FROM her grotty prison cell in New York, the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell is still playing the victim. The daughter of disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell will next week learn exactly how many more years she will be kept behind bars for her despicable deeds. But Jeffrey Epstein’s twisted fixer is doing everything in […]
FROM her grotty prison cell in New York, the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell is still playing the victim.
The daughter of disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell will next week learn exactly how many more years she will be kept behind bars for her despicable deeds.
But Jeffrey Epstein’s twisted fixer is doing everything in her power to ensure her sentence is nothing like the 30 to 55 years federal prosecutors asked a judge to impose on the “shockingly predatory” Maxwell on Wednesday.
As the clock ticks closer to Tuesday’s sentencing, her lawyers have been begging for leniency.
They claim the 60-year-old is a vulnerable woman whose difficult childhood led to her being exploited by billionaire financier Epstein, who killed himself before he could face trial.
They have made every effort to paint her as a victim and pleaded with the judge not to punish her as a “proxy for Epstein”.
“Ms Maxwell cannot and should not bear all the punishment for which Epstein should have been held responsible,” her legal team insisted, adding that she should serve as little as four years and three months.
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Her team also claim she is being held in “degrading” conditions in the tough Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, New York.
They allege the one-time jetsetter with homes all over the world was constantly strip-searched and her private parts touched, the lights in her cell were left on day and night, her food was “rancid” and the water in her cell was undrinkable.
Lawyers added that “numerous inmates would not hesitate to kill Maxwell, whether for money, fame or ‘street cred’”.
They said an inmate had threatened to murder her, saying an extra 20 years in jail “would be worth the money she’d receive for murdering Maxwell”.
But perhaps the most eye-opening claims relate to her father.
Long after he was exposed as a feckless crook, daddy’s girl Ghislaine refused to sully his memory.
Almost a decade after it emerged he had looted millions from a pension fund, the one-time society beauty described her dad as “inspiring”.
Now, in their blistering “sentencing memorandum” her lawyers have characterised her childhood as one of neglect and abuse by her “narcissistic” father.
They say her brutal treatment at the hands of the media tycoon left her traumatised and susceptible to manipulation by paedophile Epstein.
It had been claimed in court that Maxwell had shown no remorse for her victims. But instead her attorneys sought to soften this with claims of childhood anorexia and of Ghislaine being an IRA target.
They created a narrative of a childhood plagued by emotional bullying interspersed with savage beatings.
The document recounts her father hitting her with a hammer when she was 13 after she “tacked a poster of a pony on the newly painted wall of her bedroom”.
Her lawyers explained: “This outraged her father, who took the hammer and banged on Ghislaine’s dominant hand, leaving it severely bruised.”
Her lawyers quoted a letter from her older siblings, Anne Halve and Philip Maxwell.
They said: “The effect of our father’s psychologically abusive treatment of her foreshadowed Epstein’s ability to exploit, manipulate and control her.”
They said her relationship with Epstein was “the biggest mistake in her life”.
Epstein hanged himself in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
Last year, Maxwell was convicted on five counts, with the most serious being the sex trafficking of a minor.
During her trial, jurors heard two women testify that they were 14 when Maxwell coaxed them into engaging in sex acts with Epstein.
One told the court that Maxwell took part in some of the encounters.
As prosecutors put it this week: “As part of a disturbing agreement with Epstein, Maxwell identified, groomed and abused multiple victims while she enjoyed a life of extraordinary luxury and privilege.
“Maxwell left her victims permanently scarred with emotional and psychological injuries. That damage can never be undone.”
The bedraggled figure sentenced next week will bear little resemblance to the beauty whose eyes sparkled as she accompanied her father on an 1980s social whirl.
That charming Ghislaine was the favourite among his nine children was beyond doubt. Maxwell’s wife Betty said she “became spoilt. The only one of my children I can truly say that about”.
Robert Maxwell, born Jan Hoch in abject poverty in the former Czechoslovakia, was a refugee turned war hero who became a Labour MP and media tycoon.
The owner of Mirror Group Newspapers and the New York Daily News, and Derby County and Oxford United football clubs, he lavished cash on private jets, helicopters and Rolls-Royces.
Former Mirror photographer Ken Lennox recalls Maxwell and his daughter attending showbiz parties and football games together.
He said: “She was always there, clinging on to him. She called him ‘my Daddy’ all the time.”
One extraordinary recent revelation is that father and daughter were overheard conducting a telephone conversion in a series of meows.
Former Mirror Group secretary Carol Bragoli told how Ghislaine spent several minutes meowing over speaker phone.
Carol revealed in BBC documentary House Of Maxwell: “One day reception rang through and said, ‘It’s Ghislaine’ and he (her father) says, ‘Put her on’ and the next thing I heard was ‘Meow’, and he went ‘Meow, meow’ and she went ‘Meow’.
“This went on for about ten meows and he suddenly said ‘What are you doing?’ and she said ‘Nothing’ and I thought, ‘Yeah that’s about right’.”
At their Headington Hill Hall mansion in Oxford there were servants, limos and gilded luxury.
Yet according to a court report, life there had a traumatic edge.
Shortly after her birth, on Christmas Day, 1961, her eldest brother, Michael, was left in a coma from which he would never emerge after a car crash at the age of 21.
Heartbroken mum Betty went on a lengthy trip through India and Australia a year later “leaving Ghislaine and her siblings not already in boarding school at home in the care of a nanny”.
Her legal team said: “Ghislaine was hardly given a glance and became anorexic while still a toddler.”
Maxwell’s lawyers also claim she was a target for IRA terrorists in the late 1960s.
They said: “When Ms Maxwell was just a child and her father a Member of Parliament, UK authorities found a hit list of targets in a safe house used by the Irish Republican Army.”
Her legal team added: “Ms Maxwell’s name was first on the list.”
They also told how Maxwell even interfered in his daughter’s love life.
The memorandum added: “She began her first romance, only to have the relationship quashed by her father’s disapproval of her engagement.”
In November 1991, Robert Maxwell disappeared from his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter, off the Canary Islands.
His body was later found floating in the Atlantic.
Alone among her siblings, Ghislaine remained convinced he was murdered.
Even after he was unmasked as one of the century’s biggest criminals — he swiped £426million from the Mirror pension fund — she stood by him.
A year later she said: “He wasn’t a crook. A thief, to me, is someone who steals money. Do I think my father did that? No.”
Robert Maxwell biographer Martin Dillon said: “The guy, in many ways, was a monster. Ghislaine was his darling. A lot of girls love their fathers, even though they’re villains. And he was a villain.”
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And now it is Ghislaine Maxwell who is the villain — one whose attempts to play the victim card will doubtless be upsetting to those who faced abuse at Epstein’s hands.
On Tuesday she will learn her fate, with the dark shadow of her monstrous father looming over her.
