OPINION:
Human rights lawyers Francois Zimeray and Jessica Finelle have filed a complaint with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention alleging “serious violations of Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence rights and presumption of innocence.” The decision to incarcerate Ms. Maxwell for over 500 days in isolation certainly strikes me as of doubtful legality and it seems highly unlikely Ms. Maxwell will receive evenhanded treatment.
She was just a child when I spent several very happy years working for her late father, but I have watched in dismay as this farrago has unfolded.
In a press conference in July 2020 soon after Ms. Maxwell’s arrest, William Sweeney, the FBI’s assistant director for New York, described her as “a villain” who had “slithered away” into hiding after Jeffrey Epstein’s death. Such language and the brutal media coverage that followed have made it almost impossible for her to get a fair trial.
The tenor of the proceedings make one suspect Ms. Maxwell is being prosecuted as a proxy for Epstein to give the baying crowd a scalp and to deflect from the U.S. authorities’ own incompetence in allowing him to die on their watch.
JOHN CAMERON
St. Andrews, United Kingdom
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