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Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers have been kept very busy over the course of the past year or so, especially with regards to how their client is being treated in prison.

Not very well, according to complaints, but the disgraced socialite, who is facing charges related to recruiting and grooming underage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, will find sympathy hard to come by.

Money talks, though, and Maxwell and her associates have plenty of that, so the battle to try and secure her release continues.

In their latest filings, lawyers for Maxwell are seeking the dismissal of charges against her “on grounds the grand jury chosen to indict her was too White”.

Even though Maxwell herself is White.

According to the legal experts who spoke with The Washington Post, it’s a valid move:

In pretrial motions filed late Monday night, Maxwell’s legal team said the grand jury empaneled last year in suburban Westchester County was improperly seated and lacked diversity — and that Manhattan, where the case is pending in federal court and where there is a higher concentration of minorities, should have been the venue.

“The fact that Ms. Maxwell herself is neither Black nor Hispanic does not deprive of her of standing to raise this challenge,” one of her pretrial motions says.

It may be legally valid, but it’s not a great look:

Under the law, juries and grand juries must represent a fair cross-section of the community where the alleged crime occurred…

“The fact that she’s a White woman raising this claim about having a grand jury pool that’s not representative of the jurisdiction where she’s being tried — while it might be jarring on its face, it’s kind of well within the bounds of the ways in which these type of claims get raised,” [New York University School of Law’s Vincent] Southerland said.

When you factor in that Maxwell associates recently pledged $25 million as bail to get her out of jail, following her arrest at a mansion in New England where she tried to flee from authorities, it’s a stretch to see her as a victim in all of this.

In a recent bail application, Maxwell revealed she had set aside close to $8 million to be spent on lawyers, out of the $22,5m in assets that belong to her and her husband.

She’s not the only Epstein associate that tried to do a runner, either, with 74-year-old Jean-Luc Brunel recently nabbed at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.

Maxwell’s legal team also argued, according to court documents, that a highly controversial plea deal Epstein entered into with federal prosecutors in Florida years ago extended protections to her because, in exchange for his guilty plea, he and his associates were promised that no additional charges would be brought. He served only about a year in jail with liberal work-release privileges, despite the number of victims that law enforcement had identified at that point.

In all of this, I think ‘privilege’ is very much a key word.

Maxwell’s trial is currently scheduled for July.

[source:washpost]