Ghislaine Maxwell, the accomplice and ex-girlfriend of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was transferred to a less secure prison in Bryan, Texas on Friday. A week earlier, she was interrogated by Todd Blanche, Under Secretary of Justice.
The federal prison authority announced the transfer on Friday, without explaining the reason for it. Maxwell is serving a twenty-year prison sentence for helping sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
According to CNN, such a transfer is unusual, because convicted sex offenders usually pose too great a danger to public safety. The prison where Maxwell has been brought is minimally secured. Such facilities have no or only limited fencing. Previously, Maxwell was in a prison in Florida.
The victims of Epstein and Maxwell, including the family of Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life in April, have reacted with outrage. “We have taken note of the preferential treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell with dismay and outrage,” they write in a statement. They are surprised that Maxwell was transferred without informing the victims and fear “an attempt to cover up the affair.”
According to Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus, “nothing was asked” of the government. President Donald Trump said last week that he has the right to pardon Maxwell, but that he has no plans to do so yet. “We hope he uses that right,” Markus responded at the time.
Maxwell was interrogated a week earlier by Todd Blanche, Under Secretary of Justice. The interrogation was intended, among other things, to convince critical Trump supporters that justice is transparent and is doing its best to find out the truth in the Epstein case. Details about the conversation have not yet been shared.
President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi promised earlier this year to make secret information about the case public. This fueled conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death and an alleged client list he allegedly kept.
But two weeks ago, Bondi said that such a list does not exist at all and that there is no doubt about Epstein’s cause of death (he hanged himself in his cell).
That caused outrage among a section of Trump’s supporters, who increasingly suspect that Trump himself has something to hide. That was compounded when The Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had already informed Trump in May that his name appears in court documents related to Epstein.