President Trump’s former personal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met yesterday with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell at a courthouse in Palm Beach Florida. It’s highly unusual for such a high level Justice Dept. official to do such a thing but we are living in a highly usual time in which the president of the United States’s years long relationship with two sex-offenders is the subject of a roiling scandal which his own supporters suspect he is covering up.
Ghislaine Maxwell is the convicted partner in crime to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious friend of the rich and famous for decades who also happened to be pedophile exploiter of underage girls and whose story we’ve all been following in detail for what seems like forever. The MAGA movement has inexplicably been demanding that all the FBI and DOJ files be released even though there has always been every reason to believe that they would implicate their own Dear Leader Donald Trump who palled around with Epstein for years. Trump and his cronies all promised to release them if he was returned to the White House and are now dancing as fast as they can to avoid doing that, which has raised suspicions even more that that something is amiss.
Maxwell is the only perpetrator in these crimes to have paid a price which makes some people see her as a scapegoat or possibly a pawn in the nefarious plans of rich and powerful men. And it’s true that she has always been something of an elusive character in this saga, a co-conspirator in a very sleazy enterprise that seems to have been partly a labor of love on her part. But she is anything but an innocent victim. Dozens of women have testified that she was a recruiter and a participant in the weird operation that she and Epstein cooked up in the early 90s and ran for more than 15 years. And those were the years that Donald Trump was Epstein’s closest wingman.
The documentary “Filthy Rich” tells the story of Ghislaine Maxwell the society girl and daughter of notorious British media mogul Robert Maxwell who doted on his daughter even as he was reputedly a violent martinet of a father. Like Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka, Robert Maxwell often had her on his arm and bragged about her figure. According to observers, they were somewhat inappropriately affectionate, also reminiscent of Trump’s behavior with his daughter when she was young.
Ghislaine was a vivacious socialite, funny, smart and very raunchy. In the documentary, one of her acquaintances recalls her setting up a game after a dinner party in which she had all the men put scarves over their eyes while the women remove their tops and let the men fondle them, trying to guess which ones they were. The acquaintance was appalled but as happened so often in these circles, the rest didn’t bat an eye. The number of people who knew about or participated in Ghislaine’s sexcapades were legion.
Robert Maxwell died in 1991 under unusual circumstances, allegedly falling off of his massive yacht (called “Lady Ghislaine”) leaving the family nearly destitute when it was discovered that he had plundered his companies’ pension funds. Ghislaine needed money badly and apparently she also needed another relationship with a powerful man. Enter Epstein, the mysterious “financier” with plenty of money and a thirst for entry into elite circles. Maxwell was there to help with that. She knew many important people in America and Europe and she had social skills that he did not possess. They made a good team.
And apparently, they had similar sexual appetites. During the early years of their relationship when they were still a couple, one of Maxwell’s marks, a 21 year old named Liz Stein, reports in the documentary that she was working in a department story in Manhattan when she was persuaded to deliver some merchandise to the hotel where Epstein and Maxwell were staying. The two brought her up to their room where they began having sex in front of her and attempted to coerce her into joining them. She escaped what she believed was an impending assault but claimed that Ghislaine pursued her for years afterwards.
It only got weirder after that. For years Maxwell recruited and groomed mostly under-age or very young looking women to sexually exploit and abuse. And according to one witness, when asked who these people were, Maxwell replied, “they’re nothing.” She targeted runaways and girls in foster care and those who were homeless, befriending and manipulating them, giving them a couple of hundred dollars to service Epstein and his friends and sometimes offering them bigger prizes like scholarships and travel. Toward the end, she was recruiting girls to do the recruiting for her. Epstein bringing them to his private island to be violently raped was commonplace.
It was a full-blown sex-trafficking operation, not some casual pick-up at a club once in a while. And Ghislaine Maxwell was the procurer.
After Epstein died in jail awaiting trial (a suicide that will always be seen as questionable since he was the most famous prisoner in the country) Ghislaine went on the run. She was finally found hiding out in a country estate in New Hampshire and she was indicted on multiple counts of conspiracy to traffic minors for illegal sex acts. A number of her victims testified against her at trial and she was found guilty. She’s currently serving a 20 year sentence.
However, in their desperation to put this scandal behind them, Todd Blanche’s trip to see her this week indicates that they may be ready to make some kind of a deal if she is willing to exonerate Trump and/or implicate his political enemies. The MAGA influencers have no problem with that:
Others are saying right up front that Maxwell is a victim herself:
One of the prosecutors in Maxwell’s case was Maureen Comey, the daughter of James Comey who was recently fired for no reason by Attorney General Pam Bondi. It’s fair to assume that if a deal is made, Trump and his henchmen will say that Maxwell was railroaded by Comey to cover for crimes by Democrats who were out to get Trump. Or something like that. It really doesn’t have to make much sense. Virtually nothing does these days.
But there is no guarantee that that would be the end of it either. You know what they always say whenever there’s a major political scandal: it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. And this may be the sloppiest cover-up in American history.
Salon