Dear Gossips, 

Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers have requested that she be released on US$5 million bail, because of COVID-19. Her legal team is promising that she would turn over her passports and be GPS-monitored while staying in New York at a private residence. They insist that she is not a flight risk, even though she has so much money and is clearly resourceful in other ways. 

 

Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all charges against her associated with Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Per the BBC, “[her] lawyers are arguing Ms Maxwell is not Jeffrey Epstein and that she had not been in contact with him for more than a decade before his death”. Sure, but according to US federal prosecutors, “for a five-year period beginning in 2007, Maxwell and Epstein exchanged more than $20 million dollars between their bank accounts, with the sums going first from Epstein to Maxwell, and then back to Epstein”.

Does this count as not being in contact? When you are financially connected, when there’s all that money going back and forth, you don’t have to actually speak or see each other to be linked, non? 

Interestingly enough, the last time Ghislaine Maxwell spoke to Prince Andrew was just before Jeffrey Epstein died. Andrew told Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight that Epstein didn’t come up because “we had moved on”. There’s a certain luxury in being able to “move on” whenever you feel like it, despite that dozens of women coming forward, for years detailing a pattern of abuse and exploitation. 

 

As we know though, Andrew can’t move on. Every time there’s a headline about his friend, the dead rapist pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, or his other friend Ghislaine, the woman who allegedly recruited and groomed girls for Epstein, we think of Andrew, we wonder what Andrew knows, what Andrew did. And if he’s on those tapes, if they exist. But this tweet sums up some of the reactions to all that quite nicely: 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey