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The investigation into the Epstein partner focuses on their alleged facilitating role in recruiting minors who would later be abused by the tycoon. Maxwell’s defense alleges that his figure is being used to “execute” someone after Epstein’s August 2019 suicide.
New York is the scene from Monday to one of the most anticipated trials around the Epstein case. The US city court began to appoint the jury for the trial against businesswoman Ghislaine Maxwell, the main accused of being the recruiter of minors who would later be abused by magnate Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell and his defense argue that the businesswoman is one more victim of Epstein’s manipulations, however, four women who were abused by him assured that she was in charge of recruiting, deceiving and preparing them before the tycoon abused them as minors of age between 1994 and 2004.
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in one of her mansions in New Hampshire in July 2020. She had been hidden there for months due to the pandemic, but these accusations pointed out directly to her as being involved in the entire sexual abuse plot that sparked Epstein.
The prosecution’s investigations indicate that Maxwell was fully aware that the girls he recruited were not of legal age, since one of them was 14 years old at the time of the events. This argument clashes head-on with that of the defense, who, although it admits the recruitment of women coordinated by Maxwell to perform sexual massages, denies that the accused knew that they were minors.
The Jeffrey Epstein abuse case caused a tsunami of reactions within the entertainment world and high society in the United States. Epstein and Maxwell rubbed shoulders with a significant number of famous people from the United Kingdom and the United States. At first, the only one arrested was Epstein in July 2019, but after his suicide in a cell just a month later, the investigations turned towards who helped the tycoon abuse dozens of minors over the years.
This issue has led Maxwell’s family and their attorneys to argue that she is “paying” the price of being the only one possible “to quench the thirst for blood” in this case and have a defendant answer to Epstein’s misdeeds.
A life of luxury punctuated by scandals
Ghislaine Maxwell is the youngest of nine children born to British media mogul Robert Maxwell. His father was a Jew on the run from the Holocaust who forged an empire from virtually nothing thanks to his connections to the British military. Under his power were the tabloids ‘The Daily Mirror’, ‘The New York Daily News’ and editor MacMillan.
Ghislaine Maxwell lived from a young age in a world of constant mansion parties, eccentricities and contacts with big names in British and American high society. She was able to study at Oxford, where her list of important contacts expanded remarkably and early on she became the representative of her father’s empire in the United States, with the sole objective of competing with her greatest media rival: Rupert Murdoch.
However, the supposed empire that his father had forged turned out to be a lie, as numerous embezzlements and theft of pension funds from his employees were discovered. This controversy caused him to move away from his father, who finally died in strange circumstances on his yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, near the Canary Islands.
It is around this time that she began to forge a relationship with tycoon Jeffrey Epstein. Although she recognized this, she later claimed that she became “an employee” in charge of hiring the workforce for the six houses she owned.
“A very small part of my job was finding professional adult masseurs for Jeffrey,” Maxwell said during a statement in 2016. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone who came to his house was adult professionals.”
But suspicions about her began to hover when Epstein admitted to having been with a minor for the first time in 2005, which led to serving 13 months in prison for forcing the prostitution of a person under 18 years of age. Years of litigation followed, culminating in the tycoon’s second arrest and subsequent suicide.
The Maxwell family denounced their detention as arbitrary to the United Nations. In addition, they denounced that the trial is a “lynching” of Judge Alison Nathan because she refused to deprive it and considered it to be in the public interest of society.
With Reuters and AP
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