk of flight.”
“Maxwell has three passports, large sums of money, extensive international connections and absolutely no reason to stay in the United States and face the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence,” prosecutors wrote in a filing Thursday.
The charges come nearly a year after the new charges had been filed last July against Epstein for alleged crimes between 2002 and 2006.
“This case against Ghislaine Maxwell is the prequel to the earlier case we brought against Jeffrey Epstein,” Strauss said.
Epstein’s charges were driven in part by the Miami Herald’s “Perversion of Justice” series, which detailed Epstein’s lenient sentence for sex charges a decade earlier.
Epstein was found hanging in his cell in New York City the day after thousands of court documents were released detailing Maxwell’s role in luring hundreds of women and underage girls to his homes in Palm Beach, New York and elsewhere – and providing new information on the powerful men who befriended Epstein and are suspected in some cases to have had sex with the women and girls.
The Epstein case is also the focus of an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is looking into whether there was any corruption on the part of federal prosecutors who failed to bring charges against Epstein in 2007-08 when they had the case.
Maxwell is the daughter of the late British media mogul Robert Maxwell, who himself died under mysterious circumstances in 1991.
Maxwell’s whereabouts have been a subject of much interest since the new charges were filed against Epstein. Her lawyer claimed last year that Maxwell’s email server had been hacked.
At times she appeared to play a catand-mouse game with the public, such as when she was photographed at a Los Angeles area In-n-out Burger sitting at a table while holding a spy book – a photo published in the New York Post last August.
Rumors have linked both Maxwell and Epstein to intelligence agencies.