Jeffrey Epstein had it all figured out.
If his billion-dollar bank account couldn’t get him off the hook for his vile crimes, that thick black contact book would. It held a bounty of names, addresses and phone numbers of the rich and famous.
And it worked for a very long time, allowing him and his coterie of like-minded pals to rape, assault and exploit underage girls at his pleasure palaces in New York, Palm Beach and the Caribbean.
But that was then and this is now, as socialite-turned-sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell discovered Tuesday.
A federal appellate court upheld Maxwell’s convictions for conspiring to commit sex trafficking with Epstein by enticing young girls and grooming the victims for abuse.
Maxwell, 62, was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in a federal prison. And there she will stay, perhaps until she is as dead as a doornail.
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The publishing heiress’s legal team had argued that Epstein’s stomach-churning sweetheart plea deal from 2007 in Florida protected her prosecution in New York. Among the bon mots in the “worst deal ever” was a non-prosecution agreement for the fiendish financier’s “potential co-conspirators.”
Read: Maxwell.
Epstein — who killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on a slew of sex trafficking charges — copped to soliciting prostitution of a minor to get the deal.
That allowed him to slither out of a federal case and big-time, adult jail. Maxwell thought the deal extended to her.
She tried it at her 2021 trial, her 2022 sentencing and again in her 2023 appeal. Maxwell claimed the feds caved to “public outrage” over Epstein’s deal. Besides, it was her beloved one-time paramour who was responsible, her lawyers argued.
But Maxwell soon discovered that Epstein was no longer pulling strings from the grave. There was no favouritism, no winks this time. And this week, the court found “no errors” in the “District Court’s conduct of this complex case”.
No go, Ms. Maxwell.
To an extent, Maxwell was somewhat of a proxy for Jeffrey Epstein, because by the time of her trial, he was on the midnight train to Nowheresville.
And a slew of women — horrifically abused when they were young — came forward at her trial. There were the threesomes, the grooming, and the sexual abuse at the hands of the posh rich girl.
Jurors saw what the world saw: A black-hearted woman obsessed with money, class, power, celebrity and sex. In that respect, Maxwell and Epstein were two peas in a pod.
Both believed the young girls they shared twin billing in destroying were nothing, trash from the wrong side of the tracks. To be disposed of like an empty tube of lube.
A proper accent, the best clothes and private schools can never hide what Ghislaine Maxwell truly is.
She believed that Epstein’s money, connections, and political cache were her armour. From the beginning, Maxwell has been incredulous about her circumstances. That is born out of a lifetime of supreme privilege.
For someone spoiled rotten since her English-manor childhood having to suffer the temerity of her lessers, be they cops, victims, judges … well!
Her release date is July 17, 2037. She will be 75 years old.
Maxwell will haughtily emerge from prison, believing in her cold heart she has done nothing wrong.
@HunterTOSun