The sentence fell for the former British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.
Convicted at the end of 2021 of sex trafficking of minors on behalf of the deceased American financier Jeffrey Epstein, she was finally sentenced on Tuesday to 20 years in prison by a New York court.
Aged 60, the daughter of press magnate Robert Maxwell, who also has American and French nationalities, risks ending her life incarcerated in New York, where she has been detained for two years.
The day before, Ghislaine Maxwell had been placed in solitary confinement and under surveillance for suicidal risk, according to her defense, which therefore requested the postponement of the pronouncement of the sentence, in vain.
For many months, the jet-setter and her lawyers had clung to the very slim hope of a new trial for sex crimes, since one of the jurors of the Manhattan federal court who had declared her guilty on December 29 had revealed that he himself had been the victim of sexual violence as a child.
Another futile attempt to undermine his judgement.
An international case with multiple ramifications
Companion of financier Jeffrey Epstein for more than 30 years, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of five of the six charges against her, including the most serious, of sex trafficking of minors on behalf of her accomplice.
The American multimillionaire, with powerful economic and political networks in the United States and abroad, was himself accused of raping young girls but committed suicide in prison in August 2019, before his trial, at the age of 66 years old.
Arrested in the northeastern United States in the summer of 2020, a year after Epstein's death, she has since been incarcerated in New York.
Read alsoEpstein case: who is Ghislaine Maxwell, the perfidious accomplice of the financial pedophile?
In this network's enormous international sex crimes file, British Prince Andrew, friend of the Maxwell-Epstein couple, sealed an amicable agreement on February 15 - for 13 million dollars according to the Daily Telegraph - with the American Virginia Giuffre who accused him of having sexually assaulted her in 2001 when she was a minor.
The British royal family has thus avoided a civil trial in New York as resounding as it is embarrassing.
Finally in France, the former modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, close to Epstein and who had been imprisoned since the end of 2020 in Paris for "rape of a minor", was found dead in his cell on February 19.
