NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell’s family launched a “GMaxFacts” Twitter account Wednesday as the fight over her third bid for bail heats up.
“We know Ghislaine better than anyone, we are her family. It is our mission to shine light on the real Ghislaine, not the figure of fiction caricatured by the media. #GMaxFACTS #FactsMATTER” the family said in its first tweet.
The rare public statement from the British socialite’s associates came shortly after Manhattan federal prosecutors urged Judge Alison Nathan to reject Maxwell’s third request for release from the Metropolitan Detention Center into home confinement. Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey wrote that Maxwell’s offer to renounce her British and French citizenship did not address concerns she could flee the country.
“The defendant is wrong. That she is ‘willing’ to renounce her foreign citizenship would do nothing to prevent the defendant from fleeing and then fighting extradition once abroad, and it does nothing to diminish the risk that the defendant could choose to flee to another jurisdiction altogether, including one with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty and from which extradition is impossible,” Comey wrote.
Maxwell, 59, is currently scheduled to face trial in July for grooming underage victims of Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-1990s. She allegedly served as Epstein’s chief recruiter of sex trafficking victims and at times joined in the sex offender’s serial abuse.
The Maxwell family’s new Twitter account hints at a change in public relations strategy. Previously, her legal team and family have only spoken through court filings while arguing she’s been portrayed so badly in the press she has no hope of a fair trial.
The GMaxFacts account retweeted an op-ed in the Daily News by a family spokesman likening the conditions of her confinement at the New York detention center to torture.
“No objective person could honestly defend the conditions of her confinement,” family spokesman David Oscar Marcus wrote.
Maxwell has said correctional officers shine a light into her cell every 15 minutes overnight, preventing her from getting a good night’s sleep. Last month her attorneys wrote that she was “physically abused” during a routine pat-down — a claim that has not been addressed in public filings by prosecutors or the judge.
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