You can see a new narrative spinning up around Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell, where the only person in prison for hers and Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes is supposedly innocent. She has long claimed she never got a fair trial without providing evidence as to why, and the word pardon is beginning to fly around Trumpworld. Fox News for people with a terminal brain injury, Newsmax, even went as far to say that Maxwell might be a victim, echoed by smaller fish on the right trying to get into dear leader’s good graces. Maxwell’s attorney said today that they haven’t spoken to Trump about a pardon, but said “we hope he exercises that power in a right and just way.” Trump also talked about a pardon for her today, saying he “hasn’t thought about it” but that “I’m allowed to do it.”
This is what moving the Overton Window in real time looks like, as the potential for a pardon gets floated for a woman embroiled in a subject Trump thinks is a “waste of time” to talk about. Just to remind everyone what the Department of Justice found when they sentenced Ghislane Maxwell to 20 years in prison, this is what her legal team is not so subtly asking for a pardon over.
From at least 1994, up to and including in or about 2004, GHISLAINE MAXWELL assisted, facilitated, and participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls by, among other things, helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to MAXWELL and Epstein to be under the age of 18. The victims were as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by MAXWELL and Epstein, both of whom knew that their victims were in fact minors. As a part and in furtherance of their scheme to abuse minor victims, MAXWELL and Epstein enticed and caused minor victims to travel to Epstein’s residences in different states, which MAXWELL knew and intended would result in their grooming for and subjection to sexual abuse.
Maria Farmer, who provided the first criminal complaint to law enforcement about Jeffrey Epstein in 1996, said of Ghislane Maxwell, “I’ve never met a more predatory, terrifying human being in my entire life…there’s hundreds of us who were preyed upon by Ghislane Maxwell. She’s a very dangerous person and she threatened my life on very many occasions.”
The flip side of any question around a pardon for Maxwell is why Trump would do it. Why pardon the only person with connections to Epstein that were proven in a court of law? Obviously, it’s so people can do what he has asked them to do and stop talking about this, but the implication his flopsweat is presenting here is feeling the need to prove he’s not in the Epstein files (while the WSJ reports the DOJ told him he’s in them). Unless Trump is just freaking out about nothing and is totally innocent and this is all one big MAGA misunderstanding, it’s hard to see how Maxwell could do that for him. Proving a negative is never easy, and prosecutors have already established her as a dishonest narrator, as she was going to go on trial for perjury before she was sentenced to more serious crimes. It’s not quite clear what Maxwell could offer Trump to get him out of a sticky situation that no one really understands but Trump, but the word pardon is already being floated around as right-wing media portrays her as a victim. Come this time next week, don’t be surprised if there’s more momentum behind this trial balloon.
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