The former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted at the end of 2021 in New York of sex trafficking of minors on behalf of the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, should be sentenced on June 28 to at least 30 years in prison, argues the American federal prosecution.
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This position made public Wednesday evening June 22 by the federal court in Manhattan is not an indictment of the American prosecutors but their response to a request for leniency made on June 16 by the lawyers of Ghislaine Maxwell.
This 60-year-old woman, who faces up to 55 years of criminal imprisonment, demanded that the judge not go beyond, in the pronouncement of the conviction next Tuesday, a sentence of 20 years in prison.
“Total lack of remorse”
Lawyers for the daughter of British media mogul Robert Maxwell (died 1991) and accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein - who committed suicide in New York prison in August 2019 before his trial for sex crimes against minors - invoked responsibility and the harmful influence of these two men on their client.
Ghislaine Maxwell, who has triple British, American and French nationality, has shown a "
complete lack of remorse
" for her sex crimes, writes US federal prosecutor Damian Williams, saying she tried during her trial between November and last December to divest itself of its "
responsibility
".
"
Maxwell was an adult who made her choices, including sexually exploiting many underage girls.
“, denounced the prosecutor.
Born and raised in a hyperprivileged environment in the United Kingdom, a former figure of the international jet-set in France and the United States, Ghislaine Maxwell had said through her lawyers that she "
had a difficult, traumatic childhood, with an authoritarian, narcissistic father and demanding
.
She would have been thus "
made vulnerable to Epstein, whom she met just after the death of her father, the most serious mistake of her life
".
Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on December 29 of five of the six charges against her, including the most serious of sex trafficking of minors on behalf of Epstein.
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Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein formed a couple and were then collaborators and accomplices for 30 years.
The multimillionaire financier, with powerful economic and political networks in the United States and abroad, was himself accused of raping young girls but his suicide extinguished the public action against him.
Arrested in the northeastern United States in the summer of 2020, a year after Epstein's death, Maxwell is incarcerated in New York.