What Ghislaine Maxwell really knows and why she could finally spill all on Jeffrey Epstein: sources
Blanche said Tuesday he plans to meet with the convicted madam, currently serving a 20- year sentence in Florida for sex trafficking young women for her former boss, notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
'She's going to make a deal,' said Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer and law professor who was pals with, and previously represented, Epstein, who died in federal custody in August 2019.
'That's the way things are done. They make deals with the mafia, so I'm certain they are going to try to make a deal with her.'
8 Epstein and Maxwell (center) pose with Gwendolyn Beck( right), a former girlfriend of disgraced former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez.
Getty Images
8 Ghislaine Maxwell pictured during a prison interview from FCI Tallahassee in Florida.
Talk TV
A separate legal expert explained meeting with Blanche presents an opportunity for Maxwell to potentially lessen her sentence or get out of prison in exchange for spiling secrets about her and Epstein's life, which she has closely guarded since his death.
Dershowitz has referred to Maxwell, 63, as the 'Rosetta stone' of information about Epstein, and told The Post Tuesday 'she knows everything — not just about the perpetrators but the victims. And she knows about the victims who became perpetrators.'
Some of Epstein's victims – which number over 1,000 in total according to the Department of Justice – were groomed to recruit other young women, according to court papers.
8 Prince Andrew was forced to pay more than $16 million in a court settlement to Virginia Giuffre years after she accused him of having sex with her.
SplashNews.com
Maxwell has been closely associated with Epstein since the death of her publishing magnate father Robert Maxwell in 1991. The pair were inseparable at high society parties across New York and the world spanning the next two decades.
Maxwell benefitted from Epstein's mysteriously accumulated fortune, while she was seen as his social fixer, able to gain the somewhat unrefined character access to rarefied society circles. Maxwell – who was, at one point, Epstein's girlfriend – got him access even to the UK royal family and facilitated his friendship with Prince Andrew.
The British prince shelled out more than $16 million to Virginia Giuffre, one of the young women recruited by Maxwell and Epstein. Giuffre, who took her own life in April, also alleged she had been passed around as a sex slave to others, although their identities have never properly been established.
8 Ghislaine Maxwell clutches a photograph of her father, the legendary British press baron.
Getty Images
8 Ghislaine Maxwell's family claims that she is in danger at FCI Tallahassee, where living conditions are poor.
Maxwell said through her brother she would be willing to testify before a Congressional Committee on her relationship with Epstein.
It could be the first time federal prosecutors hear her version of events, as both her defense lawyers and prosecutors said they had not engaged in plea negotiations which would require such an interview before her trial.
Her lawyers at the time said she did not need to negotiate as she was innocent.
The case has been thrust back into the spotlight by the justice department's promise to release all the information gathered by the FBI from raiding Epstein's properties earlier this year, only to then walk it back.
A Justice Department-FBI joint memo concluded the 66-year-old financier killed himself in a federal lockup and did not have a 'client list' of powerful friends who allegedly took part in sexual encounters with underage women.
With no more information expected to be released by the federal government, Maxwell's version of events once again becomes of prime importance.
8 Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's closest confidante.
Mathieu Polak
She is believed to have kept silent while her appeals process played out for fear of jeopardizing her chances in the case. However, with most of her possibilities of appeal recently exhausted – apart from one petition to the Supreme Court – she may now feel compelled to give her side of the story.
Her brother, Ian Maxwell, speaks to his sister frequently and has, alongside other members of his family, fought her corner since her initial arrest in 2020.
He also denied the existence of a client list of powerful people girls had been trafficked to.
'Let's not try and big it up for more than it is. I think it was a high-quality address book. I don't think it constitutes 'a list', let alone a list of alleged people to whom young minor girls were trafficked,' Ian told 'Piers Morgan Uncensored'.
'Ghislaine's position on this, for what it's worth, has been, she doesn't ever believe that such a list existed.'
Ian Maxwell has also said he believes his sister should never have been prosecuted due to a deal Epstein cut with Florida federal prosecutors when he was first convicted of sex offenses in 2007.
8 Ghislaine Maxwell during an interview from prison with the UK's Talk TV from January 2023.
Talk TV
In exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges of soliciting a prostitute, the deal Epstein signed said he and any co-conspirators would be immune from further federal prosecution. New York prosecutors later argued successfully in court that the deal's jurisdiction ended in Florida.
Maxwell was then convicted after a trial in New York in 2021, and has been serving her sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, a low security prison, since July 2022.
8 Ghislaine Maxwell (left) with her father Robert Maxwell and her mother Elizabeth Maxwell at Cannes festival in 1987.
Steve Wood/Shutterstock
Her family has long claimed the prison is unsafe and Maxwell is subject to poor living conditions, and frequently placed in solitary confinement. They also say they fear for her life.
'Prisons are very dangerous places and we know from Ghislaine that there are serious staff shortages and more dangerous higher-risk-category prisoners now being admitted to … Tallahassee,' said Ian Maxwell.
With questions about the circumstances of Epstein's death in federal prison in 2019 still raging, some fear for Ghislaine's wellbeing and vulnerability while in prison.
President Trump has blasted the Epstein saga as a 'hoax' and ripped a faction of his supporters who have fixated on the scandal, which involved allegations of orgies and sexual encounters on Epstein's private plane, his homes in Palm Beach and Manhattan as well as Little St. James, his former private island in the Caribbean.
However, he approved of the outreach to Maxwell on Tuesday, saying: 'I think it would be something — sounds appropriate to do, yeah,' according to Politico.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
26 minutes ago
UK Supreme Court quashes convictions of 2 bank traders after deciding their trials were unfair
LONDON -- Britain's Supreme Court on Wednesday quashed the convictions of two financial market traders accused of manipulating benchmark interest rates in one of the biggest scandals to come out of the global financial crisis in 2008. The charges against Tom Hayes, a former Citigroup and UBS trader, and Carlo Palombo, who worked for Barclays, centered around alleged efforts to influence the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or Libor, and its euro currency equivalent Euribor, which were used to set the interest rates on trillions of dollars of loans and other financial products around the world. The court ruled that the convictions of Hayes and Palombo were unfair because the judges in their separate cases gave inaccurate instructions to jurors. That effectively prevented jurors from considering the key question of whether the traders had acted dishonestly. 'That misdirection undermined the fairness of the trial,' Judge George Leggatt wrote in an 82-page decision backed by all five members of the panel that heard the case. Hayes was convicted in August 2015 and sentenced to a maximum of 14 years in prison, which was later reduced to 11 years. Palombo, convicted in March 2019, was sentenced to four years in prison. Both men were released in 2021. 'It destroyed my family, I missed most of my son's childhood,' Hayes told the BBC. 'For so long I've been an international fugitive … and now I can move on with my life, or try to,' he added. The decision came after the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeal in 2022 overturned the convictions of two traders charged with similar crimes in the United States. Hayes and Palombo, whose appeals were repeatedly rejected by British judges, were allowed to take their case to the U.K. Supreme Court after that ruling. The U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office began investigating alleged efforts to manipulate Libor in 2012. That ultimately led to the conviction of nine bankers. 'We have considered this judgment and the full circumstances carefully and determined it would not be in the public interest for us to seek a retrial,' the SFO said in response to the Supreme Court ruling. Libor and Euribor were critical benchmarks that were once used to set the interest rates on everything from business loans to home mortgages and credit card debts. As a result, they also became central to more complex financial transactions such as those used by banks and businesses to bet on interest rate fluctuations. The benchmarks were vulnerable to manipulation because they were set by banks that could profit from swings in interest rates. Each day, major international banks were asked to submit the interest rate at which they could borrow money from other banks. An average of those submissions was then used to set the daily Libor and Euribor rates. During the financial crisis, regulators became aware that some banks were making artificially low Libor submissions to make their institutions seem more creditworthy. Some traders also sought to influence the submissions made by their banks as even small moves in the benchmark rates could boost their profits. Those risks became even more pronounced during the financial crisis, when lending dried up and bankers had to base their daily submissions on a subjective assessment of the market rather than actual loans.
Politico
30 minutes ago
- Politico
House Dems prepare to force more Epstein votes
Democrats are hoping to jam Republicans with Jeffrey Epstein-related amendments ahead of a Thursday Appropriations subpanel markup, according to two senior Democratic aides granted anonymity. The Epstein issue had already scuttled the House floor schedule for the remainder of the week, leading Speaker Mike Johnson to send the House home early for their five-week summer recess. Democrats have attempted to force the issue in the Rules Committee and on the House floor, dividing Republicans who have faced a backlash from the MAGA base. Now, according to the aides, Democrats will do the same at the subcommittee markup at 10 a.m. Thursday. The aides were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge plans. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Wednesday morning that the panel will proceed with the subcommittee meeting as planned. 'There are no changes to our schedule,' he said, despite the House floor schedule being scrapped a day earlier. 'I will, however, convey any changes to you as soon as possible. ... Honestly, I want to see how things go today.' Forging ahead with committee debate would put Republicans on record on controversial amendments, including on ordering the release of information about the Epstein case. Then if House Republican leaders want to pass the bill on the floor in the coming months, it would resurface the drama they are trying to hush. Getting the House out of town early was intended, in part, to starve the Epstein narrative of oxygen on Capitol Hill, and Republicans may not want a fresh fight on the issue Thursday. Cole had articulated for months his goal to get all 12 House spending bills on the floor ahead of the August recess. But he acknowledged this week that delays by the massive GOP tax and domestic policy bill put that goal out of reach. Canceling a full committee markup would put his committee further behind that goal. Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Alleged killer dad Luciano Frattolin spotted in woods
A New York woman thinks she saw accused killer dad Luciano Frattolin 'running up a hill' close to where his 9-year-old daughter was found drowned. Rebecca Kulickowski, a lifelong resident of Ticonderoga in upstate New York, told News10 that she submitted two police reports after seeing a man she now believes was Frattolin running away from his car on Saturday evening, when Melina Frattolin is thought to have been killed. Kulickowski was driving through Ticonderoga toward Schroon Lake when she saw a Toyota Prius stopped in the road. 6 Police arrested Luciano Frattolin after he claimed his daughter had been abducted. Instagram/Luciano Frattolin 'It only caught my eye because as I was driving past the car, I seen a skinny tall guy,' she told News10. 'And he was running up a hill that he was parked next to and there was a wooded area on the bottom of it,' she said. 'I just didn't feel right, there was something about him, I don't know, our eyes locked when I drove by, he looked at me,' she said. Kulickowski did not see a child with the man at the time — but immediately contacted police when she got an Amber Alert about little Melina on Sunday. 'We got an alert and I was like, 'God no.' I can't even tell you what I felt in that moment, it was horrible,' she said. 6 Frattolin is being held at the Essex County Jail in upstate New York Essex County Sheriff's Office The alert was triggered by the girl's dad claiming she'd been kidnapped, which officials later said appeared to be a hoax. The alert was called off when Melina's body was discovered pinned under a log in Eagle Lake, between Ticonderoga and Schroon Lake, close to where Kulickowski saw the suspicious man. 6 The suspect lied that his daughter had been abducted, police said. Wnyt13 6 Frattolin was arrested and charged with his daughter's murder. Instagram/Luciano Frattolin Frattolin, who had custody of his daughter for the week, was charged on Monday with second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse. He and Melina entered the US from Canada on July 11 and traveled around New York and Connecticut, visiting New York City before heading back upstate. Follow The Post's coverage on Melina Frattolin On Saturday at 5:30 p.m. the pair were spotted in Frattolin's Prius in Saratoga Springs, around 67 miles south of Ticonderoga. Around an hour later at 6:30 p.m., Melina called her mother back home in Montreal and sounded well. 6 This map shows where Melina was found dead in upstate New York. Merrill Sherman / NY Post Design 6 Melina was found dead near Lake George. New York State Police Frattolin then allegedly stopped answering his estranged partner's messages about when he would be bringing Melina back, as he was scheduled to do on Saturday. He is alleged to have strangled his daughter to death around an hour after she spoke to her mother, and some two and a half hours before he called in a missing persons report at around 10 p.m. Saturday. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! Frattolin was arrested early on Monday morning and appeared in court later that day where he pleaded not guilty. He is due back in court again on Friday.
