Part 3: Will Ghislaine Maxwell's Defense Strategy Work?
A lot of people expect her to walk or to only get a slap on the wrist. They haven't looked at the sentencing guidelines.
The most popular present narrative about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial is that it is just a big cover-up, that she’s not even going to be convicted. For some strange reason they tracked her down, arrested her, put her on trial, just so they could have the whole world watch her walk away free.
That is an exceedingly stupid take.
A better narrative - not by much but at least better - is that she gets a slap on the wrist and does a few months in a Club Fed somewhere and then is let go.
It’s clear many of the people spouting these dumb narratives have not looked at:
the criminal charges Maxwell is facing and
what the sentencing guidelines are for conviction on any of these charges
the conviction rate for federal prosecutions
Maxwell is facing up to 80 years in prison on the eight charges she’s facing in this supposed ‘cover-up’ trial.
Just the sex trafficking of a minor charge carries a maximum of 40 years in prison, and she’s facing two such charges for transporting two underage girls; one to NYC and one to New Mexico.
Federal prosecutors have a conviction rate of around 97% of the cases that go to trial because they don’t take a case to trial unless they are exceedingly confident they have enough evidence to not only get a guilty verdict, but to overcome any appeals.
If the victim was under the age of 14 or if force, fraud, or coercion were used, the penalty is not less than 15 years in prison up to life. If the victim was aged 14-17, the penalty shall not be less than 10 years in prison up to life. Anyone who obstructs or attempts to obstruct the enforcement of this statute faces as many as 20 years imprisonment. Defendants who are convicted under this statute are also required to pay restitution to their victims for any losses they caused. [emphasis added]
The sex trafficking of minors are the **strongest** charges the feds have on her. If convicted on just one of those charges, she’s going to a minimum of ten years in prison. If convicted of both, she can’t do less than twenty years.
Maxwell’s chances of beating all 8 charges are exceedingly slim. I explain why below, but for now, as far as trial strategy goes, her legal team’s goal is to create reasonable doubt about as many of the charges as they can. There is a huge difference when it comes to sentencing between being found guilty of 2 charges and not guilty of 6 than there is pleading guilty to all eight charges.
If Maxwell had pleaded guilty to all 8 charges, there would be no trial but she would be facing decades behind bars, which would essentially be a life sentence for the 59 year old elderly socialite.
If she’s found guilty of only 1 or 2 charges, she will still do prison time, but not nearly as much as she otherwise would have.
So it’s clear why she and her lawyers decided on a trial. Roll the dice and hope the jury does not convict, or if they do, it’s only for one or two of the charges.
But here’s the bad news: the prosecutors have her cold on each one of these counts she’s facing. The documented evidence places Epstein, Maxwell and the girls together at the designated times and places. Flight logs, photographs, other documentation builds an insurmountable case against Maxwell.
It’s hard to see how a jury let’s her walk on any of these charges, even though I admit that could happen.
My prediction is that she’s going to be found guilty on all eight counts and get sentenced to around forty years in prison. I don’t see the judge giving her the maximum on each count, which is why she won’t do eighty years, but around half of that.
That outcome will, of course, present a momentary problem for those confidently predicting she’ll walk or just get a slap on the wrist. But as they always do, they will quickly find their way around the problem, and move on to giving people more bad hot takes on other subjects. Such as where the Public Corruption Unit will take it’s Epstein investigation once this trial is over.
Maxwell’s Trial Strategy Is To Throw Epstein Under The Bus While Claiming She Never Saw Anything Improper
Maxwell’s close and quite prolonged proximity to Epstein for almost two full decades is going to be extremely problematic for the defense she’s been attempting to mount in her ongoing criminal trial.
That somehow, despite her almost constant presence at Epstein’s elbow for two decades, she was completely unaware of any illegal sexual activity or trafficking being committed by her paramour and longtime employer.
All these very young girls being shuffled through Epstein’s orbit in a never-ending parade never aroused her suspicions, you see. She has to sell the jury on her being an incredibly obtuse person, completely oblivious to what was happening around her.
It doesn’t quite jibe with her biography of being a sophisticated star of the international jet-set pack, but she has limited options here.
Maxwell knows what the feds found in their searches of Epstein’s island, his NYC mansion and his New Mexico ranch. Binders full of evidence, untold thousands of pictures, and more. The question of if Jeffrey Epstein was sexually abusing underage girls for decades is forever closed. The answer is yes. So Maxwell must take Epstein’s guilt into account in her defense. She has to admit what he was and what he was doing while she was with him, while also spinning a story that she was not only not involved in any of his illicit activities, she was completely unaware of them.
So Maxwell has to walk a very tricky tightrope: she has to convince the jury that yes, while it is true that Epstein was doing all these horrible things to these underage minors for all of those years - many times in extremely close proximity to her - he quite cleverly managed to keep her totally in the dark about all of it.
It is not a very strong defense however, claiming that Epstein fooled her completely, that he was some sort of genius at hiding what he was doing from her.
As Kash Patel related in a recent Epoch Times video with Jan Jekielek, the one positive aspect of Maxwell’s strategy is that Epstein safely dead, and can’t be called as a witness to dispute her claims about him having bamboozled her.
Wherever he is now, I wonder how Epstein would feel about that, if he knew Ghislaine was admitting he was a evil child sex trafficker and pedophile rapist in order to try to save her own skin.
In the next part of this ongoing series, I will at last get to where I believe the SDNY’s Public Corruption Unit is headed with their Epstein sex ring investigation, once the Maxwell trial has concluded. You’re going to see former Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta resurface since he resigned from that job a mere six days following Epstein’s arrest back in 2019.
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If that is her defense strategy, she’s in deeper doo doo than I thought. Juries do not like child molesters. This should be really interesting next week.
Excellent post. 😀👍