Maxwell ‘could f lee to France’ if she wins bail
GHISLAINE Maxwell may never stand trial if she is granted bail and then flees the US for France, prosecutors in New York warned a judge yesterday.
An offer by the socialite to renounce her French and British citizenships in return for bail was dismissed as ‘window dressing’ by the lawyers.
The US prosecution team said the 59-year-old was ‘too great a flight risk’ and warned she could escape to Britain or France if she were given her freedom before her trial in July.
Maxwell’s family have led a campaign for her release and have helped raise £20million in bail money as she fights accusations of procuring underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
But prosecutors told the New York judge that Maxwell still had access to millions of
‘She has connections around the world’
dollars that she could use to flee and had ‘connections’ around the world.
In legal documents sent to the Manhattan federal court, they said her offer to renounce her French citizenship was ‘meaningless’ as France would still block extradition if she arrived there.
Maxwell has been held in a New York detention centre for seven months while she awaits trial on sex trafficking charges.
She denies charges that she helped Epstein groom and abuse girls as young as 14 in the 1990s. She also denies a charge of perjury regarding her dealings with Virginia Roberts, who has claimed she was taken to London and forced to sleep with Prince Andrew when she was 17. He has repeatedly and categorically denied her allegations.
Yesterday Ghislaine’s brother Ian Maxwell said he did not know if the prince would be called as a witness in his sister’s defence.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he did recognise ‘the setting’ of a notorious photo showing Andrew with his arm around Miss Roberts, said to have been taken at his sister’s house in London’s Mayfair. He added of his sister: ‘This isn’t somebody who’s seeking to flee, she has attachments [in the US].’
Mr Maxwell said the way she was being treated in jail, where she lives in a 6ft by 9ft cell, ‘amounted to torture’.
Describing the water as ‘brown’ and the food ‘basically inedible’, he added: ‘There is no natural light, she is under 24-hour round the clock surveillance with ten cameras.’ He called the conditions ‘very wearing physically’ and said she was losing her hair.