Ghislaine Maxwell a ‘scapegoat’ in a ‘flawed’ trial, claims her brother

A jury convicted British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell Maxwell of five of six charges related to sex trafficking on Wednesday. 

Now, her brother Ian Maxwell has said that his sister faced a “flawed” trial and that she will not “flip” to help prosecutors, unlike the speculation.

Speaking to Sky News, he expressed his anger and called her guilty verdict a ‘tremendous blow and disappointment’.

By ‘flipping’, Maxwell is referring to the practice of helping prosecutors in return for a reduced sentence. 

He said that he was not blaming the victims or gaslighting them, “I accept that these accusers were victims of Jeffrey Epstein. What I do not accept is that they were victims of Ghislaine Maxwell.”

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Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of recruiting and grooming young girls for abuse at the hands of financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Her brother added that she had “without doubt” made “a terrible, terrible judgement about Jeffrey Epstein”, but “That is not a crime”.

He acknowledged that Ghislaine “must obviously profoundly regret that relationship” with Epstein, reported Sky News.

Stressing that his sister had been made a scapegoat, he said, “The man who was not on trial and should have been on trial – but escaped the ability of the prosecution to put him on trial because they lost him on their watch, which everyone has conveniently forgotten about – could not be tried. And therefore they had to find someone who could be tried. They chose Ghislaine Maxwell. They were perfectly entitled to do that.”

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“But the position the defence has taken – and that I continue to take – is that she was scapegoated in a process that was flawed from the start and she was not given a fair trial and she has not had justice,” he added.

He confirmed that his family would be appealing Ghislaine’s verdict, and that they would hopefully be successful in ‘vindicating’ her.

“Shackled physically, shackled mentally, shackled in every possible way, whilst everyone has been shooting at her from the sides. She’s had no capacity to shoot back,” he told Sky News.