Ghislaine Maxwell, the suspected co-conspirator of deceased sex abuser Jeffery Epstein, is being held “monstrously” in a federal detention facility where she awaits trial on charges of facilitating Epstein’s exploitation of underage children, according to her brother.
“It’s a truly dreadful experience,” Ian Maxwell, 64, told Good Morning America. “She’s lost 20 pounds, she’s losing her hair, she can’t concentrate,” he added in the television interview. He said, “She has a flashlight shone in her cell every 15 minutes during the night. So, she has no sleep of any real quality.”
Ian Maxwell’s remarks come as his younger sister awaits a federal judge’s ruling on her third request for bail before her July trial.
Because of the severity of the charges, her vast resources, and foreign connections, the court called Ghislaine Maxwell a flight risk.
Her most recent plan for pre-trial release, which prosecutors and the alleged victims rejected, involved placing her more than $20 million in assets under the custody of a monitor and renounce her citizenship in both France and England, where she was raised.
Her brother said, “Ghislaine is an American; she’s never been a flight risk. In the year or so between when Epstein died and when she was arrested, she was in the United States all the time. She was not running away from law enforcement.”
Prosecutors promised to continue investigating Epstein’s suspected co-conspirators after his arrest in July 2019. Following his death in prison a month later, police, suspected victims, and the media rapidly turned their attention to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was once a staple on the New York social scene with a Rolodex of the wealthy, influential, and politically connected. She has also faced civil litigation from suspected Epstein victims, both before and after his arrest, accusing her of encouraging their assault, which she has long denied.
After Epstein’s death, she withdrew from public life to shield her family from what her brother described as a “lynch mob” mentality in the media.
“The real problem is that the media frenzy about her, which had shifted from Epstein onto her, drove her absolutely mad,” he said. “She’s married, has a husband. And she has two stepchildren. And she couldn’t allow the terrible frenzy of the media to be brought down on their heads.”
Ghislaine Maxwell is accused of facilitating and, in some cases, engaging in Epstein’s suspected sexual assaults against three unidentified minor children from the mid-90s.
Authorities claim she groomed the victims, befriended them, and made them feel at ease, all while knowing Epstein planned to sexually assault them.
She has entered a not guilty plea to all charges, including two counts of perjury.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s family has kept a low profile following her arrest last summer.
Her lawyers have also repeatedly refused to answer questions from reporters, confining their client’s defense to their court filings. They recently filed 12 separate pre-trial motions, demanding that certain facts be removed, certain charges dropped, or the entire case be dismissed.
Her siblings agreed it was time to come forward because her bail application was still pending, and her trial was just four months away. They’ve also recruited David Oscar Markus, a family solicitor, and launched a Twitter account named “@GMaxFacts.”
“What’s going on here is what I’ve referred to as the Epstein effect. She’s being held because of her association with Epstein from all those years ago, which is absurd. You can’t hold someone in detention based on guilt by association,” said Markus, a Miami criminal defense attorney.
This is Ian Maxwell’s first television interview in over 30 years.
“I’m not minimizing the seriousness of the allegations, but my sister’s fighting for her life, and that’s pretty serious too,” he said. “Ghislaine wants to confront the accusers head-on and deal with this and get on with her life. She is as convinced as she can be that she will be exonerated. We as a family are behind her, solidly behind her.”
After the death of the Maxwell family patriarch, British press baron Robert Maxwell, Ian Maxwell said he knew nothing about his sister’s life in New York. He admitted that he knew of Ghislaine’s relationship with Epstein but had only met him once.
“I have absolutely no memory of Epstein at all,” he said. “I had no knowledge of their life or the life that Ghislaine was leading in any great detail.”
Maxwell said the last time he saw his sister in person was on June 10, 2019, on what would have been their father’s 96th birthday, at a rare reunion of the seven remaining Maxwell children in London.
He said, “It was just serendipitous that we all happened to be more or less in Europe, and we got together, and it was a very happy, genuinely happy occasion for all of us.”
Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey less than a month later, on his way back to the United States from his home in Paris.
Her brother reported, “Ghislaine is married with stepchildren and going about her business. We’re all going to our daily routines. Then there’s a boom! This extraordinary turn of events, which came completely spontaneously.”
Echoing his sister’s legal claims, he said that the prosecutors chose her as a stand-in for Epstein after the federal government failed to hold the convicted child sex trafficker alive to face the charges against him in 2019.
“They’re taking it out on my sister. Damn it, that’s wrong,” he said. “She is not Epstein. Epstein was guilty. He did time. And he was gonna do a hell of a lot more time. But she is not him. And I don’t know how many times I have to say it. She deserves to be treated as Ghislaine, presumed innocent, get on with the defense, tell us what you’ve gotta tell us, put it up, and then let the jury decide.”
The third bail application could be decided at any time by U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan, who is handling Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal case. In December, Nathan denied the second appeal, citing Ghislaine Maxwell’s initial “lack of candor” about her spouse’s identity and details about the couple’s properties as one of the reasons she would not grant bail.
Prosecutors argued that the court “should hesitate before trusting the defendant to be transparent” about her finances and that she “continues to pose an extreme risk of flight, and the additional bail conditions proposed by the defendant do not justify reversal of the Court’s prior findings that no combination of conditions could ensure her appearance.”
The government’s claims, according to the family’s counsel, are a smokescreen.
“The real reason she’s not being granted bail is not because of any real risk of flight. No one’s afraid she’s going to really run,” Markus said.
“The government wants to keep her in custody to torture her, to break her down.”
The government has also refuted defense attorneys’ claims that Maxwell is being punished harshly because of Epstein’s death in custody.
In court filings, prosecutors stated that she has more time than any other detainee in the facility to review records related to her case. According to the government, the flashlight searches are necessary “to confirm that the defendant is not in distress every fifteen minutes. To do so, staff point a flashlight to the ceiling of the defendant’s cell to illuminate the cell sufficiently to confirm that the defendant is breathing.”
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