Deadline.com, link, stating:
Alan Dershowitz, who defended Jeffrey Epstein against charges that he had serially abused young girls in 2008, has written an essay in The Spectator defending Epstein’s onetime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested on Thursday and charged with six counts related to the trafficking of underage girls, including transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
“Like every other arrested person,” writes Dershowitz, “she must be presumed innocent.”
The lawyer then spent most of the rest of the essay assailing Netflix for its recent multi-part documentary, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, in which one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers says Dershowitz abused her multiple times while she was under Epstein’s control.
[...] “She [the accuser, not Maxwell] claimed to have sex with me on six or seven occasions,” writes Dershowitz in the Spectator, “although she had previously admitted in her own words that she never met me or even heard of me.”
Dershowitz has confirmed he jetted to Epstein’s private island where sex trafficking allegedly took place, but only once. He says he was accompanied on that trip by his wife and daughter.That’s a lie. My wife & daughter were with me the one time I flew to the island, years before Guiffre met Epstein and years before he was suspected of wrongdoing. Show me a flight log that has me going to island without my wife. You can’t because there isn’t any.
— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) June 23, 2020
As for Maxwell, Dershowitz writes in his essay that he never saw her do anything untoward and assumed she was simply Epstein’s girlfriend.
My wife and I were introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell by Sir Evelyn and Lady Lynne de Rothschild, and we subsequently met her on several occasions — generally in the presence of prominent people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, presidents of universities, and prominent academic and business people. We never saw her do anything inappropriate. We knew her only as Jeffrey Epstein’s thirty-something girlfriend.
Later however, Dershowitz negotiated a controversial plea deal for Epstein in Palm Beach County that shielded the billionaire from federal prosecution in 2008. Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge (one of two) of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18 and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The deal also shielded Maxwell.
One year ago, Epstein was re-arrested after a cache of explicit photos of girls was allegedly found in his home. The financier was charged with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy and faced a combined maximum sentence of up to 45 years in prison. Before he could be tried, Epstein [reportedly] hanged himself in his jail cell.
At the time, the New York Times said the arrest deepened “questions about why federal prosecutors in Miami had cut a deal that shielded him from federal prosecution in 2008.”
Today, ever the defense lawyer, Dershowitz urged readers of the Spectator to “keep an open mind about Maxwell.”
Ghislaine Maxwell arrived in New York some 30 years ago as the young and glamorous emissary of her wealthy and influential father, an international man of mystery. Robert Maxwell was born Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the meager circumstances of an Eastern European shtetl. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust, escaped the Nazis and earned combat honors while fighting as a volunteer in the British Army under his new name, Ivan du Maurier.
After Germany’s surrender, the resourceful young man persuaded the Czechoslovakian communist government to supply air power to the Israelis in their 1948 war for nationhood. At the same time, he was establishing himself under yet another name, Maxwell, amid the battered and dazed society of post-war England. He became a publisher, a dealmaker, a member of Parliament, an empire builder, a cooker of ledger books, a swashbuckler who persuaded the Oxfordshire council to lease to him a vast mansion donated for more civic purposes by the family of Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose salon hosted the likes of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot.
The youngest of Maxwell’s nine children, Ghislaine, hosted parties at the mansion, known as Headington Hill Hall, while attending nearby Oxford University. Thus she learned the power of money in making glamorous friends. Where the money came from was of little importance — her father was known to British satirists as “the bouncing Czech” on account of his finagled finances. Access to wealth made one matter.
She delivered magnificently on her New York assignment, introducing the Maxwell brand to Manhattan’s high society in time for daddy’s purchase of the most widely circulated newspaper in the city at the time, the Daily News, in 1991. Maxwell’s London tabloid war with Rupert Murdoch was going global. But no sooner had father and daughter scored their coup than it all fell to pieces. Mysterious to the end, Maxwell pitched over the side of his massive yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, on a quiet night off the coast of Spain as his empire collapsed into a rubble of looted pension funds.
Some said suicide. Some said murder. Some said heart attack. Some said a fat and sleepy old man had just lost his balance. Beyond dispute was the cold reality of Ghislaine’s predicament: Her patron was dead, her family was broke, and she was turning 30 in desperate need of a new financial wellspring.
An indictment unsealed July 2 in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court picks up the story not long thereafter: “From at least 1994 through at least 1997, GHISLAINE MAXWELL assisted, facilitated, and participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls by, among other things, helping Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and ultimately abuse victims known to MAXWELL and Epstein to be under the age of 18.”
Nearly a year after the arrest and fishy jailhouse suicide of wealthy serial sex abuser Epstein, his longtime friend and alleged procurer Maxwell has followed him into the hoosegow. Her arrest is a welcome sign that federal prosecutors in New York are serious about their promise to pursue this scandal beyond Epstein’s death. The public still knows far too little about the sources of Epstein’s jet-owning, mansion-hopping wealth; about his relationships with powerful men, including President Trump, former president Bill Clinton, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, and billionaire Leslie Wexner; and about the nature of alleged photographs and possible video recordings seized from the safe in his Upper East Side townhouse.
Maxwell likely knows as much about these matters as anyone living. However, after a lifetime of keeping up appearances on behalf of shady men, whether she’ll become a cooperating witness is very much an open question.
Still, those dates in the indictment suggest that there is vivid testimony to be had about a lesser-known period in this sordid saga. They cover the years before 2008, when Epstein’s Palm Beach sex-trafficking scheme resulted in his conviction for soliciting prostitution involving a minor — the gentle wrist-slap that Florida prosecutors settled on after a massive intervention by Epstein’s high-priced team of legal stars. Girls recruited girls, who recruited other girls in turn to “massage” a creepy guy in a mansion.
Each new circle of recruitment added a little distance between Maxwell and her friend’s insatiable, felonious perversion. The indictment returns to the beginning — before she allegedly assembled the hierarchy — when all the coaxing and misleading and hands-on instruction of vulnerable children, according to prosecutors, fell to Maxwell herself.
Ghislaine Maxwell is no slacker in the mystery department. Perhaps instead of inheriting wealth from her father, she inherited his gift for shifting identities in the struggle to survive. She tried “Epstein’s girlfriend,” according to people who knew the pair in the 1990s. At some point, however, he must have broken the news to her that he wasn’t into grown-ups. So, the indictment suggests, she adopted a more indispensable persona: his networker.
With the Maxwell family background in Britain, Guardian has coverage, e.g., here, here and here. MSN carrying a Guardian item.
Clearly there is more online. Enough is enough. Now, a too-easy tune time to wrap up the post.
__________UPDATE__________
While enough is enough, too little is not enough. One more interesting link.
FBI or Justice Department special reasons for the timing of the Maxwell arrest, if any, have not been published. This item notes Maxwell's arrest at her New Hampshire rural estate happened shortly after Bill Barr made a questionable move:
Geoffrey Berman was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, the unit leading the Epstein investigation, until last month when he was controversially sacked by the Trump administration for reasons that remain unclear.
Mr Berman will appear before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Thursday and is expected to face hours of questioning from members, offering an insight into his work and unexpected dismissal.
The testimony will be given behind closed doors, [...]
- continuing -
Back in January Mr Berman accused Prince Andrew of giving the FBI “zero co-operation” as it probed his friendship with Epstein, the late New York billionaire accused of sexually abusing underage girls. Mr Berman made similar comments again later in the year.
The Duke of York’s legal team has always argued that he is willing to speak to investigators and has repeatedly offered to do so, suggesting Mr Berman’s claims were misleading.
The exact trigger for Mr Berman’s dismissal remains a mystery which Democrats on Capitol Hill are now investigating.
Charges against Ghislaine Maxwell, who is accused of trafficking underage victims for Epstein, were announced by Mr Berman’s deputy days after she stepped into the role following his removal.
The timing of Mr Berman’s dismissal, his thoughts on the Trump administration’s motives for the sacking and the nature of his disagreement with Prince Andrew could all be topics for questions from the congressmen.
[links in original] Apart from questions of timing, allso not found in present reporting is whether the FBI had a search warrant, or only an arrest warrant, in seizing Maxwell. Nor was any report found noting whether any additional documentary, video, or other evidence not already held was seized at the plush rural estate during or subsequent to the arrest.
FURTHER; A fact is that Ms. Maxwell's father, while alive, vied with Rupert Murdoch's FOX in sleaze news publishing. It is possible animosity arising from that competition is driving the range and tone of FOX online video coverage beyond what is normal FOX sleaze news reporting.