This archive report was first published on 30 December 2021.
Ghislaine Maxwell Found Guilty of Sex Trafficking ¶
On December 29, 2021, a federal jury in Manhattan found Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, guilty of sex trafficking and four other charges against her. Maxwell, the daughter of a British media mogul and a former companion to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted of conspiring with him over a decade to recruit, groom, and sexually abuse underage girls.
The trial was widely seen as the courtroom reckoning that Mr. Epstein never had because he was found dead in a Manhattan jail in August 2019 while awaiting his own trial. The verdict came late on the afternoon of the jury’s fifth full day of deliberations.
Prosecutors presented a case over 10 days that centered on four women who testified they had been abused by Mr. Epstein as teenagers. Two of the women testified that Mr. Epstein started engaging in sex acts with them when they were only 14 years old: one said Ms. Maxwell was sometimes present in the encounters and the other said Ms. Maxwell had molested her directly by touching her breasts.
Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers sought to raise doubts about the testimony of her accusers, emphasize the distance between her and Mr. Epstein, and criticize how the investigation was conducted. However, the verdict was largely a rejection of Ms. Maxwell’s defense, which centered on an argument that the government’s case was based on flimsy evidence, prosecutors’ animus toward Mr. Epstein, and the inconsistent accounts of women who were motivated by money to point the finger at Ms. Maxwell.
The charges against Ms. Maxwell included sex trafficking of minors, enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, and transporting a minor across state lines for the same purpose. She was also charged with conspiracy to commit those crimes. The top charge of sex-trafficking of minors carries a maximum sentence of 40 years, prosecutors say.
