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Gregory Robinson
Ghislaine Maxwell has received her sentence after being found guilty of helping American financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls in a landmark ruling last year.
Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years, it was announced on Tuesday (28 June) in the Manhattan Federal Court. She also received a $750,000 (£615,000) fine.
Maxwell said meeting Jeffrey Epstein was the “greatest regret of my life” and that she wanted to “acknowledge the suffering” of her victims.
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“I know my association with Epstein will follow and and forever stain me,” she said shortly before the sentencing. “It is the greatest regret of my life that I ever met Jeffrey Epstein.”
Addressing her victims, she added: “To you, all the victims that came to today inside the court and outside… I am sorry for the pain you have experienced.
“I hope my sentence… brings you closure… peace and finality. To help you put those experiences in a place that helps you move forward.”
The sentence comes after Maxwell’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said her client was put on ‘suicide watch’ on Friday (24 June) and therefore urged the judge overseeing Maxwell’s case to delay the sentencing in a letter sent on Saturday (25 June), Reuters reports.
In a letter to the judge, Sternheim said her client, who is being detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, is ‘unable to properly prepare, for sentencing'.
Sternheim also claimed that Maxwell ‘is not suicidal’ and said a psychologist who evaluated Maxwell on Saturday also reached the same conclusion.
In December 2021, the jury at Manhattan Federal Court, New York, found the 60-year-old former socialite guilty on all but one count.
Maxwell was found guilty of five charges in total, including sex trafficking of an individual under the age of 18, although she maintains her innocence.
Jurors deliberated for five days before finding Maxwell guilty on five out of six counts. They heard the disturbing details and accounts from victims who were as young as 14 when the abuse happened between 1994 and 2004 at Epstein’s homes in Florida, New York and New Mexico.
Epstein ended his life in August 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell where he was awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell is thought to have remained closely associated with Epstein. After he was arrested in 2019, Maxwell effectively went into hiding, communicating with the courts only through her lawyers.
She was found in a remote New Hampshire location in July 2020, after the FBI tracked Maxwell's location through mobile phone calls to her sister Isobel and her legal representatives.
In January this year, Maxwell filed a motion for a retrial after a juror told the Independent that he used his own experience of being sexually abused to influence the verdict decided with the other jurors.
Lawyers for Maxwell wrote to Judge Alison Nathan regarding the issue of the juror and said it was 'incontrovertible grounds' for a new trial. Maxwell's conviction was upheld.
During Maxwell's trial, the defence tried to argue that Maxwell was being used as a scapegoat for Epstein, as the sex offender was never tried in a court for his extensive list of crimes.
Maxwell refused to testify in her defence in court and she told the judge: “Your honour, the government has not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and so there’s no reason for me to testify.”
The trial saw many high profile names mentioned, due to Maxwell and Epstein's close friendships with politicians and royalty, most notably Prince Andrew.
In February, the Duke of York avoided going to trial by settling the sexual assault case filed against by Virginia Giuffre for an undisclosed sum out of court.