As sex offenders go, Ghislaine Maxwell is in a category of one. Having been upgraded from a penitentiary to a prison camp — the equivalent of moving from a Travelodge to a Trump hotel — the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking co-conspirator seems to be getting what she wants. A commutation from Trump could follow. What has Maxwell done to deserve this? The answer is a known unknown. Maxwell has said she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting”. We also know that his administration is showering her with benefits. The unknown is why anyone would see this as acceptable.
A whistleblower told House Democrats that a senior official at the new jail says he is “sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch”. The question is whether the FBI, Department of Justice and half of Capitol Hill will tire of playing the same role. The looming end of the US government shutdown means there can finally be a vote on releasing the Epstein files. The trove, which includes video and written material, is so large that it reportedly took 1,000 FBI agents to search it earlier this year. Trump’s allies claim this bespoke manhunt exonerated him of any guilt. “Are you still talking about Epstein?” the president keeps asking. Epstein is a “dead issue”, Trump says.
The man stays dead but his issue is very much alive. That is because the system that protected Epstein has still not been held to account. Apart from Maxwell, only two other figures have suffered consequences — the disgraced Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Lord Peter Mandelson, who was fired in September as Britain’s US ambassador. All three are British. But there are scores of prominent Americans — including former senators, presidents, chief executives, billionaires and academics — who also travelled on Epstein’s “Lolita Express”. Even if they are not accused of having non-consensual sex with teenage girls, as was the case with the Andrew formerly known as Prince, they sustained Epstein’s world. Melinda French Gates, Bill Gates’s ex-wife, wrote that her divorce was prompted partly by her husband’s friendship with Epstein.