Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers claimed on Wednesday that a female inmate planned to kill Maxwell, who remains jailed in New York while awaiting sentencing on federal sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell’s legal team made the allegations in a pre-sentencing report. Her attorneys not only asked for a lighter sentence due to the threat — which authorities have not substantiated — but because of Maxwell’s abusive childhood, according to Global News.
“One of the female inmates in Ms. Maxwell’s housing unit told at least three other inmates that she had been offered money to murder Ms. Maxwell and that she planned to strangle her in her sleep,” her attorneys wrote.
Maxwell’s lawyers also claimed that the inmate was not concerned with serving 20 years for killing Maxwell as the payout would be worth it. They said the inmate was moved to a different unit, presumably to protect Maxwell.
In December, Maxwell was found guilty of federal sex trafficking for grooming underage girls, some as young as 14, for Jeffrey Epstein, 66, to sexually abuse between 1994 and 1997.
In August 2019, Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Officials’ determination that Epstein hanged himself has been met with skepticism. At the time, the billionaire financier was jailed without bond amid allegations he sex-trafficked dozens of underage girls from 2002 to 2005.
Maxwell’s sentencing is scheduled for this month.
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[Featured image: Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell/AP Photo/John Minchillo, File]
