‘The door to hell’: Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre slams Ghislaine Maxwell ahead of sentencing
Jeffrey Epstein’s Australian victim gets her day in court with an evisceration of ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ Ghislaine Maxwell ahead of sentencing on sex trafficking and grooming.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s Australian victim Virginia Giuffre said Ghislaine Maxwell “opened the door to hell”.
Ms Giuffre reached an out-of-court settlement over her sexual assault allegations against Prince Andrew, who categorically denies any wrongdoing.
But Epstein’s most vocal survivor may finally get a day in court with a victim impact statement submitted ahead of Ms Maxwell’s sentencing.
In the letter addressed directly to Ms Maxwell, Ms Giuffre described how she was spotted and followed at the Mar-a-Lago hotel in Florida during the summer of 2000 to be “procured” for Epstein.
“Just hours later, you and he abused me together for the first time,” Ms Giuffre wrote.
“Together, you damaged me physically, mentally, sexually, and emotionally Together, you did unthinkable things that still have a corrosive impact on me to this day.”
Ms Giuffre said the course of her life was forever changed when she met the “terrible paedophile”, Jeffrey Epstein, but that she never would have met him if not for Ms Maxwell.
“For me, and for so many others, you opened the door to hell. And then, Ghislaine, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you used your femininity to betray us, and you led us all through it,” Ms Giuffre said.
“You joked that you were like a new mother to us. As a woman, I think you understood the damage you were causing —the price you were making us victims pay. You could have put an end to, the molestations, the sickening manipulations that you arranged, witnessed and even took part in. You could’ve called the authorities and reported that you were a part of something awful.”
The statement was one of several revealed in a legal filing by the former British socialite’s legal team, who sought to have some excluded as four of the accusers’ ages meant they were not “statutory crime victims”.
Maxwell’s lawyer, Bobbi C Sternheim, wrote in the filing that while Ms Giuffre was a minor when she interacted with Epstein and Maxwell during the period of the indictment, she was not called to testify as a government witness
“Ms Giuffre’s impact statement, while admissible under the CVRA (Crime Victims’ Rights Act), should be redacted and the letters
challenging her credibility should be made part of the record in this case,” Ms Sternheim wrote.
The filing to Judge Alison Nathan means the victim impact statement of Ms Giuffre, and several others, were revealed before Maxwell’s sentencing.
Other statements, meanwhile, were heavily redacted, which prosecutors have opposed. Maxwell, 60, faces a prison sentence between 30 to 55 years after being found guilty of sex trafficking and grooming.
Ms Giuffre said in her statement that she deserves to spend the rest of her life in a jail cell.
“You deserve to be trapped in a cage forever, just like you trapped your victims,” she wrote.
Ms Giuffre struck a defiant tone in the letter, telling Maxwell that she didn’t succeed in breaking the “young and naive” girl she exploited.
“Ghislaine, the pain you have caused me is almost indescribable. Because of your choices and the world you brought me into, I don’t sleep. Nightmares wake me at all hours. In those dreams, I relive the awful things you and others did to me and the things you forced me to do,” Ms Giuffre wrote.
“Those memories will never go away. I have trouble meeting new people without questioning if somehow they are going to hurt me, too. I don’t allow my children to stay over at friends’ houses,
or to walk down the street alone. I don’t trust anyone to be near them without me or my husband close by. I am hyper-vigilant, because I know that evil exists. You taught me that.”
Ms Giuffre was never able to testify against Epstein after her abuser was found dead in his prison cell, which authorities have claimed was a suicide.
Before her sentencing, Maxwell was placed on suicide watch despite her lawyer saying she was not suicidal.
Ms Sternheim submitted a letter to US District Judge Alison Nathan on Saturday, local time, emphasising her client was “abruptly removed” from the general population and placed in solitary confinement “without having conducted a psychological evaluation and without justification.”
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