When FBI agents showed up at British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s secluded New Hampshire estate to arrest her, she ran to another room, forcing agents to break through the front door.
The British socialite, who was living on the property she bought via an anonymous limited liability company (LLC), had a cellphone wrapped in tin foil — apparently to avoid it being tracked. She also had round-the-clock security made up of former UK military personnel who fetched things for her using a credit card issued by the LLC.
Those are just some of the measures federal prosecutors say Maxwell, 58, took to hide from law enforcement when she was arrested July 2 on sex-trafficking charges linked to her association with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In a court filing on Monday, the government cited those details in its fight to keep Maxwell locked up before her trial, saying that she had spent the past year “hiding” from law enforcement and has access to “extraordinary financial resources” that would allow her to flee the country is she was freed.
A federal judge was yesterday scheduled to consider whether to grant Maxwell’s request to be released from a Brooklyn, New York, lockup on US$5 million bond to live under house arrest until her trial.
Her defense team argued for her release, citing her long ties to the US, where she has lived to decades.
However, prosecutors on Monday reiterated that the daughter of British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell remains a high risk to flee the country to avoid prison.
“She has demonstrated her ability to evade detection, and the victims of the defendant’s crimes seek her detention,” the US said in its filing.
If she flees to France, where she also has citizenship, Maxwell would not be sent back to the US for trial because the country does not extradite its citizens to the US for prosecution.
Maxwell is accused of luring girls as young as 14 for sexual encounters with Epstein and engaging in some of the abuse.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS