Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 on multiple charges related to the serial sexual abuse of underage girls by the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. She’s been locked up in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center ever since, where her lawyer claims she’s being treated like fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter.
“The surveillance rivals scenes of Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration as portrayed in the movie, Silence of the Lambs, despite the absence of the cage and plastic face guard,” defense attorney Bobbi Sternheim wrote in a seven-page letter to the court. “Ms. Maxwell’s conditions of detention for the past 16 months continue to be reprehensible and utterly inappropriate for woman on the cusp of turning 60 with no criminal record or history of violence. It is unwarranted, unrelenting, and utterly inappropriate.”
Sternheim also claims that her weekly visits with Maxwell are “conducted under the most humiliating circumstances that I have ever experienced in many decades of federal criminal practice,” and that a U.S. Marshal who guarded Maxwell during a court appearance told her client, “You think you are special. You are not special. Remember you are in custody and the judge doesn’t care about you.”
She likely faces an uphill battle for bail given that U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan, who oversees her case, has rejected it three times, calling her a “significant risk of flight.” A federal appeals court has also rejected bail.
The document can be found here. Maxwell’s trial is scheduled to begin on November 29.
(Via Reuters)