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Ghislaine Maxwell‘s brother spoke out in her defense on Monday, calling her a ‘patsy’ for Jeffrey Epstein and claiming she is now being scapegoated because the American authorities ‘lost’ Epstein when he killed himself in his jail cell.
Maxwell’s older brother Ian, 64, appeared on Good Morning America after speaking to The Times of London in an interview over the weekend to protest his sister’s innocence. He is one of her six siblings.
He claims she had her life ruined by Epstein, was not part of his criminal enterprise despite what multiple women say, and is taking the fall for it because someone needs to and Epstein is dead.
‘She’s a patsy for Jeffrey Epstein who they lost on their watch and they are taking it out on my sister and dammit, that’s wrong,’ Ian Maxwell said.
He also revealed a new photograph of his sister, taken in June 2019, a month before Epstein’s arrest.
It is one of the most recent photographs of her. Only one other – what appeared to be a staged photo at an In-N-Out Burger in L.A. – has surfaced in the last two years.
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Ghislaine Maxwell, 59, in June 2019 with her six living siblings. Ian Maxwell, her older brother, top right, shared it this weekend. A month after it was taken, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and Ghislaine went into hiding with her husband, Scott Borgerson. The siblings, L-R, are: Anne, 73, Kevin, 62, twins Isabel and Christine, 70, Philip, 71, and Ian, 64
Ghislaine Maxwell’s older brother Ian on Good Morning America on Monday speaking in her defense
Ian said his younger sister is a ‘patsy’ for Jeffrey Epstein who killed himself in jail in 2019
He added that his sister is the victim of a ‘media lynch mob’ and says she is being treated differently to other crime suspects, is ‘tortured’ in jail and cannot sleep.
‘I’m not minimizing the seriousness of the allegations but my sister is fighting for her life… that’s pretty serious too,’ he said.
He claimed that when Epstein killed himself in July 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, his sister had moved on with her life and was happily married to Scott Borgerson, the man she was found holed up with in New Hampshire last summer.
Ian says that she was not involved with Epstein by that point.
‘Ghislaine was married, with stepchildren, getting on with her life and then bang. She’s married, has a husband, two stepchildren.
‘She was simply seeking to protect her family. She was not running from law enforcement.
‘Suddenly he dies and they’ve got this really serious problem… it seems to me inescapable that the authorities decided they had to do something about it,’ he said.
Ghislaine managed to hide from public view for a year before the FBI arrested her in New Hampshire in an early morning raid.
Since then, she has been in jail in Manhattan. Her attorneys have complained repeatedly about the conditions she has faced.
On Monday, her brother said they amounted to ‘torture’.
‘She’s lost 20lbs, she’s losing her hair, she can’t concentrate… she has a flashlight shone in her cell every 15 minutes during the night so she has no sleep of any real quality.
‘That is torture,’ he said.
He also spoke of their father, the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell who died mysteriously during a yachting trip in the Canary Islands in the 1990s after pillaging the pension funds of The Mirror newspaper group, saying that he was an ‘extraordinarily well-connected man’.
‘My father was an extraordinarily well connected man.
‘She had grown up in that world and was very able to move in it freely,’ he said, making no mention of their father’s crimes.
In his interview with The Times, Ian said of his sister’s relationship with Epstein: ‘I know she wishes that she had never met him. He has ruined her life.
‘The Ghislaine that we know has been buried in this caricature, this monstrous creature that has been invented as an abuser and a pimp.
‘Ghislaine is very charming. She has a very good sense of humor.’
Maxwell has had multiple attempts at bail turned down. She has agreed to renounce her British and French citizenship in an attempt to be released by the judge has rejected her efforts.
She remains behind bars.
Ian, in a separate interview, said his sister was their father’s favorite. She is shown with their parents, the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell – who died in the early 90s – and his wife Elisabeth who died in 2013
Multiple women claim she procured them for Epstein when they were underage girls, and facilitated his pedophile ring by organizing travel for them or meetings with Epstein.
She denies the charges.
Her brother told The Times: ‘She did the house up or managed one or two of his properties.’
He added that Ghislaine believes firmly that her father was murdered on his boat – Lady Ghislaine – and said their childhood was difficult and filled with punishment.
‘We were all physically punished, girls and boys; the girls were smacked and the boys belted, mostly for poor grades, laziness and lack of application at school.
‘You didn’t want to be too close to home because it was quite tense.
‘Meal times were always pretty tough. We had to stand up and account for what we’d done that day, that week, that year.’
He told how Ghislaine, the youngest, seemed to be their father’s favorite of the children and how the other kids were ‘stunned’ when he named his boat after her.
‘It was all a big mystery. Ghislaine was given this bottle, she crashed it against the side, the wrap fell off and there it was the Lady Ghislaine.
‘She was stunned. We all were stunned,’ he said.
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