What Ghislaine Maxwell Told the Justice Department
Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein for tea in his office in Madison Avenue. What she remembers the most well of the meeting, Maxwell told Vice-Procureur General, Todd Blanche, in an interview at the end of July, published last week, is Epstein’s link. “He had a giant, seemed to be a ketchup stain,” she said. “I was, like Wow, Ok”
It was in 1991, and Maxwell recently canceled a commitment and was moving from London to New York. “And one of my friends … said:” I have ” – you know, as your friends do – ‘I have a guy to meet you … you will like him. He is looking for a woman,” Maxwell told Blanche at the start of the interview. “I bite at thirty. I don’t need to tell you guys, it’s a very important moment for a girl, like important things.”
He therefore started a relationship that lasted decades and which was both romantic and professional, with Epstein paying Maxwell – which supervised the management of its properties – very early. According to Maxwell, they were widely disconnected at the time of the death of Epstein, in prison, in 2019. Three years later, she was sentenced to twenty years in prison for young girls trafficking for Epstein and participating in their sexual abuse.
The story of Maxwell’s first meeting with Epstein can look like an unlikely anecdote for a child-sex-sex trafficker convicted to share with a senior official from the Ministry of Justice; Indeed, the entire interview with Maxwell, which took place over two days, is unlike any legal document that most of us had never met. To read the transcription of three hundred and approximately seven pages – even more, to listen to the audio of the soft voice of Maxwell, its British accent punctuated by decades in the United States – is horrified, even enraged, by Maxwell’s cheeky aircraft of his driving, and by the complained acceptance of Blanche. The interview had no obvious legal objective. It was a damage control operation. Blanche did not invest as long as the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell were trying to excuse President Donald Trump, who was under the fire of his base for his own involvement with Epstein, a man he described once a “formidable guy” and “a lot of pleasure to be”. The Ministry of Justice had once argued that Maxwell should be sentenced to at least thirty years in prison. Now, his second rank manager, who had been the criminal defense of Trump, was aligned with a woman whose crimes that the department had condemned as “monstrous”. The interrogator and the witness shared the same goal – they were both to make Trump happy – and their exchange reflected this arrangement.
The interview is alternately boring and convincing, offering an overview of an island world of privilege and law. “I am English and my close friends are all friends close to Sarah and Andrew,” said Maxwell at some point, referring to Sarah Ferguson and her former husband, Prince Andrew, who was accused in a civil lawsuit of having raped one of the minor victims of Epstein, Virginia Giuffre. (Prince Andrew denied reprehensible acts but reached a colony outside the Giuffre affair.) Maxwell described the meeting with Elon Musk when “a group of us” met at “another friend Island” for a birthday party for the co-founder of Google Sergey Brin; She said that she had run in Tesla’s CEO a few years later, at the Oscars. Maxwell presents itself both pathetic and repugnant. Epstein had encouraged him to think that they could get married. “Admittedly, by the middle, the late 90s, I knew that the part of the marriage would never have taken place,” she said. “But I thought we could have a child, what I really wanted.” She suggested that she had ruined her own life – but never recognized that she had injured many others in the process.
About his crimes, Maxwell remained completely lacking in remorse. It allowed “someone to be inappropriate” – like seeing Epstein masturbating on a massage table – “and mine can be different.” She admitted that he had sexually abused minor girls. “It’s a disgusting guy who has done terrible things for young children,” said Maxwell. But she said that she had never witnessed or even informed of abuse when she was involved with Epstein and denied having asked for minor girls to massage him. “I can categorically say that if a child had told me that they were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen … I would never have allowed such a thing,” Maxwell told Blanche. She said that she had never seen any women, of any age, “in no form of constraint” or “in relation to uncomfortable or in any way in distress”. Perhaps some Masseins of Epstein have done their naked breast work – “less than normally dressed in massage”, as she said. “Have I ever asked someone to please Mr. Epstein?” Maxwell told Blanche. “No.”
Of course, there is no reason to believe Maxwell. During his trial, four women, who were all minor when they met Maxwell and Epstein, provided testimonies which convincingly contradict this story. The jury condemned Maxwell of five charges involving sex trafficking. The judge who chaired his trial and condemned him concluded that she had “participated in a horrible program to seduce, transport and make the circulation of minor girls, certain as young as fourteen”.
The couple met one of them, known by the pseudonym Jane, in a summer camp for talented children, when they were fourteen; His father had just died and his family struggled financially. The memo of determining the prosecution sentence described what happened next: Epstein and Maxwell both abused Jane, and “taught Jane how Epstein liked to be massaged and gave Jane on the touch of the Epstein penis”. Maxwell, the memo continued, “tried to make Jane feel” very normal “and” not a big problem “. “Epstein abused Jane for the next two years, said the memo, and Maxwell” was often in the room when the abuses occurred. “
Maxwell had this to say on Jane to whiten: “I only saw her at Palm Beach and I only saw her with his mother.” Blanche did not support it on the inconsistency. The last time Maxwell denied having witnessed or participated in the crimes of Epstein, during a civil testimony in 2016, she was accused of perjury – by the very department of justice that Blanche now helps to manage. (Prosecutors abandoned the accusations of perjury after obtaining Maxwell’s condemnation on the counting of sex traffic.)
After the release of the transcription of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche, Giuffre’s family, who died by suicide in April, published a statement denounced the Ministry of Justice for having given Maxwell a “platform to rewrite history”. Their anger is understandable. The Ministry of Justice has taken care to reduce the names of the victims of the transcription, but allowed Maxwell’s lies to remain undisputed. Blanche was there, he said to Maxwell at some point, not “to create a kind of” she said, she said “situation” but, rather, “to hear you talk about your conduct.” In this procedure, equity to victims was a reflection after the fact.
But the strange meeting – The deputy prosecutors of the deputy generally spend their time interviewing witnesses – offered the prospect of a mutual advantage to Trump and Maxwell. Maxwell’s lawyer David Oscar Markus had seized Canally Trump’s Epstein difficulties to offer his client’s testimony – learned that she had received the immunity from having used her against her. Maxwell presented himself in the interview as having been “very eager to speak to anyone” and deplored that “nobody of the government … I have ever spoken to me”, easily omitting the fact that she chose not to testify for her own defense.
The Trump team had clearly hoped that the interview would give allegations concerning sexual misconduct by eminent democrats. As such, the interview was a failure, despite the white game efforts to cause information. At one point, Blanche asked if Senator Ted Kennedy knew Epstein. Maxwell said they didn’t know. “But Bobby Kennedy knew him,” she proposed, referring to the Secretary of Health and Social Services. “Say this again about Bobby Kennedy,” said Blanche. “How do you know that?” Answer: “Hunting of dinosaurs in the Dakotas”.
Blanche dropped the subject of the Kennedys, but he spoke on several occasions of Epstein relations with former president Bill Clinton:
