Maxwell sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking young girls
Clad in a navy blue prison jumpsuit, her ankles shackled, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years for procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual gratification.
Maxwell, 60, the multimillionaire’s companion who counted world leaders and royalty among her close friends, will grow old behind bars.
Maxwell has maintained her innocence since her arrest and throughout her odyssey to trial and conviction.
“I am sorry for the pain that you experienced. I hope that my conviction brings you closure,” Maxwell said at the sentencing, addressing the victims in the courtroom.
But U.S. District Judge Allison Nathan, who presided over the trial, was not moved.
“What wasn’t expressed was acceptance of responsibility, Nathan said. “A lack of expression of remorse for her own conduct.”
Several women spoke Tuesday about the impact Maxwell’s crimes had on their lives and their struggle to recover.
“The best way to imprison someone, is to make them create the prison bars in their own mind,” said “Kate,” one of the four victims who testified at the trial, using a pseudonym to protect her privacy.
Maxwell was convicted this past December on sex trafficking of a minor and related crimes. At her trial, four victims explained how Maxwell had recruited and groomed them to be abused by Epstein.
Maxwell and Epstein lived a jet-setting lifestyle, flying on Epstein’s private planes between his mansions in New York and Palm Beach; his ranch in New Mexico and his private island, Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Those luxury locales were the setting for hundreds of alleged sexual assaults and the pair wielded their power to both entice and intimidate the girls they abused. Multiple victims indicated that Maxwell and Epstein directed them to have sex with the pair’s high-powered friends.
Earlier this year, Britain’s Prince Andrew settled a sex abuse suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who has said that Maxwell recruited her when Giuffre was a teenage spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mara-lago club and then directed her to have sex with Epstein and later Andrew, among other of the pair’s prominent friends. Andrew settled the suit for a re
ported 12 million pounds, or roughly $14 million.
For Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, their search for justice has been long and elusive, with regular threats of derailment.
“There were a lot of times I never thought we would get to this point,” said Annie Farmer, one of the women who testified at Maxwell’s trial last year and one of the six who spoke at Tuesday’s sentencing. Farmer’s older sister Maria, also one of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, had first contacted law enforcement about Epstein’s abuse in 1996.
More than a decade later, Epstein negotiated a remarkably lenient plea deal in 2008 without the knowledge of his dozens of victims. Epstein was arrested again in July 2019 and charged anew, but died in federal custody a month later, which many victims saw as a denied opportunity for justice.
In yet another complication, after Maxwell’s conviction a juror revealed publicly that he had failed to disclose his prior history of childhood sexual abuse during jury selection, which threatened to undo the verdict. Judge Nathan ultimately decided that the juror’s failure to disclose — which he insisted was an honest mistake — wasn’t reason enough to nullify the trial, though it will undoubtedly be relitigated during Maxwell’s appeal.
The lead-up to Maxwell’s sentencing has also been fraught. Maxwell’s lawyers threatened to request a delay to the sentencing in a letter Saturday because they said that Maxwell had been placed on suicide watch the day before by prison officials, despite her not being suicidal. They said that she had been denied her legal materials while on suicide watch. Prison officials countered that she had contacted the inspector general for the U.S. Bureau of Prison, saying that she felt threatened by prison staff, but then declined to elaborate on the threat to psychologists at the prison.
The prison’s chief psychologist feared that Maxwell “may be attempting to be transferred to a single cell where she can engage in self-harm.”
Ahead of sentencing, Maxwell offered an account of a troubled childhood in which two siblings died and she suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, and had a distant mother. Her lawyers wrote that her father’s November 1991 death — he drowned while cruising on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine — made her vulnerable to Epstein, though they stopped short of characterizing her as Epstein’s victim. After Robert Maxwell’s death, it was revealed he had been embezzling from the publishing company and its employee pension fund, a huge British scandal.
And while Maxwell’s sentencing submission made reference to “the wounds caused by Epstein,” it expressed little remorse. Indeed, during the trial, Maxwell’s lawyers portrayed the four victims who testified as motivated by financial gain rather than as true victims, and honed in on inconsistencies in their accounts.
Jill Steinberg, a former federal prosecutor and Department of Justice official with extensive experience in child exploitation cases, said she was surprised Maxwell didn’t make an effort in her pre-sentencing submissions to express some sympathy for the victims and thought it could have hurt Maxwell’s hopes of a lighter sentence.
“There are ways to take responsibility for certain things and acknowledging the victims short of taking responsibility,” Steinberg said.
The Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein in 2005 after a 14-year-old girl complained that Epstein had molested her at his Palm Beach mansion. The FBI would investigate, as well. Despite dozens of reports of abuse, Epstein struck a remarkably lenient plea deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida in 2008 that allowed him to plead guilty to two state counts of solicitation, one involving a minor.
He served 13 months in a private wing of a Palm Beach County jail and was allowed to work several hours a day out of a nearby office.
Epstein’s deal was the subject of the Miami Herald’s 2018 Perversion of Justice series, which led federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to reexamine its case against Epstein and bring fresh sex charges against him in July 2019. Epstein died in federal custody one month later, in what has been ruled a suicide by hanging.
Maxwell was charged roughly one year after Epstein, arrested on a 156acre estate that had been purchased months before through a shell company. Maxwell had toured it using a pseudonym.
Epstein’s crimes — and death — hung over the proceedings from the beginning. Maxwell, who was denied bail four times for fear that she would flee the country, was frequently held in effective suicide watch, with nightly surveillance and paper clothes.
Her lawyers complained that the conditions were a direct response to Epstein’s death.
At trial, they argued that Maxwell was being punished for Epstein’s crimes and that Epstein’s name was invoked more than Maxwell’s, at least in the early-going.
But over the course of two weeks, four women testified about the role Maxwell played in befriending them and ultimately preparing them for Epstein’s abuse. They assumed she was Epstein’s wife or girlfriend, and her presence had initially put them at ease. She took an interest in them, which flattered the girls who ranged in age from 14 to 16 when they first met Maxwell. But she also normalized them to the idea of sexual activity, readying them for Epstein’s abuse.
Maxwell initiated a conversation with 14-year-old “Jane,” the pseudonym used by one of the victims who testified as an adult, when Jane was eating ice cream at her summer camp in Michigan. Jane testified that Maxwell had at first felt like an older sister, but later counseled her on how to sexually satisfy Epstein.
Anne Farmer testified at the trial that Maxwell had touched her bare breast when Farmer was 16 during a massage Maxwell gave her at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico. Later that weekend, Epstein molested Farmer in her bed and she escaped only by hiding in the bathroom until he left.
“Kate” testified that when they first met, Maxwell “seemed very exciting and she seemed to be everything that I wanted to be.” Kate, who was 16 at the time of their first meeting, said she had initially been pleased to make Maxwell happy by sexually satisfying Epstein. She would continue to have sexual activity with Epstein for years and feared that cutting off ties with Maxwell and Epstein could hurt her career as a model and singer because of the pair’s highpowered friends.
“Carolyn,” the fourth victim who testified, recalled that soon after they met when she was 14 Maxwell told her she had “a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.” Carolyn said that as a result of Epstein’s abuse she became addicted to pain pills and cocaine to “block out” her experiences.
The victims who spoke at Tuesday’s sentencing described the efforts they have made to recover from the trauma of their abuse.
Steinberg, the former prosecutor, credits their persistence in telling their story as what led to Tuesday’s sentence.
“I think this is a triumph for them,” she said.
Bradley Edwards, a South Florida attorney who represented several accusers, called the sentence “a major victory, not just for Annie or Kate, but for a lot of victims.”
“It sends a really powerful message,” he said. “Nobody is above the law.”