Former girlfriend of financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of sex trafficking said that she is being persecuted because persecutors wanted a substitute to replace him in prison. Epstein who was being held at a detention centre in New York killed himself on August 2019 while awaiting trial on said sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, on January 26, asked a judge to dismiss the case charging her with recruiting teenage girls, who were sexually abused to be on several grounds. Another unusual argument cited to dismiss the charges was that the indictment was obtained from a grand jury seated outside New York City in White Plains, where her lawyers said Black and Hispanic grand jurors would have been under-represented. Maxwell has not pleaded guilty to the charges against her. Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 and has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.
“The government’s sudden zeal to prosecute Ms Maxwell for alleged conduct with Epstein in the 1990s — conduct for which the government never even charged Epstein — follows a history that is both highly unusual and deeply troubling," her lawyers wrote in the Manhattan federal court documents, an AP report reads.
Maxwell's lawyers challenged the case on multiple grounds in papers filed last week and unsealed on Thursday with some redactions.
A judge rejected a $28.5 million bail proposal for Maxwell who holds the citizenship of the UK, US and France on the grounds that she had not been completely about her finances and that she remained a threat to flee. Maxwell had revealed that she had set aside more than $7 million to be spent on lawyers from $22.5 million in assets belonging to herself and her husband.
59-year-old Maxwell is scheduled to be tried in July, on charges that she procured three teenage girls between 1994 and 1997 for Epstein to sexually abuse and sometimes pimp the girls to his wealthy associates. Some women have said that they were assaulted by Epstein or coerced into performing sexual acts by Epstein when they were as young as 14.
On January 28, The Daily Mail reported that Maxwell would ask girls to kiss and touch each other in a sexual manner for herself and Epstein to watch.
