Ghislaine Maxwell in desperate bid to block damning testimony of Epstein’s Scots victim
11th-hour legal battle ahead of socialite’s sentencing next week
GHISLAINE Maxwell is trying to prevent a Scottish victim of Jeffrey Epstein from speaking at her sentencing next week.
Sarah Ransome has said she was recruited into Epstein’s sex ring in 2006 when she was 22 and was taken to his private island in the Caribbean where she was repeatedly raped.
She has claimed that she was controlled by Maxwell, Epstein’s madam, whom she has branded a ‘sick and sadistic woman who took pleasure in humiliating and bullying other human beings’.
Miss Ransome was not part of Maxwell’s New York trial last year. Maxwell was convicted in December of five counts of grooming and procuring underage girls for Epstein, who was found hanged in his prison cell in 2019.
But through her lawyers, the daughter of the late second baron of Drumochter asked to make a statement to the court next week when Maxwell is expected to be jailed for more than 20 years.
However, the disgraced socialite’s legal team want to block the move, saying Miss Ransome was not ‘part of the record in this case’ and so should not be treated as a ‘crime victim’.
Maxwell said that the sentencing should not become an ‘open forum’ for any victims of Epstein to speak out or it could unfairly lead to a longer sentence.
But in a letter to the court, a lawyer for Miss Ransome and Elizabeth Stein, an American, argued that they had the right to be ‘reasonably heard at any public proceeding’ such as a sentencing.
Following Epstein’s suicide, Miss Ran
‘Took pleasure in bullying others’
some made an impassioned speech to the court as it closed his estate and awarded her and others compensation.
According to the lawsuit she filed, at one point Miss Ransome tried to swim away but Epstein led a search party to find her.
Miss Stein has told the Miami Herald that she met Maxwell in 1994 when she was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was abused by her and Epstein for three years.
However, Maxwell’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said that the law governing victims’ rights to address the court is ‘not limitless and only covers victims of the conduct underlying the offences of conviction’.
Miss Sternheim said that Miss Ransome’s abuse was between October 2006 and April 2007 – two years after the time period of Maxwell’s trial, which covered crimes between 1994 and 2004.
In a letter to the court, Miss Sternheim states: ‘She therefore does not qualify as a “crime victim”. We do not know when Ms Stein alleges that she was a victim, but she would also not qualify as a “crime victim” if the conduct she alleged post-dates 2004 or she was not a minor.’
Maxwell, 60, has argued she should be sentenced to just over four years as she does not represent a danger to the public.
That would see her freed in little more than two years, given the time she has spent on remand.
Among those who could speak at Maxwell’s sentencing is Virginia Roberts, the woman who claims she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew at Epstein’s command. Earlier this year she settled a civil lawsuit she filed against the duke for a reported £12million. Last week, Maxwell blamed her disgraced father and her shamed boyfriend Epstein for her downfall in a plea for mercy before her sentencing for child sex crimes.
The privately-educated British socialite said she had a ‘difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father’ – newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell. This, her US lawyers argue, made her ‘vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met right after her father’s death’ in 1991.
Ahead of her sentencing for sex trafficking on June 28, Maxwell also revealed that her late father – about whom she spoke glowingly following his death – subjected her to corporal punishment during her childhood. In one incident she ‘vividly recalls’, when she was 13, he banged her hand with a hammer for tacking a picture of a pony on her bedroom wall.
Her lawyers said she and her siblings would receive dressing downs when their father would ‘explode, threaten and rant’ until they were ‘reduced to a pulp’.