US Prosecutors have requested a Friday bail hearing in New York for Ghislaine Maxwell - the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, who is accused of procuring underage girls for the dead pedophile.
In a Sunday letter to Judge Alison Nathan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss said that defense attorney Christian Everdell requested a Friday, July 10 hearing for the 58-year-old Maxwell, according to Reuters.
Maxwell is charged with four criminal counts related to procuring and transporting minors for illegal sex acts and two of perjury, according to the indictment by federal prosecutors in New York.
Epstein was awaiting trial on federal charges of trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005 when he was found hanged in an apparent suicide while in a New York City jail in August. He was 66. -Reuters
Ghislaine has been accused by three women of procuring and training young girls to perform massage and sexual acts on Epstein and his associates.
Virginia Giuffre (previously named Virginia Roberts), one of Epstein’s alleged victims, claimed in a civil lawsuit that Maxwell "recruited" her into Epstein’s orbit, where she was forced to have sex with Epstein and his powerful friends, including Prince Andrew.
Giuffre asserts in her complaint that Maxwell, the sole defendant in the suit and the daughter of late publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, routinely recruited underaged girls for Epstein and was doing so when she approached the $9-an-hour locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999 about giving massages to the wealthy investment banker.
Giuffre alleges that Maxwell ultimately trained her in how to give “massages” to Epstein that involved sex acts and, essentially, prostitution. When Maxwell publicly denied the allegations and called Giuffre a liar in 2015, that gave her the opening to head to federal court and file the defamation suit now headed for trial. -Politico
Though multiple survivors have alleged that Maxwell participated in Epstein’s alleged crimes, Maxwell had never been criminally charged until now. One thing that could stymie potential efforts to level charges against her - as a seemingly nervous Alan Dershowitz noted last week, is the infamous 2008 plea deal that Epstein struck with the US Attorney for Miami, Alexander Acosta, which found him serving just 13 months in prison after initially facing charges that could have garnered him a life sentence.
