Lawyers: Ghislaine Maxwell's Fellow Inmate 'Offered Money' to Strangle Epstein's 'Pimp' in Her Sleep

Last week, Ian Maxwell, the brother of Ghislaine, a disgraced British socialite convicted of conspiring with the now-late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls, said that his sister has been subjected to inhumane treatment in prison.

A fellow inmate of Ghislaine Maxwell made a “credible death threat” toward the 60-year-old, who is due to be sentenced later in June after being convicted of recruiting teenage girls for Jeffrey Epstein, her lawyers have argued.

They asserted that “an inmate in Ms Maxwell’s unit threatened to kill her, claiming that an additional 20 years’ incarceration would be worth the money she’d receive for murdering Ms Maxwell”.

According to her legal team, “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”.

The remarks are part of the lawyers’ pre-sentencing memorandum filed in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, in which they insisted that Maxwell should be sentenced to “well below” the 20 years imprisonment that probation authorities recommended in her New York federal sex-trafficking case.

The attorneys argued that Maxwell “cannot and should not bear all the punishment for which [the late billionaire financier Jeffrey] Epstein should have been held responsible”.

“Epstein was the mastermind, Epstein was the principal abuser, and Epstein orchestrated the crimes for his personal gratification. Indeed, had Ghislaine Maxwell never had the profound misfortune of meeting Jeffrey Epstein over 30 years ago, she would not be here,” they wrote.

This followed the 60-year-old brother, Ian Maxwell, expressing last week that he deplored his sister’s “inhuman” treatment in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, where she has been held since her arrest in July 2020.

The embattled British socialite was only recently moved from isolation, where she was on round the clock suicide watch, into the general prison population that allows social visits.

She was found guilty on 29 December 2021 of recruiting underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein between 1994 and 2004 at his various properties. The daughter of Robert Maxwell, the late media tycoon, now faces sentencing on 28 June, with the prospect of spending up to 55 years behind bars.

The US probation department, which makes sentencing recommendations, however, suggested a punishment of 20 years imprisonment for Maxwell, whose sentence is ultimately up to the judge to decide.

Epstein himself was found hanged in his prison cell on 10 August 2019, a month after he was arrested. The New York City Medical Examiner's Office concluded that his death was a suicide, but a forensic pathologist hired by his family suggested that evidence pointed to the financier potentially having been strangled.