When FBI agents finally ran Ghislaine Maxwell to ground at her million-dollar lair in Bradford, New Hampshire, they had to break down a door to arrest her, and found a cellphone wrapped in aluminum foil, presumably to block the feds from tracing her.
The latest on the woman accused of recruiting and grooming sex slaves for deceased Wall Street financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein appears in federal prosecutors’ reply to Maxwell’s plea for bail.
Prosecutors reiterated the need to keep Maxwell in detention because she has the money and means to flee, but they added new details to show just how desperate the jet-setting millionairess must be to escape justice.
Bail Application and Rebuttal
After the government filed an initial detention memorandum, Maxwell, who faces four sex-trafficking and two perjury charges in connection with the Epstein operation, answered with a plea for $5 million bond, backed by unnamed properties abroad and unnamed friends and relatives.
The bail memorandum filed July 10 says Maxwell cannot be prosecuted for the crimes prosecutors allege because she is covered by a non-prosecution agreement the government signed with Epstein in 2007. That agreement, the application says, covers “any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.” The crimes alleged occurred more than 25 years ago, the brief continues, and Maxwell would wear an electronic monitoring bracelet and not leave the Southern and Eastern districts of New York.
Last, the memorandum says, she is at risk of catching the Chinese Virus in detention.
Yesterday, federal prosecutors answered: The non-prosecution agreement does not cover Maxwell, and whether the crimes occurred nearly three decades ago is irrelevant. Moreover, Maxwell is a citizen of France, which does not extradite its citizens; she is massively wealthy and that wealth is “opaque”; and she knows how to hide. All of those are “glaring red flags” that Maxwell will run.
The claim that Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement covers Maxwell is “absurd,” prosecutors argue:
That agreement affords her no protection in this District, for at least three reasons. First, the defendant was not a party to that agreement nor named in it as a third-party beneficiary, and the defendant offers no basis to think she would have standing to claim any rights under the NPA…. Second, and equally important, the NPA does not bind the Southern District of New York, which was not a party to the agreement.
But third, even if the agreement might cover Maxwell, prosecutors say, Maxwell’s indictment “charges conduct not covered by the NPA,” i.e., the crimes with which Maxwell is charged occurred in the late 1990s. The NPA covers conduct after that.
In reiterating its arguments that Maxwell has the money and means to flee, prosecutors observe that she has no job to keep her in the United States, and “she does not appear to depend on any job — or to have depended on any employment in the past 30 years — for the privileged lifestyle she has maintained for the entirety of that period.”
Maxwell’s brief “provides zero information about her assets in the United States or abroad,” prosecutors argue, which means “it would be impossible for the Court to even begin to evaluate whether conditions of bail would mitigate her risk of flight.”
Then there’s Maxwell’s fabulous wealth. She not only bought the estate in New Hampshire but also “has been associated with more than a dozen bank accounts from 2016 to the present, and during that period, the maximum total balances of those accounts have exceeded $20 million.”
Prosecutors also say the Chinese Virus is not a reason to release Maxwell and federal authorities will see to it that she does not contract it.
In a footnote, prosecutors say more witnesses have offered to testify against Maxwell.
Tried to Hide
Beyond that, though, the federal brief details Maxwell’s desperate if pathetic attempt to hide when the G-Men arrived at her estate in New Hampshire.
Agents had to break open a locked gate, and when they approached her front door and ordered her to open up, “through a window, the agents saw the defendant ignore the direction to open the door and, instead, try to flee to another room in the house, quickly shutting a door behind her.”
Agents were ultimately forced to breach the door in order to enter the house to arrest the defendant, who was found in an interior room in the house. Moreover, as the agents conducted a security sweep of the house, they also noticed a cell phone wrapped in tin foil on top of a desk, a seemingly misguided effort to evade detection, not by the press or public, which of course would have no ability to trace her phone or intercept her communications, but by law enforcement.
Maxwell hired former British military personnel to guard her.
Maxwell never left the property, and gave one of her guards a credit card, in the same name as the entity that purchased the property, to buy what she needed. “As these facts make plain, there should be no question that the defendant is skilled at living in hiding,” prosecutors argue.
Maxwell is locked up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Image: domoyega/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
