US3 min(s) read
Published 12:03 12 Dec 2021 GMT
Ghislaine Maxwell believes that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered during his time in prison, her brother Ian Maxwell has revealed.
Maxwell is charged with six counts alleging that she recruited, groomed, and abused four underage girls between 1994 and 2004. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges and faces 80 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
She is accused of helping financier Epstein abuse underage girls between 1994 and 2004. She denies all charges against her.
During an appearance on The Spectator's Americano podcast on Saturday, December 11, Ian rallied behind his sister as he compared theories around the death of the convicted sex offender to the case of his own father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who died in 1991.
"I don't buy a lot of the conspiracy theories at all. It so happens that one of the conspiracy theories is about my father, that he was murdered.
"Of all of my siblings Ghislaine is the only one who happens to believe that he [Robert Maxwell] was murdered. And I would venture to believe that she may also think that Epstein was murdered," he said.
Maxwell was arrested in July 2020 at her New Hampshire home, and has since denied any involvement in the incidents of sex trafficking that her now-deceased ex-partner, Epstein, was accused of.
Epstein's final cause of death was revealed to be suicide by hanging in his jail cell in August 2019. This took place as he awaited, without the chance of bail, his trial on sex trafficking charges.
While the medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, his death had sparked numerous conspiracy theories including that he was murdered.
Elsewhere, the body of billionaire press baron Robert Maxwell was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991 after he fell overboard from his yacht.
While an inquest recorded the cause of death to be heart attack and accidental drowning, there is still speculation whether or not his death was suicide or murder.
In the podcast, Ian also recounted his only meeting with Epstein in 1996 during a lunch with Ghislaine.
"I didn't warm to him," he said. "He was a bit of a cagey character, clearly intelligent, had a certain charisma. But he was somebody who took things from you rather than gave things back. Not a very clubbable man, not a man you want to go and have a drink with."
Elsewhere in the interview, Ian said he believes that his sister is being scapegoated because Epstein is no longer alive.
"I think that the key thing that I have always thought about is that she should never have been put on trial. The case against her is really a case against Jeffrey Epstein that has been reverse-engineered post his death against my sister.
"And it’s been driven from the start by a combination of enormous embarrassment on the part of the US legal authorities on one hand and by the greed of the lawyers of the accusers on the other hand.
"And that has whipped up tremendous fury against my sister that has totally trashed her presumption of innocence and has led to her being jailed for over 525 days in isolation."
