She gave nothing away (US Attorney's office)
Always young, always blonde. In this story the girls are a selected type, not human beings. They had loose lives that rattled like spare change. Easily discarded, easily lost. Most of these girls had nothing at all, and even that would be taken from them.
They’ll be sitting outside the school gates, or in the resort where they are doing holiday work, or on a bench at a summer camp. Head down in a book. They want to be singers, or anything to get away from home.
The approach is made by a couple, or by an older woman on her own. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: friendly, worldly, wealthy. Ghislaine is armoured with a classy accent, a Yorkshire terrier, and expensive clothes. She plunges into their lives. One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name. But forget that. Ghislaine wants to play the giggly older sister; pal and confidante.
The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.
Ghislaine Maxwell was from a different universe. The question of her trial was whether she, like the girls, is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein too. Ghislaine, daughter of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and variously described as Epstein’s girlfriend, madam, employee, best friend, pimp, and general, was arrested in 2020. She was accused by the US government of gathering up Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Anne over a decade, like a beachcomber, and delivering them to Epstein.
For four weeks, the trial in lower Manhattan has been watched with awe. Outside the courthouse stand placards and protestors and paranoiacs. Three overflow rooms inside contain the world’s press, concerned private citizens, and podcasters. They are drawn there for irresistibly tabloid reasons: the downfall of rich people in heavenly places who did evil things.
Epstein and Maxwell were high society floaters, who bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams, fishing for famous friends. (Taki says she was “not a bad girl” — I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it.) By the time Epstein earned his first conviction for sex crimes in 2008, the couple had collected an entire Met Gala of chintzy brilliancies: actors, publishers, royals, writers, scientists, academics, and politicians. That constellation has blinded many to the couple’s more gothic collection of broken young women. Why care about them, when they are landmines lying in wait for Prince Andrew, Ariana Huffington, Geordie Greig, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton?
These embarrassing links, the dozens of embarrassing photos that accompanied them, and the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his death, transformed Epstein. In the world’s imagination he was no longer a rich bullshit artist and an abuser. He became a popular demon, a supervillain, a Halloween costume. Writers polished their 24 Carat allusions: Epstein was Machiavelli, he was Mephistopheles. He was the ultraviolet scan that illuminated a rotten system of perversion and power. Maxwell’s trial was widely considered to be the last chance at justice for many of the women who claim to have been abused by Epstein.
But Epstein is dead. This was Ghislaine’s trial, and throughout she has been circumspect, almost dignified, and given nothing away. Videos outside the courthouse showed her old and arthritic and beaten down. She does not look like she will ever adjust to thinking of herself as a dangerous criminal. She appeared tired of being herself. Sooner or later, compassion was bound to be felt for the accused. It’s only natural. Old university acquaintances suggested they felt pity for her. Others wondered what went wrong, without ever probing the circumstances of Maxwell’s alleged crimes. Friends anonymously briefed glossy magazines, and said they could never imagine her scoring trailer trash by skulking around outside public schools. It just wasn’t her style, darling. None of them ever took the stand to defend her though. That just wasn’t their style.
These disposable, costless emotions were a perfect echo of the defence put up by Maxwell’s attorneys. They said she had become a bullseye for the limitless greed, pointless anger, and false memories of the accusers. Maxwell was the real victim here. This was whiplash; an acidic backwash from Epstein’s death that mistakenly threatened to dissolve their client, because he could never stand trial. Eternal archetypes were invoked. “Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple,” said one Maxwell lawyer, “women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men”.
The men were Epstein, and at a more distant remove, Robert Maxwell. To believe in the defence, you had to believe that Ghislaine had been without a sense of her own interest for decades. That she was helplessly shaped by these amoral patriarchs. Her father and Epstein were eerily similar, if not the same man. Both escaped obscurity and exchanged it for wealth. Both courted ‘brilliant scientific minds’ with praise and parties. Both were talented at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals they destroyed on their way up. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Hoffenberg might have been describing Maxwell.
How much of their behaviour was for show, and how much was real, and whether they knew the difference, was unclear. A bewildering aura of fantasy surrounds them. They had a curious shared interest in the Marquis de Sade, and they inhabited airlessly Sadean worlds of selfishness, injustice, and misery. In de Sade’s pages nobody ever changes. His characters are glazed and flat; moral development is an impossibility. As one of the libertine monks in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) — a novel Epstein displayed in his home and proudly showed off to a journalist — rhetorically asks: “Can we become anything other than we are?”
Maxwell and Epstein answered that question with an emphatic no. They would forever be outsiders who shredded convention, determined to consume whatever and whoever they found once on the inside. Each was regarded with a mixture of dread, sarcasm, and awe. Their most credulous, generous supporters came from the top. Epstein, as Maxwell did the British establishment of his time, regarded them with contempt. He once told his brother that if the public knew how corrupt his Wall Street friends were, there would be a revolution.
Above all these men lied, unstoppably and uncontrollably. They lied to business associates, mistresses, journalists, judges, creditors, and lawyers. They lied about money to make more money. Their skill was faking and lying uncommonly well enough to create new, unstable realities. Their lies became eight-storey yachts and the largest townhouse in Manhattan. Every new acquisition was honeycombed with surveillance equipment; recording devices and teeny tiny cameras. This is usually considered further evidence of these men’s perfidy. Blackmail gatherers, Epstein and Maxwell, working on another sick angle, preparing a new front in their war on everyone they ever met. But they were not spying on their guests.
The evidence that Epstein blackmailed his friends is thin, and has fallen apart before. Maxwell used his devices to track a secretary who didn’t love him around London, as she slept with one of his underlings. They surveilled their environments because all their lies made their environments, and themselves, insecure. Each was one or two discoveries away from the collapse of their entire world. The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail. It was a form of consolation. It proved that for all their lies, they were still real. One of Epstein’s homes was lined with framed glass eyeballs made for injured English soldiers from a deadlier century. The display was a warning to his guests, and a reminder to himself: watch your every move.
Are we supposed to paint Ghislaine Maxwell on this bleak canvas as the feckless girl next door? A crass ingénue, an Eve who didn’t know any better? It is closer to the truth to say that both men needed her as much as she needed them.
Maxwell family legend has it that Ghislaine was anorexic as a very young child. She was probably abused by her father, as he was by his, when she was an adolescent, with riding crops and shoe horns. But by the time she arrived, fully formed and totally integrated, at Oxford during its woozy Brideshead revival years in the early Eighties, Ghislaine’s dramas of individuation were over.
She was ahead of the pack, imperious from the off. She spoke five languages and was the director of a football club. The beautiful “glamazon” rested a boot on Boris Johnson and parties with Gottfried von Bismarck. She was inadvertently to blame for the creation of George Monbiot. Her father kept one photo of his nine children on his desk — a portrait of Ghislaine. As his mania grew and his business empire fell apart in the later Eighties, she remained good, pure, true. His colleagues thought him “pre-moral”, disconcerting, disgusting, and frightening. And he was fond of saying “I have a beautiful daughter who is just like me.”
Ghislaine was already in New York when her father died in 1991. Supposedly adrift, grieving, and broke, the conventional narrative has Epstein performing a bat-like swoop and winging Ghislaine off into his cave. “He saved her,” one Maxwell friend told Vanity Fair, “Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that, and never will.” In this telling Ghislaine is another picked-up, pitiable woman, ensnared by a master manipulator. Whatever crimes she involved herself in later could almost be excused. They were payments for a debt.
All you have to do to believe that is forget she was Robert Maxwell’s daughter. She had a glittering upbringing. She was skilled at getting what she wanted, at reeling people in, at throwing parties. Epstein was cash rich but class poor. Described in these early years so often as a “schlub”, he needed a charismatic partner to launch his conquest of Manhattan’s charity auction set. Otherwise he was just another nerdy dogsbody who helped plutocrats avoid paying tax. Every bank in the city had a thousand of those.
Ghislaine helped propel his somersault into the ranks of the super wealthy. He valued her as his equal: “Ghislaine is the best at what I need,” he said in 2002. “Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently… She’ll come to a meeting, and not only will she be able to translate what the person’s saying… but she can also give me a sense of is the person telling the truth.” All she received in return were private jets, lavish estates, and vast sums of money.
This world melted away, like her father’s did. The trial came long after the deluge. It was mind-numbing. There were endless examinations of flight logs, property portfolios, and financial transactions. The accusers were tortured on the stand by Maxwell’s lawyers. To save their Eve, they had to destroy the credibility of four others. The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”
If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom. You had to look for it elsewhere. The dozen pictures of her and Epstein released during the trial are a good place to start. She has the same face in every photo. A greying man and his partner, affluent and easy, sitting in a grass field with a dog; as perfectly self-possessed and unreal as a couple in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.
This was the only reveal from the trial. There were no big prizes, no doomily grim revelations about paedophile rings operating at high altitude, among the jet set, that the placards outside the courthouse prayed for. The apocalypse never arrived because the apocalypse had already happened: it was the afterlife of the four accusers. There was no final answer to the mystery of Epstein’s death. Only the look Maxwell gives him in each image, taken over the span of their eleven-year relationship. Love. Nothing could be guiltier.
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SubscribeAll very emotional. all very pop psychology, but what criminal act is she accused of and what evidence has been submitted to justify a conviction?
I don’t have to like the accused to view this as a show trial.
She is accused ( amongst others) of “transporting a minor for the purposes of criminal sexual activity”
If it’s a “show trial,” it’s because people on both sides of the Atlantic are interested. If you are not, you are free not to read the articles. Interest yourself in something pious.
I think you meant to address that comment to me rather than to poor old Peppercorn.
What really caught my attention was the way that Maxwell is paraded around in handcuffs, presumably for the edification of the mob as they shout “Hang the witch”.
I have no more confidence in the US justice system than I do in its political system.
That’s just the perp-walk. It’s very American, like root beer, and quite as repulsive. Everybody accused of a crime over there gets it. Americans seem to love it, though.
Exactly , the real danger may have been giving them easy money which could have caused one or two to become drug dependent , and thus brought them into low level prostitution
A de Sade novel on a bookshelf is all he can offer ! Will Lloyd’s World of Interiors of the rich and famous .
Enter this chamber of horrors and let Will show you around their evil inner lives . Holiday snaps used to great effect .Even the Labrador looks away in disgust
How can this be a show trial ? The criminal acts she is accused of are very clear: inciting, assisting and encouraging young, vulnerable people to become the sexual objects of a repulsive man who controlled her. It’s impossible for me to comprehend how anyone can not understand that Ms Maxwell was on trial for very serious, real offences. Unless, of course, those disbelievers (of whom there seem to be many reading and commenting here) are themselves as evil and perverted as Ms Maxwell appears to be.
I am no supporter of Maxwell or Epstein but this article offers little in the way of facts. Crimes as serious as those she is accused of should also not be treated lightly as regards evidence.
Perhaps they like to think they are not. Denial is a powerful emotion.
Your choice oflanguage betrays you.
I suspect that she is on trial because the guy that you really want is beyond reach.She is a scapegoat.
The jury disagree with you. I suppose you’re going to say that they were misled, biassed, whatever. She’s going to be locked up for the rest of her days. It’s a fair and good result.
Does that deserve a sentence of 65 years?
yes.
How about 165 years ?
Exactly ! From what I read they massaged the guy and then he self -pleasured I think there was one mention of sexual intercourse . 65 years for helping to bring girls to do that !
Also is there any study of the age when girls in the US actually start having sex , as opposed to age of consent , which since humans mature at different rates is bound to be an imprecise measure , and anyway varies from state to state .
In the UK most girls seem to have sex well before the age of consent , from what women say . And usually with people older than them .
Ok there needs to be an age of consent , but to equate facilitating these girls to hang out with a middle aged guy with the act of murder is absurd . And soul murder isn’t a crime
I also wondered what the point of this article was. It reads like something from a schmaltzy chick novel. The writer knows nothing about Maxwell or Epstein beyond what everyone else knows and appears to have conjured up an insider’s eye view from their fevered imagination. Personally I just want facts thanks.
Facts ? You have the witnesses,
And according to them (prosecution witnesses ) no rape or forced sex of any kind , no threesomes , no sex of any kind with Maxwell , hardly any sex at all apart from eroticised massage and that not with Maxwell , ( brushed breasts once when Maxwell massaged one girl) and THAT’S worth 65 years in a US jail !
Not emotional enough for my taste. A thoroughly entertaining piece of credibly informed writing. Trials of the rich and famous are always going to be on show but that does not make them a ‘show trial’.
Nor does it mean that they are NOT show trials
So’s she’s guilty, of 4 counts out of 5. What do you say now? The jury, after 5 days of deliberation, decided the evidence was enough to convict. Her lawyers (on $7mn) will of course go through the motions of an appeal. I think, as intelligent people, they know they have no chance of reversing a jury verdict. But they are being paid a lot of money, so they have to show willing. I say: thank goodness that justice has been done, and a truly evil person (the daughter of a truly evil man) has met her comeuppance.
‘Truly evil’ What nonsense . If you are going to call her truly evil what words have you left for a Rose West ? Hyperbolic Bollox !
Whenever a couple get accused of heinous crime the woman or her counsel always suggest that they were being coerced by the man in the relationship. In the Doors Murders Hindley claimed during the trial that she was forced take part in the killings and sex abuse.
Yes guilty of not looking hatefully at the man she is being photographed with .
And who knew how to pronounce Maxwell’s first name ? I certainly didn’t and apparently not even the BBC gets it right . So why is it a sign of poor reading ability if one of the accusers struggles .
And why do the lawyers for Maxwell have to worry about upsetting these women who are trying to put their client behind bars for decades .These are middle aged women who have already been compensated millions of dollars , and will very likely be able to get more if Maxwell is convicted .
The strange support for Maxwell here is unnerving.
Some ppl, including myself, will always support those who are enduring a show trial as a proxy for other dead ppl. If the prosecutors could identify some, they’d try ppl as proxies for the extremely dead Jimmy Savile.
Why is this a “show trial”, exactly? Looks like she had a case to answer. If anything the number of cases are a sample. She’s not accused of being Epstein but of counts of grooming and transporting a minor.
If there is a case to answer then the evidence should make that clear and she should get her just desserts. My objection is to the recent fashion of accusation and proximity being enough.
The evidence is being presented in the trial. What problem do you have with it?
I think they are a subgroup , but not a random sample .
So now I am a member of a subgroup, because I am suspicious of what appears to be a display of lynch mob mentality.
Let us not forget that the comments here are in response to the above published article, not a debate on whether or not I am a wicked person
Long live the subgroup.
If she had a case to answer, she should have been prosecuted of such heinous crimes at the outset. She wasn’t! Does that not reflect badly on the US system of justice?
As an American citizen, our justice system is seriously flawed. I don’t have an opinion on Ghislaine, whose name i don’t know how to pronounce and see absolutely no reason why I should. Politics plays way too much in our appointment of judges and prosecutors want wins, not necessarily justice.
She is on trial for offences, particularly nasty ones, that she is accused of perpetrating. What other people have been paid for their pain is irrelevant; her innocence or guilt are what is relevant in her trial.
The one offence she has been guilty of is pimping.
Do you know of others that were revealed ? Why were they ‘particularly’ nasty in your opinion ?
Not support, just an old fashioned regard for evidence and ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
For having views you disagree with ?
Why do you come here if you do not want to think again (or at all) ?
Are you actually saying I should be *banned* because I adhere to the principle of innocent until proven guilty and reject trial by media? Wow. Just wow. I’m glad she was found guilty by a jury in a court of law – justice has prevailed thanks to EVIDENCE and a strong case being made. That’s it.
“And why do the lawyers for Maxwell have to worry about upsetting these women who are trying to put their client behind bars for decades.” I’m guessing it’s not unrelated to Maxwell and Epstein having preyed on them when they were children so they could sexually abuse.
The evidence I have seen is they were not asked to do anything they were uncomfortable with and most stuff involved massage only .
Most of the girls were over the age of consent and if one or two had sex at a younger age that is down to Epstein . The author and the prosecution wants to make Maxwell responsible for everyone bad that ever happened to them . ‘You murdered my soul ‘ as one of these middle aged women shouted . Was she even a virgin at the time ? I can see how easy money ( and 100s of dollars for a massage was easy money for a teenager) could have lead them into taking drugs and a bad lifestyle.
If she knowingly trafficked them for sex when under-aged then she is guilty , but I am not sure the prosecution proved that .
Your lack of understanding of child abuse astounds me. These were underage girls. Two were 14. Oh, I forgot, with parental permission, girls of 14 in New York, can be married to much older men… I suppose the word “could” in your last sentence gives you a “get out of jail free” card in your victim blaming. “was she even a virgin at the time”… That is victim blaming and you should know better.
These were vulnerable young girls/women who were trafficked for sex by a woman who thought nowt would touch her. Hopefully she gets her comeuppance now. Sometimes the worst crimes against women are perpetrated by women in exchange for a lavish lifestyle where she doesn’t have to do much work except keep the man company in bed. In most circles, that is called prostitution.
She’ll get years in a nasty slammer.
There was no suggestion of forced sex or rape or threesomes or pretty much any sex beyond slightly erotic massage . I think it is unlikely any of them were traumatised by the experience and whether they were sexually experienced is I think relevant here .
Very weird victim blaming. The middle aged women weren’t always middle aged, they were underaged at the time Why are you worrying about whether they were “even” virgins? If someone underaged takes money then it’s still grooming and illegal to have sec with them.
Yes agree with you. Their being virgins irrelevant. Their age and what they were asked to do, or expected to do, is the question.
Their age was underage, what they were being asked to do was have sex with Epstein after the massages. That’s what the prosecution alleges. And these 4 are sample cases, the number of victims is far greater.
The comment section here is pretty weird. Unfortunately I have paid for a year subscription but that won’t be renewed, not sure I want the association.
I agree.
I’m a monther, and when it ends in about 18 days, I’m gone. Creepsters proliferate here.
Irrelevant ??
Irrelevant as in trying to use that as a way to paint the victims as more ‘innocent’, or, if not virgins, ‘less innocent’. I remember the way the Yorkshire Ripper victims were viewed differently when described as prostitutes, even if they weren’t, and how the narrative changed when someone ‘innocent’ got murdered.
Are you sick?
Yes, he is. Like a lot of commentators on this thread.
It’s a strange thread all right. Not just full of apologists for child sex trafficking and victim blaming but a clear bias to those defending from the thumbs up brigade.
Please tell me:
– what sex acts the girls were asked to perform
Do you know ?
The cynic in me suggests that perhaps someone told her to shout it out. In the USA it seems lawyers may coach witnesses, which is forbidden in the UK.
She’s accused of the exact same crimes as the muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham and other places. Would you be so quick to defend those monsters as you are Maxwell?
Money – the root of all evil – was the basis for the trial. Money for the lawyers as well as the accusers.
It seems that Lady Ghislane is a bad person, like her father before her. But the trial is to determine whether she is guilty of a crime, not merely being a bad person, so the question is “what crime?”
Surprisingly, the prosecutors put on a flimsy case and inept case, and the defense was not much better. I was expected the “hidden videos” of various celebs to be revealed. Imagine my disappointment! But what will the jury make of it?
Perhaps Lady Ghislane’s coming trial for perjury should be easier, as the issues are more clear cut. If Lady Ghislane is not convicted here for being a bad person, but later convicted of perjury, expect her to be slammed at sentencing.
There are perhaps ten perjury trials per year in the US, but they should be more common, since when one lies under oath it corrupts and undermines the entire system. Jessie Smollett should absolutely be tried for perjury, given his massive lies under oath in his recent trial.
Her crime was running a Ponzi scheme except in this case the currency was very young girls.
Is the trial finished? If not then alleged crime?
What crime? Well one she is accused of is “transporting a minor for the purposes of criminal sexual activity”
Were they in wheelchairs ?
No they were underaged. This comment section is a cesspool.
That’s a bit of a stretch.
It is rather frightening. I didn’t know so many people thought it was OK to run a child sex ring! I’m beginning to see Alex Jones in a better light. Yikes.
What on earth is the point of your comment since you know the answer?
She is perverted.
She’s a creep.
Creep.
I remember one of Cochrane’s team in the OJ Simpson case saying words to the effect that “we didn’t play the race card, we played the competence card”.
One can be derisive about that statement, and believe your team deserve to win by virtue of nothing more than being the “good guys”. But lawyers still have to be at the top of their game to land the conviction in these cases.
Little about the way the Maxwell trial was prosecuted seemed particularly “competent”. See also Kyle Rittenhouse.
Lady Ghislaine is the yacht her father jumped/fell/was pushed off.
Yes, thanks for sharing, I know. I use the term Lady Ghislaine to mock her. Maybe you like her, maybe you don’t (I don’t) but she is fair game for mocking.
Is the author of this piece forgetting that Maxwell is innocent until proven guilty?
Have you been following this story? Doesn’t sound like it.
Indeed. Has the trial finished? The narrative, with the ubiquitous term ‘alleged’, almost skips lightly near to the suggestion that trials are for sentencing and nothing more – the annoying formality of examination of evidence etc already performed by media and public.
And Epstein and Maxwell as ‘amoral patriarchs’. Amoral abusers more like.
That’s the bit that bothers me. That the trial is just a formality because the court of public opinion has already decided. I’m no fan of Maxwell or Epstein, I’m sure if the evidence is there she will be found guilty. But if justice is to be trusted it can’t be allowed to be merely the bonfire demanded by the torches and pitchforks mob.
Who is demanding that? There is a trial and it’s ongoing. While plenty of her supporters on this comment section are victim blaming or s**t shaming nobody has yet said she doesn’t need a trial to prove her guilt or innocence.
Terrible writing, I hope Unherd ups its editorial game and begins to filter out these breathy, overblown, “pieces” (cf the dancer writing about her body at great length a few days ago). The model should be George Orwell, not Ernest Hemingway.
Disagree. The writing of this piece is excellent. That of the dancer’s piece, not so much.
I was not in the court and have not seen the evidence but these kind of sexual abuse cases are always problematic.
You have unreliable and vulnerable witnesses whose evidence individually would never be sufficient to justify a prosecution. So the tactic is to construct a case built on the evidence of several unreliable witnesses in the hope that repartition of similar allegations from several unreliable witnesses will invest those allegations with a credibility they not merit and will be sufficient to secure a conviction, all driven by a prosecutors so determined to pursue a conviction that they almost deliberately turn a blind eye to the the gapping flaws in their case..
It put me in mind of the Kelly Michaels case. She was a young nursery assistant who was wrongly convicted of 250 charges of child sexual abuse in the 1980s. She recently gave a rare interview to John Ronson for his series Culture Wars on Radio 4, which is very well worth listening to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00120vp
The allegations were so fantastical and lacking in credibility that it is difficult to believe that any sane person would give them the time of day, yet the case was pursued.
She quotes one ‘expert’ as giving evidence to the effect that none of her alleged victim showed any signs of trauma because they were so traumatised and that they were in fact the most traumatised children this expert had ever seen.
See also
https://www.famous-trials.com/mcmartin/907-michaelscase
I understand writers of Will’s leaning desperate to throw Trump’s name in to balance out the Clintons, but I have yet to learn of any Epstein landmine lying in wait for Trump, other than the photo of them socialising together which gets trotted out every time. Maybe it’s a social distancing crime?
Genuinely interested in any joined-up substantive Trump rumours on a par with the L-Jet?
Blair is of course omitted from such innuendo although the circumstantial evidence is greater.
The Clintons are mentioned several times but it never seems to blow up on them. Imagine if it were Trump mentioned as often as they are, how many column inches and TV segments it would fill. We’d never hear the end of it. But for the Clintons… softly softly. I’m not particularly a Trump fan but the hypocrisy and derangement over him by the Left is staggering. Not to mention the deliberate lack of focus on whom Christopher Hitchens “called a war criminal, a rapist, and a pathological liar”.
Yes, BC is a truly nasty piece of work. Hillary loves power, and that’s the only reason she’s still around.
I am not a climate denier, and in fact am a fan of modern renewable technologies – if backed up by nuclear. It gets us off the reliance on Saudi and Russia if nothing else but George is clearly a Neo-feudalist, and like most of his class, in favour of the mass immigration that benefits him but not the existing bottom 80%. You might think that migration from poorer countries would in fact harm the environment, but George thinks the opposite. Here is where he sides with the Belorussians attempt to de-stabilise Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/15/border-walls-triggering-ecological-disaster-humanity-wildlife-habitats-extinction
Monbiot is basically a Neo-feudalist.
Moonbat is not even Neo – he is a classical feudalist who thinks he should choose who thrives and how they do it. Whlist Epstein appears to be a creepy pervert and probably a sex cirminal, he paid lots of wages for lots of years and poured money into builders and decorators in many states, thereby helping a lot of ppl to get along… and Moonbat has done what? Thorium fission and hydrogen to directly replace hydrocarbons would solve the fossil fuel question whether or not it creates AGW. The eco-nazis can’t let this happen or their raison d’etre disappears and they have to go back to their SWP roots. hanging around looking miserable and whinging all the time….. hey, wait a minute?!
For every 3rd worlder that immigrates, an extra 1st world consumer, with associated carbon footprint, is born.
I hate writing like this. Well writing like this about people and events like these.
It serves no purpose beyond illustrating the skills of the author.
It sheds no new light on the personalities or events. Offers nothing resembling a fact.
It’s mood writing. It’s myth creation. It creates an aura, a smokescreen for us to peer into and try to discern half truths.
Writing like this should never be used to describe crimes like these.
There are real victims in this story and writing about the accused in this fashion simply belittles their suffering.
“I hate writing like this” Well don’t then. (Couldn’t resist)
Yes, I laughed at that too – a nicely-curated example of leftist self-regard. If I was that fond of myself I would be unable to trust me, but probably I wouldn’t realise.
Yet our elites nowadays, the ones with power and wealth, are not blue blood aristocrats anymore, they are self proclaimed progressive social justice warriors agitating for NetZero, BLM, pink p***y hats, and equality, diversity and ‘representation’ in all things.
I can’t help but feel some sympathy for Ghislaine, a broken human being who has fallen from a glittering existence to some kind of hell. Don’t bother shouting at me about the young women she allegedly procured; it’s possible to to feel sympathy for both.
I think she was captured and modelled by her father, who charged through 1960’s and 1970’s Britain lying, bribing and bullying, leaving a trail of destroyed humans behind him. He was a truly evil man. I suppose the moral of the story is that”evil begets evil”. Is it possible to be a good person when you are in the net of an evil person or group of people ? Survival dictates imitating your torturers.
He didn’t necessarily start as an evil man. He started as an orthodox Czech jew, escaped, and had a useful, perhaps bloody war (I don’t know the details). He was also a Labour MP at some point, although it’s seldom mentioned.
reading between the lines it sounds like she gave Monbiot the boot when they were students. So in a parallel world somewhere did Monbiot get off with Ghislaine and start a life as a playboy paedophile ring financer and Jeffery Epstein became a whiny ecowarrior?
She saw the writing on the wall at his first arrest and knew it was a matter of time before the shite really hit the fan. As soon as he was arrested and thrown in jail she did a disappearing act.
Listening to John Sweeney’s podcast on Ghislaine, he says that her father in his heyday used to go to the roof of the Mirror building and pee off it, on to the unsuspecting people below. And as she did, metaphorically, on to those poor teenagers? Such contempt for the “little people”.
Does anyone believe a word John Sweeney says?
Ah, the curled lip dismissal, so British of you.
John Sweeney had a fellow on, who used to work for Maxwell and witnessed this behavior first hand.
Lies don’t buy yachts and private islands. Where did his money come from? All 3 of them (Maxwell’s father who died under mysterious circumstances) had ties to powerful intelligence services. Do we have proof they are blackmailing people? No. But Justice John Roberts is indeed on the fly list of lolita express as one of those “powerful” people who was just drawn in by Epstein’s charms. I mean… who would want to blackmail a supreme court judge?
Hey, this is a strange case. Everyone involved seems to be a victim.
I’m waiting for the BBC, or Netflix, to release the story soon.
It’s not a crime to want to “get away from home” even when you are 14 or 15, to be sure. But these women, even when they were “children” of 14 and 15, were apparently happy to go along with whatever their “hosts” had in mind. Yes, they were “abused” and yes they were “manipulated” and yes they were “taken advantage of” and yes they were “victimized”. But 14 and 15 year old girls do have some agency about them. Even if Ghislaine is technically guilty of trafficking, I personally don’t think jail time is warranted. When the prosecutorial justice system decides it doesn’t want to enforce the law, the complaint becomes a “civil matter”. The “trafficking” of these “girls” is a social matter. Where were their parents?
I hesitate to opine in such a definitive way, because for sure, if it was my daughter involved, I might want revenge. But I’m not sure that a young woman starting her sexual life too early is as permanently damaging as all that. Girls as young as 11 and 13 are becoming sexually active and how is it treated ? As a social problem. Some dudes might get prosecuted, but many are not. What Ghilaine stands to be punished for is helping a rich man procure. It’s distasteful. But what is also extremely distasteful is how voyeuristic our society is. This trial reflects very badly on ALL of us.
I also hesitate to opine about the justice of more jail time, because the sexual abuse of teenage girls (and boys) is an ugly, ugly phenomenon indeed. What is different about Ghislaine’s case is that the abuse was among strangers and not among friends or family. Have we heard evidence of violence? I don’t think so. It involved purported friendships. When the uncle or grandfather is the abuser, it is a family tragedy. When the abuse is by a new-found friend, the lines are more blurred.
Ghislaine’s soul is not our business. And can we even be sure Carolyn ever had a soul ? No, we can’t. Causative factors are tenuous at best. Remember this is a criminal trial and NOT a civil matter. Ghislaine’s attorney may want to spin that little bit of drama-dressed-up-as-evidence in closing argument.
And where is the commercial nature of Ghilaine’s pimping ? Is there a paycheck or a 1099 or a W-2 somewhere with a job description ? It’s a silly question, true. But her relationship with Epstein was personal, to be sure. Doesn’t the crime of trafficking require more than just a tag-along affair ? I’m skeptical about the “evidence”. It’s cuts too many ways in both the exculpatory and culpable directions.
I’ll need to watch more of Robert Gruhler’s show, Watching the Watchers to see what evidence is really being offered in this show-trial. But I think it’s clear that what we really want to know is the culpability of the powerful men and women in the Black Book. This is a high-powered reveal of the secret world of the rich and famous. Ghislaine is a casualty.
‘Yes, they were “abused” and yes they were “manipulated” and yes they were “taken advantage of” and yes they were “victimized”. But 14 and 15 year old girls do have some agency about them.’ You weren’t a member of the criminal defence counsel for the paedophile rape gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Halifax, Oxford, and a dozen other towns and cities in the UK by any chance? Because you use exactly the same ‘rationale’ to justify child abuse.
If this was a show trial it would be on television.I’m assuming you are aware of the fact that women will sell their children to men for sex. It’s a common problem particularly in impoverished countries. The young girls in this case were ‘trailer trash’ as far as Maxwell was concerned. I’m surprised she even bothered to groom them, she had so little regard for them.
It will be interesting to compare Maxwell’s sentence with that of the Rochdale etc. gangs.
What a disgusting attitude. Would you feel the same way about the Muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham? After all those girls were of a similar age, and were given gifts and attention in exchange for performing sexual favours on much older men. I’d wager you wouldn’t be so quick to defend those monsters though would you?
Maxwell wanted for nothing in life. If the jury finds she chose to deliver underage girls to Epstein in full knowledge that he was going to abuse them then she deserves everything that’s coming to her
Nice job, UnHerd, on the Maxwell psychology aspect. MSM has been loath to cover this. Why? Clinton, Trump, Gates, British royalty- all on the flight logs. Why did Ghislaine keep a black book? Coincidental there were intelligence links or that Epstein committed suicide? These girls are brave and unlikely to be compensated financially for the pain of testifying. Should damages be awarded in civil trial, we shall see, but the rats have fled the sinking ship and all those millions with them. And where are the missing tapes collected by police in Florida? One has to wonder when the conspiracy theories make more sense than the stated evidence. BTW, the money trail would be the first place to look, if prosecution had the nerve, which they don’t seem to. The money only makes sense as payoffs or blackmail as Epstein did not have an explicable investment strategy. Professional investment types smelled a rat from the beginning.
They have already been compensated by a victim’s fund following his death. Therefore they could have just not bothered to testify. However, they want to see her convicted for what she did to them and I don’t blame them. We will never know the full extent of her and Epstein’s crimes because he had entire police depts, powerful people and politicians in his back pocket. And he didn’t kill himself.
Whatever she may have done, Ghislaine Maxwell is being used as a scapegoat for all the rich Americans who committed sex crimes.
And who, needless to say, are Too Big to Fall – or even stand trial.
True, but she’s the one on trial. Tough. She has to take it.
Agreed. Money and power can buy innocence. Clearly Ms Maxwell had sufficient of neither in comparison to those who preferred to keep their names out of the limelight. Hush money is the most cost-effective legal tool on the planet.
To accuse someone for their parentage and privileged upbringing, is equivalent to accusing someone for the colour of their skin. Neither is of their making.
Did the prosecution ever say why she was not prosecuted for the crimes at the outset? If something is a crime, it is a crime, and not subject to other circumstances.
I would suggest that she had two things against her – she was British and she was rich.
For example, Charlie Chaplin was found guilty of a paternity suit for the same reasons – British and rich.. In his case, he had to give the baby his name and support her throughout her life, regardless of the fact that tests had proved he was not her father.
With such a justice system, it would be immoral for the UK to extradite anyone to be tried there.
Brilliant piece. The last sentence sums it up. Maxwell was hopelessly in love with Epstein and would do anything for him. In order to keep him all she had to do was provide him with very young girls to use like sex toys and then pass around to his rich pals. You can see in the photographs how besotted she was. She knew it was wrong and now she is going to pay the price.
And rightly so it appears.
What a vile article at this time when the verdict of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial had not been decided. I hope it does not have an adverse effect on the verdict.
As I said before -..God (visiting) the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary to every principle of moral justice (Written by Thomas Paine The Rights of Man).
I doubt if the jurors in the case are in fact reading unherd and the author is basing his article on what was presented to the jurors at the trial, anyway. And the trial is over, the jury is deliberating, which means they are sequestered.
I did suggest a while back that you watched a documentary on Netflix called Filthy Rich. Clearly you didn’t bother. Shame, you would have learned a lot.
How is this trial any different from the Pakistani grooming gangs trials in the Midlands? When will the general public accept that sexual grooming of underage girls is a crime in all developed countries? Why is it so difficult to prove? Why are decent people questioning the credibility of victims, who were young and naive at the time of the crime?
A better job than the official prosecution.
A conviction might be rough justice but what other sort of justice is available when one is dealing with that sort of person.
My comment was deleted. Sorry to see Unherd going the way of the MSM.
Gotta love”…bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams,…”
There may be an element of rough justice in Maxwell’s treatment but that’s acceptable when it’s the only kind of justice she’s ever likely to face.
Something else, almost all of the articles on her trial and conviction list their high profile associates except one person – Peter Mandelson – why?
This is a terrible piece, written in the style of Shirley Conran during her Lace era.
Maxwell goes to jail and all the men who enjoyed the pleasures go unnamed.
We know who some of them are. Leon Black, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew…
I give here a 50/50 chance of surviving long enough to get her sentence reduced by telling all and naming the rich and powerful men who benefitted from her services.
It’s not a suicide watch she needs to be on, it’s an assassination watch.
“One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name.”
Nor do I.
“Most of these girls had nothing at all, and even that would be taken from them”
I truly fear for the mental capacity of any readers who would be taken in by the deviousness of such rhetoric.
Same problem as Saville and operation yew tree, Exaro type online witch hunts etc. Whilst we are sure some of these characters are guilty we would need some legal process, based on accepted jurisprudence, to prove this. Sure US justice isn’t the pay as you go paedo protection team like the UK’s but it is still prone to bias, corruption and the desire to stop facts getting in the way of a good story, or a lynch mob. Ironically whilst this trial may not establish Ms Maxwell’s guilt or innocence we now hear she “inadvertantly created” George Moonbat. The stated aim of Moonbat and his eco-nazis is the destruction of all but their chosen part of humanity. I suggest the trafficking of minors trial is put on hold until the “negligently aiding or abetting a conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity” trial is finished.
Love is…finishing each others sentences.
I wonder if she’ll now wreak her revenge on American society by revealing all she knows about those who signal their virtue?
She would be killed before she could reveal anything, as Epstein surely was just before his trial. I think she knows that, won’t say much.
Proof, as if it were needed, that the abused can indeed grow up to be abusers.
I have no pity for Maxwell, though, she was educated , smart and should have known or remembered how it felt to be abused. Had the money and position to seek help for herself.
The look of love . Is Will really an expert on this kind of look . It would seem unlikely
I believe Unherd failed it’s audience two years ago, when they stopped being interested in the truth about “Covid19 lockdowns” & other crimes.
Those imposing NPIs knew they didn’t work before they gave the orders.
From there, it’s impossible to conclude seriously that this is anything but depopulation, in my well-qualified opinion.
Maxwell is enigmatic because there is substantial overlap in the list of names considered involved in the global coup d’etat & the Lolita Express. That’s surely not accidental. One wonders if there is a Little Black Book & if do, who now controls that intelligence, potentially very useful. In the event somebody acquires a conscience & declares themselves out, a quiet word world bring them back onside.The threat of financial ruin & worse, becoming famous only for being a high end child abuser isn’t going to be as attractive as keeping quiet & getting a lot richer,
“The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail.”
Sure… and Jeffrey wasn’t murdered to keep him quiet. He just quietly and conveniently committed suicide. It’s interesting that Trump and Clinton are always mentioned with Epstein, but at least some prominent former “associates” of Jeffrey and Ghislaine increasingly seem to escape notice in Wikipedia and other “trustworthy” sites.
Sexual slavery is slavery and pimps are slavers. Rapists are brutal, but the seducer’s particular cruelty is subtle; to make the victim complicit in his or her own enslavement and rape. Jeffrey and Ghislaine were enslavers of children and seducers of children, and their clients were rapists of children.
Who are the pimp’s customers? Are they not every bit as guilty as Ghislane?
The fact that victims of abuse often go on to become abusers is well known and documented and indeed is sometimes used to garner sympathy and even legal mitigation – particularly by the left.
This sentiment is largely absent in many of these comments, presumably because the two abusers and the abusive victim of their abuse were all fabulously rich.
Once again the the liberal left displays its conspicuously complete and disgraceful moral vacuum
This is by a country mile quite the worst article I have ever read in UnHerd. I am not even going to bother to dissect it.
As if the American Revolution wasn’t enough of a blow for the Royal Family…
the case against prince Andrew suddenly seems stronger.
The FBI seized film recordings when they raided Epstein’s NY mansion. We do not know what they seized or what has become of these recordings. The purpose of these recordings therefore remains an open question, whatever the NYT says. (I couldn’t be bothered to pay the 50 cents I needed to access their Establishment drivel).
If Ghislaine Maxwell committed the crime of which she was latterly accused, why was she not prosecuted at the outset.
To make her a stand-in for the criminality of her deceased boyfriend (and, indeed, her father) smacks to me of revenge rather than justice under the law.
Her social standing and that of her accusers should be irrelevant when judging a crime. – at least it should be and I believe. still would be in British or European courts..
Trash article
The comments to this article show that we are dealing with a very sick culture. You will find identical perverted thoughts in any declining civilisation, starting with Greece, then Rome, Visit Pompeii, and see the pictures. Just the same as the United States today. It’s a certain indicator of lights out, and goodbye. I don’t even feel sad. Just relieved .
Relieved in a morally acceptable way I presume?
Relieved because I think the US has become a bad influence on the rest of the world, and the sooner its influence wanes, the better for everyone else.
A confusing comment, at least for me.
The comments on the article aren’t perverted. Appropriately cynical, sure. To your point, I don’t think it’s the US, London or Paris that’s to blame, nor it’s peoples. It’s not even their political leadership. No, that fin de siecle feeling in the air emanates from the self appointed elites, who’s multi-generational destiny has arrived. They & their antecedents have invested all of themselves in the evisceration of liberal democracies.