Roll up! Roll up! The Ghislaine Maxwell Rehabilitation Tour is coming to town. You may think Jeffrey Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend is now behind bars for good reason but, according to some big brains in the Maga-sphere, poor old Maxwell may have suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Maxwell “just might be a victim”, Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly mused on air recently. “She just might be. There was a rush to judgment … All right, granted, she hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, and I know that’s apparently not good, but she’s in jail. For how long now? Twenty years.”
To discuss this further, Kelly brought on Alan Dershowitz, whom he introduced as “one of the greatest attorneys who ever lived”. Which certainly isn’t how I’d describe the retired Harvard professor.
Dershowitz, who helped procure a lenient plea deal for Epstein in 2008, also wrote an op-ed for the LA Times in 1997 headlined Statutory Rape Is an Outdated Concept, in which he argued 15 seems “appropriate” for the age of consent. Dershowitz suggested some “reasonable people” might even favour 14 – which happens to be the age of some of Epstein’s victims. When that op-ed resurfaced in 2019, after Epstein’s arrest, Dershowitz defended it, saying he stood by “the constitutional (not moral) argument” offered.
Dershowitz now reckons Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 on five counts of aiding Epstein in his abuse of underage girls and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2022, has suffered enough. “She shouldn’t have been in jail for five years for what she is alleged to have done,” Dershowitz told Newsmax on Sunday. “She served more time than anybody has ever served for any comparable offence.”
I’m sure I don’t need to spell out why others seem to be attempting to rebrand Maxwell as the victim of a stitch-up. The Epstein files have turned into a disaster of Trump’s own making. He hasn’t been able to distract people from the story, so now there is speculation that he is trying to make some sort of deal with Maxwell. Who, by the way, had secretive conversations with Trump’s department of justice last week and, on Monday, asked the supreme court to overturn her conviction, saying she was unjustly prosecuted. One can imagine a scenario in which Maxwell releases a few select details about Epstein that absolve Trump and make his enemies look bad in exchange for a pardon. (“I’m allowed to give her a pardon but nobody’s approached me with it,” Trump said on Monday.) However, for that hypothetical strategy to be successful, Maxwell’s reputation needs to be rehabilitated. She would need to look like a victim rather than a monster.
Which is where Newsmax, and its sudden interest in Maxwell, might help. The cable news channel, which is to the right of Fox News, is essentially a pro-Trump propaganda outlet with strong financial ties to the president. Earlier this month the outlet announced that it had struck a deal for the Trump Media and Technology Group Corp to stream Newsmax on its platform. Which obviously raises a lot of conflict-of-interest questions. “This is now the Trump network,” one Newsmax insider complained to the Independent last week. “Even the most conservative people at Newsmax think it’s a terrible look and they feel like state-run media.” Also raising questions is the fact that Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who gave Epstein that plea deal in 2008, happens to be on the board of Newsmax.
I don’t know what will happen next with Maxwell, but I can tell you that I absolutely believe the women Epstein abused over anchors on Trump’s propaganda channel. And I believe those women over Maxwell herself. Epstein’s accusers have repeatedly been clear that Maxwell was no victim. “She didn’t just procure girls for Epstein – she participated in their abuse,” accuser Annie Farmer told ABC News on Monday. Now it’s looking increasingly likely that, instead of releasing the Epstein files, Trump will release Maxwell instead.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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