:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elcomercio/GTUTB2ODGFFDXEQNQYUMIEERTY.jpeg "Ghislaine Maxwell, guilty of sexual crimes, asks the United States justice for clemency")
The British socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell, found guilty in late 2021 in New York of sex trafficking of minors for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, asked for mercy from the US justice, which plans to announce her sentence on June 28.
In a document delivered Tuesday night to the federal court in Manhattan instructing her case, attorneys for Maxwell, 60 years old, ask the judge not to sentence her to more than 20 years in prison, half of the sentence she faces.
The defenders of the daughter of the British press tycoon Robert Maxwell and accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein -who committed suicide in prison in New York in August 2019 before his trial for sexual crimes against minors- allude to the responsibility and they highlight the nefarious influence of these two on their client.
Born and raised in an environment of privilege in the United Kingdom, the former figure of the international jet-set Ghislaine Maxwell, who has triple British, French and American nationality, “had a difficult, traumatic childhood, with an authoritarian, narcissistic and demanding father,” argues the defense.
“This made her vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met after her father’s death. It is the biggest mistake of her life”, writes New York attorney Bobbi Sternheim.
Two weeks before the ruling of the Manhattan court, the defense document recalls that the American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein “was the mastermind, the main aggressor and the architect of the crimes perpetrated in his favor.”
Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on December 29 of five of the six charges against her. The most serious was the sexual trafficking of minors for Epstein, whom she met in the United States just after the death of her father Robert Maxwell in 1991, in strange circumstances due to a fall from his yacht.
Ghislaine Mawxell and Jeffrey Epstein became a couple and were collaborators and accomplices for 30 years.
The financial giant with powerful economic and political connections in the United States and abroad, was accused of pederasty.
Arrested in the northeastern United States in 2020, a year after Epstein’s death, Maxwell has since been in jail in New York and her defense has repeatedly complained about her conditions of detention.
The ramifications of this network of child trafficking splashed British Prince Andrew, a friend of the Maxwell-Epstein couple, who on February 15 sealed a friendly settlement – for 13 million dollars according to the Daily Telegraph – to put an end to a lawsuit of the American Virginia Giuffre who accused him of having sexually assaulted her in 2001 when she was a minor.
The British royal family was spared a civil lawsuit in New York that would have put it in a compromising situation.