(New York) Two years after the suicide in prison of the American billionaire accused of sex crimes, Jeffrey Epstein, the trial of his ex-partner Ghislaine Maxwell begins this week in New York with the selection of the jury that will say if she has recruited, between 1994 and 2004, a network of underage girls for the financier and his entourage.
The daughter of press magnate Robert Maxwell – born near Paris on December 25, 1961 and who has triple French, British and American nationality – faces life imprisonment at the end of a trial that will last six weeks in from the formal start of the debates on November 29.
According to the complex American criminal procedure, the final selection of the jury must begin on Tuesday in his presence and end on Friday. Mme Maxwell is expected to make an appearance in federal court in Manhattan.
She has been imprisoned since the summer of 2020 in New York, a year after the death in August 2019 in her cell of her former companion, the financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of sexual exploitation of dozens of minors and for whom she would have played the role of “reel”.
“Aggression”, “spoiled food”
The now almost sixty-year-old, a well-born celebrity who has lived free from want, has been complaining for 18 months, via her lawyers, about her conditions of detention in a Brooklyn prison.
“I have been the victim of assault for a year and a half,” she told the British Mail on Sunday, accusing her guards of depriving her of sleep: “I am weak, frail, I have no energy, I’m tired. I don’t even have a pair of shoes that fit me. I am given rotten food […] and I’m not allowed to exercise. ”
The incriminated facts date back to the decade 1994-2004.
The accusation is based on four anonymous plaintiffs – two of whom were only 14 and 15 years old – who say they were approached by “touts”, including Mr.me Maxwell, near their school or at work. Then, after cinema sessions or shopping “with girlfriends”, the young girls were persuaded, for a few hundred dollars, to come and give a massage, presented as non-sexual, to a powerful New Yorker ready to take their career off the ground. .
According to US federal prosecutors, the accused would also have participated in the sexual assaults with her companion Epstein, either at her home in London or at his home in Manhattan, Florida and New Mexico.
Shadows of Epstein and Andrew
The shadow of Jeffrey Epstein will obviously be omnipresent, two years after his suicide in prison at the age of 66, depriving his victims of a trial for the sexual exploitation of minors.
The billionaire disappeared, however, was convicted in Florida in 2008 for paying young girls for massages. But he had only served 13 months in prison following a confidential agreement with the prosecutor at the time.
Another shadow will hang over the Maxwell trial: that of British Prince Andrew, a close friend of Epstein, target since August of a civil complaint in New York for “sexual assault” filed by an American, Virginia Giuffre.
This complaint should be examined at the end of 2022 in a civil court in New York, even if the second son of Queen Elizabeth II is not prosecuted and denies these facts which would have taken place between 2000 and 2002, when Virginia Giuffre was a minor. .
After his trial, Mme Maxwell is also set to stand trial for perjury for having testified in 2016 in a libel proceeding she brought against Mr.me Giuffre, who accuses him of having played the go-between for Prince Andrew.
French Brunel
Virginia Giuffre is not one of the four plaintiffs against Ghislaine Maxwell for this Manhattan criminal trial.
The names of other personalities could be cited during the trial, including that of the former French model agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a relative of Jeffrey Epstein, indicted and imprisoned in Paris in December 2020 for rape and sexual assault .
The defense of Mme Maxwell should focus his pleadings on the fact that the alleged crimes date back more than 20 years and especially that the accused is tried instead of the main protagonist who died. She will therefore plead not guilty to the six charges for which she faces up to 80 years in prison.
Unless surprised, Ghislaine Maxwell should not speak at the hearing.