[imagesource: US District Court for the Southern District of New York / AFP / Getty Images]

Last month, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with five years of supervised release, at the federal court in the Southern District of New York.

Frankly, that’s not enough for somebody who aided and abetted decades of sex trafficking and the abuse of underage girls and women.

Maxwell’s lawyers had argued ahead of sentencing that their client should serve at most four to five years behind bars because she was being made into a scapegoat for Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Speaking at her sentencing, Judge Alison Nathan told the court that “the damage done to these girls was incalculable” and added that victims were still forced to live through the “painful, horrific and lasting impact of that trauma”.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, despite apologising to her victims during her sentencing hearing, Maxwell formally appealed her conviction and 20-year prison sentence yesterday.

Court documents show Maxwell has paid $505 to appeal against her conviction and sentence, and the court docket shows her appeal has now been sent to the US court of appeals.

More via Sky News:

The 60-year-old was found guilty of luring young girls to massage rooms for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to molest between 1994 and 2004…

Image: US District Court for the Southern District of New York

Maxwell’s lawyers had indicated they would be appealing against the conviction after it emerged one of the jurors in her trial had failed to disclose he had been sexually abused.

That argument was rejected by Judge Nathan back in April.

The filings lodged yesterday to set the appeal in motion didn’t outline what issues the disgraced former socialite will raise in her defence.

She certainly pulled out all of the stops ahead of her sentencing last month, as NBC News reported at the time:

One of Maxwell’s fellow inmates was offered money to murder her and planned to “strangle her in her sleep,” according to her lawyers… The claim was made in court papers in which Maxwell’s lawyers pleaded for leniency.

“One of the female inmates in Ms. Maxwell’s housing unit told at least three other inmates that she had been offered money to murder Ms. Maxwell and that she planned to strangle her in her sleep,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Her lawyers also argued that Ghislaine, the daughter of billionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell, had a traumatic and grim childhood.

With good behaviour and credit for time already served (as well as enough money to have her lawyers continue to hammer away), 60-year-old Maxwell may well be out of jail before her mid-70s.

Appeals processes usually last for at least several months, meaning victims will once again have to endure watching one of their tormentors seek to wriggle off the legal hook.

[sources:sky&nbc]