Five Things You Need to Know about Convicted Sexual Predator Ghislaine Maxwell and Her Case – Part I
Especially in light of Trump administration officials’ decision to move her to a “Club Fed”-style, minimal security prison.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump’s executive branch officials moved convicted sexual predator Ghislaine (pronounced “ghee-len”) Maxwell to a “Club Fed”-style minimal security prison camp.
Together, we’ll be covering the five things everyone should know about Maxwell and the growing controversy. Given that there’s a lot to discuss for each, we’ll be breaking this into two parts. In this newsletter, you’ll find the first three things you need to know, and, next week, we’ll discuss two more.
1. Who Is Negotiating for Trump with this Convicted Sexual Groomer of Girls?
The transfer came just days after Maxwell met privately with Todd Blanche, a lawyer Trump named to be Deputy Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice. Blanche represented Trump in the criminal case where, just one year ago, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts for his efforts to “illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor,” Stormy Daniels. (She testified Trump had sex with her in 2006, just 18 months after he married Melania, and that he told the blonde sex worker: “You remind me of my daughter,” Ivanka, who was then 25.) Blanche represented Trump on other criminal charges, too: when he was accused of mishandling classified documents and trying to subvert the 2020 election.
It seems like Trump’s top Justice Department appointees – Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was a Trump lawyer in his first impeachment trial – are continuing to act more like Trump’s personal attorneys rather than public servants who are supposed to secure justice for people harmed by sexual predators.
As Annie Farmer, a survivor of the sex trafficking scheme Maxwell was convicted of orchestrating with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, wrote: “[O]ur country’s law enforcement agencies have only ever arrested these two individuals in connection with crimes committed against countless young women and girls, and the Government’s recent suggestion that no further criminal investigations are forthcoming is a cowardly abdication of its duties to protect and serve….”
In response to the controversy over the prison transfer, an anonymous Trump flack claimed prisoners are moved “routinely” and asserted that Maxwell was not given preferential treatment, even though downgrading security for someone convicted of serious sex offenses violates federal prison policy. Transferring Maxwell to a lower security facility raises serious concerns that Trump insiders may be looking to use her to exonerate Trump, whose name appears multiple times in the files related to the Epstein investigation, though he has denied wrongdoing.
2. A Quid Pro Quo Doesn’t Have to Be Said Out Loud to Be Obvious
Is Maxwell lying or telling the truth in whatever portion of the conversation she had with Blanche that the Trump crisis management operation may release to the public?
The real truth is that Maxwell has every incentive to lie by making assertions designed to help Trump distance himself from Epstein. In 2020, when she was arrested for the serious charges she was ultimately convicted of, Trump bizarrely said “I just wish her well.” Was that public statement a signal, too, from the man who could hold her future in his hands by implicitly dangling the possibility of a pardon for her pre- or post-trial, if she kept him out of the case? In my opinion, it would be sick to pardon someone like Maxwell, who destroyed young girls’ lives, or as Farmer put it in her recent letter to the federal court: “Maxwell is now, to the victims’ horror, herself attempting to escape justice by negotiating for herself a potential pardon." Another filing suggested this set of conduct by the Trump regime is beginning to look a lot like a cover-up.
Helping Trump now, no matter the facts, could obviously help Maxwell secure a pardon – or an easier sentence – like doing time at a prison camp instead of a more restrictive federal prison. The purported hand-wringing by the Trump regime over whether or not to release the recording Blanche made of his meeting with Maxwell seems manufactured to achieve a fait accompli to help Trump’s ratings stop falling due to the scandal involving these sexual predators.
And, why would any reasonable person believe Maxwell since she has repeatedly denied that she recruited, trained, and sexually trafficked young girls, but was convicted for doing exactly that? Maxwell even called Virginia Roberts Giuffre a liar and a “fantasist” during a 2016 deposition in spite of Giuffre’s compelling testimony about how Maxwell recruited her when she was 16 years old, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa in 2000, to be a sexual servant to Epstein. Recently, Trump said he was upset that Epstein “stole” her from his spa–before a claimed falling out between the two men–a characterization of her as akin to chattel, which her family objected to. (Giuffre’s death earlier this year was ruled a suicide; Epstein’s death was also ruled a suicide, though some continue to doubt the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.)
3. How Has the Trump Team Already Rewarded the Sexual Groomer of Teens?
After her two-day meeting with Blanche, Maxwell was suddenly moved to the lowest security facility in the federal prison system, FPC-Bryan in Texas. This is the same prison camp where Elizabeth Holmes is serving a sentence for committing fraud involving her blood testing firm, Theranos. These kinds of camps have been likened to country clubs for white collar criminals, where, unlike at higher security prisons, convicts like Holmes have relatively free movement inside the facility’s buildings and in an outside fenced-in area for working out and hanging out.
However, Maxwell was not convicted of illegal stock trades and given a slap on the wrist, like Martha Stewart. She was convicted of deeply harmful sex trafficking of underage girls and, after a month-long trial, she was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Maxwell was serving that sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee (which, it bears noting, offers far more humane conditions for violent criminals than the nearby concentration camp dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” a creation of Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, offers for innocent people).
At this very minute, Trump’s team is giving comfort to a convicted sexual predator while acting with cruelty toward foreign nationals swept up from their homes and jobs for not having papers. This extraordinary scenario has led to an array of protests. One group of concerned citizens created a huge sign over a California freeway exhorting: “Release the Files, not the Pedophiles.”
I’ll leave you with that thought for now. Tune in next week for two more things you really need to know about convicted sex predator and trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and her case.
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