A discussion with Ian Maxwell, brother of Ghislaine

As everyone ravenously gobbles up all the new “Epstein Files,” released with redactions galore by the Department of Justice (hey, I tried to warn you!) please enjoy this discussion I recorded yesterday with Ian Maxwell, a man who I’m sure has many noteworthy traits in his own right, but for our purposes is most relevant because he happens to be the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell — perhaps the most high-profile inmate in the federal prison system. I won’t shy away from acknowledging that I’m of the belief that Maxwell was wrongly convicted, that her 2021 trial was a complete farce, and that she’s essentially been scapegoated for the mythological sins of Jeffrey Epstein. Because someone had to pay for his world-historic wrongdoing, even if the contours of this perceived wrongdoing are seldom well-defined. Along the way, all manner of civil liberties were aggressively curtailed to put Ghislaine in the can — from suspending the right to confront one’s accusers, previously guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, to the “cruel and unusual punishment” of being tormented with beaming strobe-lights every 15 minutes, so she could not even sleep in pretrial detention. Exculpating evidence was withheld from her defense counsel; profit-seeking civil lawyers were effectively deputized as surrogate prosecutors. “Victims” were trotted out to contrive the most outlandish tales about events that took place as many as 27 years before; none had ever named Maxwell as a “sex-trafficking” villain until post-2019, when the settlement floodgates opened, and they could maximize their payouts by ensuring their newly-recalled memories aligned squarely with the government’s crusade to nail someone, anyone, for the broader Epstein fiasco. As an FBI official effused upon Maxwell’s arrest in July 2020, it took a great deal of “creativity” for enterprising law enforcement professionals to figure out a way to send Maxwell to the slammer. Because the factual predicate was not exactly straightforward. But they got it done, by god, thanks in no small part to the cultural and political mania that prevailed at the time, which even swept right through the jury box. One juror spoke up at a critical moment during deliberations, imploring his fellow jurors to set aside their misgivings about the witnesses’ credibility, because he too — the juror, that is — was himself a child sex abuse survivor, and this somehow endowed him with the knowledge that the government-designated victims must be telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One problem, though: this sermonizing foreman had also falsified his juror questionnaire, checking “no” under the question: “Have you or a friend or family member ever been the victim of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or sexual assault?” Which was supposed to have been grounds for him to be disqualified from the resultant jury pool, given the likelihood that he’d fail to remain impartial in evaluating the alleged child sex crimes at issue in the trial. But the judge paid no mind; post-verdict appeals made by Maxwell’s counsel were soundly rebuffed. So now she’s been sitting in prison for over five years, and has also incongruously become a partisan “hot potato,” with Democrats darkly intimating that she must’ve been moved to a slightly-less-onerous lockup facility because she’s an accessory to some “coverup” engineered by Trump, even though no one ever specifies what exactly is being covered up. So there you have it: I spoke to her brother yesterday. And so concludes my stream-of-consciousness introduction to that conversation. One big, unwieldy paragraph that I’m not even going to bother trimming down for aesthetic reasons. Deal with it!

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