TRANSCRIPT:
JB: The last time I interviewed you, your sister, Ghislaine Maxwell, had just been found guilty at her trial and was sent to a prison in Tallahassee. But since then, a lot has happened. Not only has new evidence come to light, but Glenn was interviewed in prison by the DOJ.
During that interview, she said that President Trump wasn’t involved in any of the things that Epstein was accused of. Shortly after that, she was transferred to a minimum security prison in Texas. Now, there are, as you will have seen, rumors swirling around social media that it was essentially a deal to take some of the political pressure off of Donald Trump - i.e., if she told the DOJ that Trump wasn’t involved in any of the Epstein scandal, she’d be moved to a better prison. Is there any truth in that all?
IM: Well, the first thing that we know is that the entire transcript of the interview was released publicly. So, what Ghislaine said and what Blanche asked her is known to everybody. The fact of the matter is that her life was in danger in Tallahassee. Because there was some very violent people in there.
And people who are deemed to be talking to the feds, or whatever you want to describe it, are automatically assumed to be shopping others and basically turning state’s evidence. So, that’s never taken very well inside a prison where life is cheap and the cost of harming somebody or killing them is measured at a few bucks, 25 bucks, 30 bucks for a hit.
So she was in real danger and the government, whatever else it has done, could not afford, in my view, to lose Ghislaine on their watch, just as they lost Epstein.
And anything to ensure that she is protected must be the correct thing to have done. And certainly, I have talked to her myself since late July or August, whenever the transfer took place, and she is certainly in a safer place. She feels better. She’s been able to sleep.
You have no idea the sleep deprivation from MDC Brooklyn, where she was on 18 months of suicide watch and being woken up every 15 minutes throughout the night, and then in Tallahassee where she was in multiple bunk dorms with televisions on all day, all night, and hardly any dark anywhere. So she was really, tremendously deprived of sleep. And that, I think, is the single most important physical improvement in her, that she’s got back her energy and colour in her cheeks and, of course, the fighting her cause is really what keeps the fires burning inside her.
JB: Sure. And some people, particularly the media, they’ve portrayed this new prison as if she’s in as some sort of holiday camp. What’s the reality?
IM: Look, it’s a prison. And a prison is a prison, doesn’t matter how you dress it up. I suppose in UK terms, it’s sort of similar to an open prison. But it’s a prison. And the leaks of her private emails to her family, and above all of her legal emails, to her lawyer, are incredibly damaging and really disgraceful.
And it’s obvious to me anyway that there’s a lot of political point scoring going on here. The Democrats in the Oversight Committee leaked the emails to a newspaper, that then published them.
You can’t help feeling that the Democrats are using Ghislaine, or attempting to use Ghislaine, to beat the President with at every opportunity - Epstein generally, but Ghislaine specifically. That’s the impression that I get. I have heard nothing of this sort of, you know, some sort of hotel arrangement, that she can have what she likes to eat and the warden’s waiting on her hand and foot. I mean, this is just complete nonsense. It’s a professionally run prison, people who respect the laws and who respect the inmates and the guards. From what I understand from Ghislaine, they are completely correct, that there is no preferential treatment. She’s just in a safer place. And from my perspective as her brother, that’s a source of tremendous comfort to me.
JB: So let’s touch briefly on something that gets covered very little here. There’s not much coverage on this, if I’m honest, although she’s quite a key player: So I read somewhere that Maureen Comey seems to think that she was fired by the Trump administration for political reasons and because she’s the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, whom President Trump has long had his differences with. Do you have any comment on that at all?
JB: Well, Maureen Comey was the lead prosecutor of Ghislaine. And as we now know from the habeas petition that Ghislaine filed this week - I’m sure we’re gonna’ come to the contents of that - one of the central charges is that the government, that is to say the prosecution, that is to say Maureen Comey, deliberately withheld Brady material. Brady material is exculpatory material which must, under US law, be handed over to the defence, even if the evidence does not help the government, does not help the prosecution.
They have a duty to hand over material of that type. It was deliberately withheld, and we know from Maureen Comey’s own words when she took and spoke on oath, on behalf of the FBI in a suit bought by a news website called Radar Online back in 2022, and she was asked about this and she said, “Yes, we...” (I’m, I’m paraphrasing, but essentially), “Yes, we did withhold information in case there was a second trial and we would have needed to deploy it.”
“Now that’s out of her own words. So here you have somebody who is defying the Constitution, not handing over, as she’s duty-bound to do, information and evidence that helps the defence, and seems to be treating it with complete contempt, that obligation - and to behave in that way, effectively to break the law… and she wonders why she’s being fired.
I mean, you ask yourself the question. I mean, I don’t know who is the arrogant person in here? You know, the impression is that somehow the administration has got it in for this family. Could it not just be that they are, in the case of the daughter, I can’t speak for the father, but in the case of the daughter, could it not really be to do with incompetence and transgression of the law? That seems to me to be sufficient reason for her to have been terminated.
I don’t know any more than that. But that’s what I know as far as just the prosecution of my sister is concerned.
JB: And something that has scuppered all of this, that has made all of this a lot more complex, are the so-called Epstein files. You mentioned that things are being used as political footballs, so to speak. Ghislaine urged the judge not to release the Epstein files, but what are your thoughts about the files themselves, the timing of the Democrats wanting to release these files, and how the media are selectively presenting the evidence in those files?
IM: Well, let’s just understand the position. A law has been passed and signed into law by the president, voted by the Congress and the Senate, that these materials under the general title, the Epstein files, must be released publicly, I think, today, the 19th. And I am perfectly content that, you know, thousands of pages are going to come out.
We don’t know what, how much is already truly in the public domain, and how much is not in the public domain. But the law says these files must be released. The only files or the only documentation the DoJ is holding, that I think is exempted from this, is material that is going to be held back. There might be some small amount. I don’t think it will be a large amount of paper. The DoJ for one reason or another, maybe they have an ongoing prosecution somewhere or there’s additional redactions to be done, could be an issue of national security, we don’t know.
The government has legitimate reasons for holding back certain materials, but they must explain why they’re holding those back. So, on the assumption that most of the material is then released into the public domain, that is what’s going to happen. In the meantime, Congress, through the committee led by ranking Democrats and so forth, have chosen to release photographs notably - of a certain number of individuals - to embarrass them and to keep the feet of the administration pressed to the fire.
Not that they don’t shirk and that they continue to produce the material as it has been ordered. So clearly they’re hoping for whatever political advantage they can get. The Republicans are complaining that it’s selective, it’s anti-Trump, it’s this, it’s that. It’ll happen, it must happen. And everybody will then draw whatever conclusions they can from this material and seek to embarrass whoever, because that’s the game in politics. And it’s become so binary in America.
JB: I think that’s the issue that I have though, is that I would like everything to be released, of course. However, the way the information is presented to the public, because let’s be honest, the average Joe relies upon journalists, they rely upon journalists to give them the news and to give them context. They’re not gonna’ sift through thousands and thousands of pages of documents, court transcripts, and depositions, et cetera. So they generally believe what journalists and the press are telling them. However, we’ve seen throughout this, not just the Epstein files, but throughout the entire Epstein scandal, that the case has been twisted and manipulated for political reasons, sometimes not political reasons at all - sometimes just to create sensational headlines. And I do worry, because the files that we’ve seen released so far have already been misrepresented. For instance, the Donald Trump thing, I do believe that they have smeared him to some extent. For instance, you know, redacting Virginia Giuffre’s name in one of the emails to make it look like he had been in the home of a victim, so it removed the context that Virginia had already said that she had never seen him do anything illegal or inappropriate. So I do have those concerns, and I don’t believe that we are going to see the truth completely from the media. I don’t have trust fully in the public - though I’d love to - for them to sit down and look for context away from the media. But anyway, let’s, let’s move onto this habeas corpus, because it’s huge at the moment.
Since your sister was convicted, since we last spoke, a lot of new evidence has been coming out. Ghislaine has been busy working on this habeas petition for some time, setting out everything wrong in her case and the subsequent trial, how it was handled. I know that she submitted that a few days ago, at least. Why do you think the court took so long to upload the habeas petition, and then when they did upload it, it was uploaded with missing sections? Was it just a genuine error, or do you think perhaps it was intentional to time it alongside the releasing of the so-called Epstein files?
IM: Well, I’m generally, between a conspiracy theory man or a cock-up man, I’m generally on the cock-up side rather than conspiracy side. So, the first thing to say about the petition is that it is no ordinary habeas petition, which is a form with boxes to tick and some small evidence put in the sides. Prisoners regularly file habeas petitions, because they can, and they are regularly knocked back because they are. In the case of Ghislaine, she has written up, I think it’s a 53-page petition, and she’s acting now per se, as they say in America, or as a litigant in person, as we say in the United Kingdom.
And that is simply because the cost of lawyers is so massive that Ghislaine can no longer - and, frankly nor can the family - sustain the costs of permanent representation for her. So she’s had to do all the work herself, had to do all the research herself. My sisters have helped to a certain extent, but this is really the product of Ghislaine’s own work.
So in addition to the 56-page, whatever it is, 53-page petition, there are 143 exhibits coming up, close to 1,000 pages of material to support the grounds for relief that are the basis for the petition. It’s a federal habeas petition, and the federal courts are quite technologically challenged.
So trying to upload a 50-plus page petition and 1,000 pages and exhibits to a technologically challenged court is no slam dunk. It’s gotta’ go through something called the Per Se Office, because there is an office for litigants, and they check that everything is correct and so on, and they acknowledged to Ghislaine that it was properly uploaded to them.
Somehow between the Per Se Office and the Southern District of New York, it took a bit of time to get through, and then the actual upload itself, clearly, there have been some issues with it because it is, when I last looked, it was not completely intact.
I know that there is work afoot to try and get it sorted out so that the full petition is there and all 143 exhibits are there, although I think in the case of the exhibits they are sealed rather than unsealed, because the court requires to redact it.
It doesn’t matter really what we see on the docket. What truly matters is that the judge, who has to consider this petition, gets all 56 pages in the right sequence and he has access to 143 of the exhibits so that he’s got everything in which to be able to take the decision.
I don’t think it was some conspiracy on the part of the government, although, my goodness, we’ve seen a lot of that. But I think, in this case, I think it’s a cock-up, and I think they’re going to correct it, and I hope they do.
JB: So less conspiracy and more the fact that they need more efficient staff and a better scanner, perhaps?
IM: When uploading, basically you’re emailing across. But the speed at which you can take this material in, if you can only upload it at 15 megs a second, whatever… you’ve got to break a document down into two, three, four emails. So you’re talking about 300 plus emails. The complexity of it and the capacity to go wrong is there.
JB: And your sister has already made numerous appeals and been turned down in all of them. What’s the major difference between her prior appeals and petitions and this new habeas petition, and more importantly, will the result likely be any different?
IM: That’s a good question. There are two fundamental differences. One is the nature of the appeal that she’s making now, and the second thing is the new evidence that has emerged between when the first appeals were made and today’s appeal. So the appeals that she has conducted are, firstly, she appealed to the Second Circuit Appeal Court, that’s to say the Appeal Court which governs New York.
And a number of the points that that are being made in the habeas were made at the Appeal Court, and they were all turned down. But that appeal was filed by Ghislaine, from my memory, in, I think, 2022 or ‘23, and much of the new evidence that’s come out, both through Congress and other sources, and we’ll come to that in a minute, has come out in the last, since a year ago, really.
So that’s as far as the appeal to the Second Circuit is concerned. And then she appealed to the Supreme Court. But on the Supreme Court, she didn’t take all the appeal points that had been turned down by the Appeal Court. She concentrated on one specific point, which was that she should never have been prosecuted anyway, because the non-prosecution agreement negotiated by Jeffrey Epstein himself with, uh, the government, so Ghislaine argued, was the remit that ran across all the jurisdictions in the United States. In other words, the United States cannot present in Florida and yet present in New York. You can’t have the law running in Pennsylvania with one set of decisions, and it doesn’t run in Alaska with another set of decisions.
So, the Supreme Court did not elect to take her petition. The important thing to note, Jay, is that that does not mean she did not have a case. She had a very good case, which hit the sweet spot for the Supreme Court, because it absolutely hates having differences between its Appeal Courts. That is a perfect area for the Supreme Court to step in and rule federally across the nation. And we don’t know why, they’re not obliged to say why they chose not to take it. I think you could take a reasonable guess and say this is a very political case; they didn’t want to get involved.
Maybe it was the test case that wasn’t... Maybe they’re hoping they’ll find another test case. They just decided not to go with it, for whatever, you draw whatever conclusions you want.
And so we now get to the habeas petition. Now a habeas is different to the others, because this is to do with matters of violation of the Constitution and of due process at the trial itself. And habeas corpus means you have the body, so the Federal Government is holding the body of my sister in its penitentiary... and this writ is designed to seek the relief of the same court that convicted her on nine specific grounds, and I’m sure we’re gonna’ come to those in a minute.
It’s a very serious issue, it’s the last possible safeguard for prisoners that they’re able to pursue. It must be said that 90 plus percent of all habeas’ fail.
JB: Yeah, that’s the thing. I just wondered if you had, you know, considered what you would be doing next if this does fail?
IM: So, the point that I want to make is this: The great majority of habeas corpus, habeas petitions, fail because they do not meet very, very stringent tests which have to be taken into consideration by the presiding judge of every habeas petition, and those conditions relate to: has it been brought within the right period of time? These are time-barred. A lot of this is time-barred material, so the first question is, has it been brought at the right time? Second, they cannot retry substantive issues. This isn’t a petition to say, you know, the jury didn’t take this into consideration, or the witness said something… You know, it’s not a retrial. What it is is specifically dealing with constitutional and due process issues, and they are very specific. And in the case of Ghislaine, there’s nobody who knows her case better than her. She knows it better than any lawyer. The lawyers are obviously crucial for helping with legal authorities and nice turns of phrase and the like, but Ghislaine knows her case backwards, and she believes, and I believe, and if you read the petition carefully, it is incredibly well-structured. It’s got tremendously lengthy legal authorities underpinning it, and above all, it has incontrovertible evidence sustaining each one of these grounds.
As I said, some of the grounds were already rejected by the appeal court in whenever it was, ‘23 or ‘24 even, but nonetheless, they were, before the evidence that Ghislaine is now deploying has come out, and it is entirely possible that the appeal court would have come down on a different point of view had they had this evidence.
JB: Well, what let’s touch upon some of the important parts of that habeas corpus, because it does list some quite shocking examples of how Ghislaine not only didn’t receive a fair trial, but how her constitutional rights were abused. So let’s start with the first point in your family statement, because the statement was quite a good summary of sorts of that habeas. And you state in there, “Prosecutors hid witness evidence from 2006 that contradicted the same witness’s testimony in her 2021 trial.” Can you elaborate on that for me?
IM: Well, firstly, how do we know this? We know it because Governor DeSantis, the governor of Florida, chose in December 2024, exactly a year ago, to release, publicly, the state grand jury documentation relating to the 2006 indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. So that’s the source. And we were able, or Ghislaine was able then to see what evidence was put forward to the grand jury to enable it to order the indictment of Epstein in 2006.
And one particular piece of evidence was provided by a crime scene manager by the name of Gregory Parkinson, and he was responsible for securing the Epstein residence in Miami Beach and gathering evidence and labelling it and preserving it and docketing it, filming it, et cetera, et cetera. And what he disclosed about one particular piece of evidence, which was extremely important in Ghislaine’s own trial, related to a massage table. And what he said about it in 2006 and what he said about it now, and what was produced in 2021, are different, significantly different.
And that evidence was suppressed and hidden. The government knew about it because the government indicted Epstein in 2006, and the government paid Mr. Parkinson in 2006 to secure the crime scene. Now, the issue with this massage table is that it was the central piece of evidence on counts five and six relating to interstate commerce, and those two counts carried the highest penalty of 20 years of imprisonment.
If the massage table was not, uh, that was deployed and wheeled in with great fanfare into the… I was there that particular day. I remember it myself, and I thought, “My, oh, what is this?”
JB: I saw the sketch from the courtroom, It was theatrically wheeled in, theatrically, and presented to the jurors as if it was some sort of sacrificial altar.
IM: It was very theatrical. I don’t know, I cannot now recall because it’s, it’s five years ago, whatever, four years, who, which prosecutor, you know, pointed to it and tried to imply that this was the one on which I think the witness Carolyn had been abused, and that Ghislaine had brought this about and had been involved, and it was an immensely emotional... it appealed to the emotions of the jury.
And we know that that landed powerfully with the jury because one of the jurors, uh, Juror 50, Scotty David, in post-trial interviews said so, and said that the jury found the massage table and also other evidence, but that particular piece, highly compelling.
Now, when you go back and you study the evidence carefully, and you see what was in fact brought out, there is an immense dispute as to whether or not what was produced in 2021 was the same thing produced in 2006. A label which said, “Made in California,” which was crucial for proving interstate commerce, as in a California-made table turned up for massage purposes in Florida. Now, the massage table that was taken in 2006 didn’t show any labelling. It wasn’t even the same massage table. It wasn’t even taken from the same bathroom. And now all of this was hidden so that defence could not cast doubt on it and seek to eliminate it from the process, and the government knew it well. And this is one crucial moment in the trial where their suppression of exculpatory material was decisive in ensuring on two counts that Ghislaine went down, and she went down for the heaviest possible penalty of 20 years.
JB: You’ve talked about jurors, but the habeas states there are only nine of them, which of course is unconstitutional. Why? Why were there only nine? There should be twelve.
IM: Well, I mean, there were 12, Jay. Let there be no mistake. I was in the courtroom, I saw 12 jurors, so there were 12 jurors. The family statement just basically short-circuited in this way, that Juror 50 had prior sexual abuse that occurred to him when he was a boy or a young man, and he failed to disclose it on his juror form. And by failing to disclose it on his juror form, he deprived the defence of the opportunity to strike him for cause and probable bias. So he hid it. And we also know, as part of the same conversations and interviews that he gave post-trial, that he confirmed that two other members of the jury also had prior sexual abuse experience, that it happened to them, and were able to corroborate what he had introduced as his own experience into the jury room, even though they are only supposed to be discussing what’s going on in the courtroom. In that sense, nine jurors, nine unbiased jurors, were sitting in judgment on Ghislaine, not 12. And that is a constitutional violation of such importance that it isn’t a technical matter.
The only other thing I want to add with Juror 50 is that the judge had no option but to grant a defence motion that she hold a hearing, an evidential hearing with Juror 50 to ask him why he didn’t declare truthfully what had happened to him and how he could reconcile that with his oath and et cetera, et cetera.
And critically, at the start of this evidence-taking, she said, “You must tell me the truth. If you swear to tell me the truth, I will grant you immunity.” So on the basis that he had a get out of jail free card, he could say anything that sounded vaguely plausible. And we know from a book published in 2024 by the journalist who interviewed him from The Independent, and there were several journalists that interviewed him, there was one from the Daily Mail, that what he had told to the judge was not true. He perjured himself based on the evidence reported by the journalist, from her own conversations with him.
JB: I think that’s one of the biggest points in the habeas, and one of the biggest problems in the trial. Professor Alan Dershowitz said to me that that point alone should have triggered a mistrial. So it’s something that people need to look into more. It’s just a basic right to have an unbiased jury.
You’ve also mentioned in your statement that there was a conflict of interest, that counsel for accusers acted as de facto prosecutors. Again, if you could expand on that, if you would.
IM: Sure. The Supreme Court holds that the government cannot outsource prosecution to an interested private party, interested in a financial sense. And in this case, private attorneys who represented civil claimants subsequently were used as - some of them - as government witnesses at Ghislaine’s trial, with direct financial interest in the outcome of the case against Ghislaine.
And there is significant evidence of collusion between the prosecutors and a number of the accusers’ private counsel. And the reason it’s so important, Jay, is because this was a classic, as we said in the statement, ‘she said, he said’ case, and because of the age of the proceedings. Don’t forget, back when this came to trial in 2021, we were talking about events that had occurred in the mid-’90s. And people had died and memories had gone awry, and so on. And the credibility of the witnesses was absolutely central in every case. And yet, we know that the lawyers for the civil plaintiffs, as I said, one or two of these accusers, really misbehaved with them.
I’ll give you one example. One of the new pieces of evidence that has come out is the mother of one of the central four accusers of Ghislaine at her trial, a girl called Carolyn Andriano, who sadly has died since, confirmed that her daughter was coerced into giving evidence by private lawyers to support the government’s case in return for money. I mean, more black and white I cannot imagine.
JB: I agree, and I was the person, obviously, I interviewed Caroline’s mother, and she said that her daughter was completely exploited, first by Virginia Giuffre in recruiting and grooming her, and that it had nothing to do with Ghislaine at all. And secondly, she claims, as you’ve just mentioned, she claims it was by the lawyers, who exploited her vulnerability, the fact that she was addicted to drugs and had been led on this life of drug abuse, actually instigated by Virginia [Giuffre] giving her those drugs at a very young age. And she actually says that the lawyers wanted to keep her dumbed down and stupid, so that she would say whatever they wanted her to say. And then you throw in the allegations of money being offered to give false testimony, that’s serious and they, they do need…
IM: Your audience needs to bear in mind just how much money is involved here. I mean, we are talking well over half a billion dollars paid by banks, by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, by Prince Andrew, by Ghislaine, et cetera. And when you have money of that scale, where lawyers are taking tremendous, tremendous percentages of that coming their way, you can see that they’re going to stop at almost nothing to make sure that that gravy train keeps going.
JB: They need to keep the cash cow alive, don’t they?
IM: New reporting which has come, you know, since the trial’s come out, it confirms that these lawyers instigated the Southern District of New York investigation. They worked hand in glove with the prosecution, sharing, receiving information, developing, gathering evidence, proposing civil suits, as a means of acquiring evidence for a criminal case, using the media as a strategy to foment investigation and so on and so on. And all of it contradicts the government’s own arguments to the trial jury when they said the lawyers were all - there was no collusion between them and the lawyers, that the witnesses never looked at any media, that the lawyers had no financial motivations. I mean, it’s nonsense, complete nonsense. All of these assertions were false, demonstrably, demonstrably false.
JB: I don’t think that the public realise just how intertwined and involved these private lawyers are, and, you know, that they are…
IM: Exactly.
JB: …motivated by money, but it even comes to the Epstein files. Recently, they wrote, the same lawyers wrote a letter to the judge, and they openly admitted that they had been working pro bono with the House Democrats to help them, you know, with the release of these files. And there’s surely a conflict of interest there as well because they still have ongoing lawsuits against, um, very esteemed banks. And there’s millions, as you say, there’s millions upon millions of dollars at stake. So, terrible business, terrible business.
In the habeas corpus, it also mentions that there was a sentencing error. The sentence calculation and financial penalty imposed were legally and factually wrong. That’s exactly what it states in the habeas. What does that mean exactly?
IM: Let’s deal with the fine first, that Ghislaine was fined $750,000, and the calculation of that fine was wrong, both as to fact and on the basis on which it was taken. She’s perfectly entitled to, the judge, to impose a fine. But the maximum fine that I think was applicable at the time of the sentence was lower than what was finally imposed, and it’s just a technical mistake, but, nonetheless, you know, 750,000 could be reduced to 600,000, 500,000. Anything is going to be better, put it that way.
The sentencing issue is really significant because, again, there are applicable sentence guidelines that the judge really is obliged to stay within, and it seems fairly clear that she did not. And there are also issues as to how non-participating witnesses, such as Giuffre and Sarah Ransome, were allowed through lawyers to read statements, impact statements into the record, which meant that it definitely added at least a year or two, or more, to Ghislaine’s sentence.
But anyway, so there are some technical issues relating to the fine and the sentence which any fair-minded objective judge should be able to get to the bottom of very quickly.
JB: So, you’ve you’ve touched upon the victim impact statements, and I have delved, you know, quite deeply into those statements, and I’ve contacted some of the witnesses who wrote them. And it doesn’t appear that they were - well, I say it doesn’t appear, they weren’t, they weren’t factually correct. They weren’t sound. Even though they were signed under oath. One of the witnesses was Juliet Bryant. In her victim impact statement, and we need to, people who are listening need to realise that these victim impact statements were submitted to the judge and influenced the sentence, you know, how long your sister was going to be put behind bars for.
IM: Yes.
JB: In Juliet Bryant’s alone, she claims that she had been on the island, that she had seen Ghislaine operating, in her words, some sort of sex trafficking operation. That she had seen her send girls to bedrooms, to Jeffrey Epstein, had recruited girls, et cetera, et cetera. Yet to me, and this is after the trial, after she wrote that, she admitted in writing, black and white, that she had never once seen your sister engage in anything illegal, inappropriate, and had never seen her recruiting or sending any girls to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s a major contradiction.
Well, there you go. I mean, that leads very neatly onto two things. One, that in Grand Jury indictments, it’s that kind of statement that is used to sway Grand Juries to issue indictments because the Grand Jury system has no, there’s no defender in there, there’s no one arguing the other way. It’s just the prosecution saying, “We’ve got this evidence, and on the basis of this evidence, we want to issue an indictment.” And most Grand Juries say, “Yes. On the basis of that evidence, you can have the indictment.” But because it’s not put to test inside the Grand ... And Ghislaine has objected to having this kind of grand jury testimony in, put into the public… which would then have the impact of poisoning various appeals, including the habeas appeal that she’s running here. But we have to trust that the judge who made that decision considers the material inside the grand jury transcripts is 99% of it already in the public domain, and therefore it doesn’t matter.
We’ve only got his judgment, but he’s a judge, so we have to hope that he’s got that right. Now, the other key point that is so central to this habeas is that the grand jury transcripts of the Epstein indictment of 2006, released by Governor DeSantis a year ago, were not able to be deployed by Ghislaine at her trial, um, which is truly, uh, uh, was immensely damaging to her ability to defend herself.
And the new evidence reveals coordination by the accuser’s attorneys on the one hand and the government on the other, to conceal grating material because that withheld material allowed the court to deny Ghislaine the ability to introduce exculpatory evidence about the Southern District of Florida’s 2006 investigation of Epstein, and why she was not charged at that time. This was suppressed. And the Miami police detective in charge of that inquiry, of that investigation, a man called Detective Recarey, sadly has died.
But in the 2016 civil case between Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine, he was alive and he was asked in terms of all the 70 witnesses, women, that he interviewed, alleged subjects of abuse by Epstein. Was Ghislaine Maxwell’s name ever mentioned? No. Was Ghislaine Maxwell involved in any way in, in this, uh, abuse? No. Now, how can that not be in the ‘21 trial? It’s just, to me, and wrong that the, through the concealment of exculpatory material by the government, in cahoots with the accuser’s lawyers, enabled the court to not, to accede to the government’s, uh, objection to this material being put into the public record.
JB: I’ve spent over five years now investigating all of this and interviewing key witnesses. And again, what you say there, that she was never uh, your sister was never named as a recruiter or anyone who’d done anything illegal is, is massive and something I explored because, you know, just to fact check it. And I found that every single witness I spoke to had not been recruited by Ghislaine, and she was not involved in their alleged abuse. So just for people who are listening, the media now have given the false narrative that Ghislaine was, is, some sort of trafficker, she was the head of this big operation, when in fact, the people who I spoke to, the people who worked for Epstein, who arranged these massages, et cetera, were people like Sarah Kellen. None of them mentioned Ghislaine Maxwell.
So what was, to set the record straight, what was Ghislaine’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s life?
IM: Look, I think the most important thing that needs to be said at this junction is that the death of Jeffrey Epstein in government custody, in what are without doubt murky - whether you believe he killed himself or whether you believe he was killed, at some point it doesn’t matter because the man is dead. And because he died on the government’s watch, the ranking, uh, political appointed head of the DOJ, Attorney General William Barr, was furious, absolutely furious and embarrassed beyond belief that this had somehow come to pass. He needs to find somebody to bring to book.
And it turns out that Ghislaine fits the bill. She’s high profile, she’s got a well-known name, she moves in exalted circles. She was certainly very close to Epstein for a period of his life. She’s the perfect person to reverse engineer the case against Jeffrey Epstein to make it against her.
And we know from all the new evidence that’s come out that that is precisely what William Barr authorized. Not only did he authorize it-But he personally oversaw the disgraceful, really disgusting, um, regime that Ghislaine was subjected to in MDC Brooklyn, for the suicide watch, the sleep deprivation, and all the other humiliations.
She didn’t sleep one night for 600 days in the bed that she was designated to have slept in, in MDC. They kept moving her every night, every night, to another cell, another cell, another cell. All designed to holler, hollow her out, physically, so that come the trial, she could not take the stand, she could not defend herself.
So we have a situation where she is physically reduced to a, uh, a shadow of the girl that I know to be my sister, on the one hand, and they hollowed out her defense in ways which we are now, uh, able to expose on the other. They were determined that Ghislaine would pay the price, and boy is she paying that price.
So that’s the, what I want to say on that. The, as to the role that Ghislaine had in Epstein’s life, I mean, I think there’s no issue that in the early part of that relationship, they met, I don’t know, uh, ‘91, ‘92, something like that, uh, she was in love with him, they were an item, but they never cohabited.
They didn’t, she didn’t have a key to his house in New York or let alone in Miami. Uh, he didn’t have a key to her house. They didn’t, uh, they were not, uh, uh, partners in that, in that sense at all. And that element of that relationship probably lasted maybe four years, uh, uh, as lovers or something like that.
That she then went on to have a much more professional relationship with him is also without doubt the case. Uh, he had very many properties, substantial properties, in, uh, New York, in Miami, on the island, in, uh, New Mexico, in Paris, uh, and so on, uh, which were major construction issue and projects, a bit like hotels.
They, they were all really very substantial affairs, and she really took over the whole of the management of that side of his life, and, uh, what is also now clear is that he was leading a double life. And, uh, I think Ghislaine reached a point really where she realized that this man was never going to ultimately turn into Mr.
Right, and she ended up in a full-blown relationship with another gentleman by the name of Ted Waite for at least seven years post 2003. So the affective side of her relationship with Jeffrey would have gone from the early ‘90s to the mid-later ‘90s, became much more professional 2000, uh, up to about, uh, 2003.
They were still involved one way or another because she was still helping him with his various, uh, projects from here, uh, here and there, but at a much, much smaller level. And this kind of issue about, uh, who’s organizing, masseuse, and, and so forth to come and visit him, I, she was not involved in anything to do with that as far as I know.
JB: And a lot of that, a lot of the disinformation about your sister actually came about from Virginia Giuffre, uh, and, and she obviously has since been proven to have falsely accused numerous people, including, um, Professor Alan Dershowitz, and she claimed she was traffic to foreign presidents and then admitted she’d never met any.
She claimed she’d had sex with Prince Andrew in New Mexico and then admitted it didn’t happen. I could sit here for an hour. Um, you’ve probably read some of my stuff. But what are your thoughts about Giuffre now? Now, I understand she tragically has died. However, I don’t think that that should stop people from digging into her and looking at the impact that her lies had upon your sister’s case.
IM: Look, I’m on public record as saying I don’t, and I haven’t, shed a tear over the loss of Ms. Giuffre. And I’m not going to pour out some unheartfelt words about it. However, what is true is that she did have a difficult life, in many ways, a tragic life, ... and, uh, she, uh, was abused by her father, she was abused by her father’s friend, uh, she, uh, was, uh, a bit of a wild, feral child.
She fell in with bad people. She seems to have gone on the game at some point. Uh, she suddenly took a fantastic amount of drugs. Um, you know, this is not, you’re not gonna’ you’re not gonna’ be a, turn out to be a nun with that kind of background.
So, it’s, it’s a sad, sad story. But that does not absolve her from the untruths and the lies that she has told which have definitely ruined quite a few lives, not the least of which is my sister and Prince Andrew. And whereas in the case of Prince Andrew, he, he certainly has not helped himself, uh, by a PR policy and, uh, and by his, his, his really unsympathetic character. Um, but that said, uh, it, it is, uh, it is also quite tragic what’s happened to him and to Ghislaine, uh, obviously, goes without saying.
JB: Do you think it was fair that he’s been recently stripped of his titles?
IM: I think that’s just taking it to its logical conclusion. Uh, you know, he’s, uh, the, the hue and cry in the UK in particular has been so significant that The Crown really could not ignore it. I, I, you know, I don’t know where the real impetus inside the family came that, that, that should be done to him.
Um, I, I guess it’s a case of, uh, not just justice in inverted commas, getting his own comeuppance, but that he must be seen to be really have his nose rubbed in it. That’s a particularly English quality of these things. They, we don’t like tall poppies and, uh, we cut ‘em down when we find them and we, there’s a kind of schadenfreude in, um, in, in, watching other people’s humiliations. But personally, I think it’s, I think it’s a bit, uh, I, I don’t like pylons full stop. I don’t like it, I think it’s unnecessary, but it’s the way of the world.
JB: And let’s focus back on the, um, just finish with the habeas corpus. So, how long until the judge makes his decision?
That’s a good question, Jay It’s Christmas, uh, I don’t think we can be waiting for any judgment anytime, anytime soon. I mean, just to put this in perspective, the appeal court took, uh, six months to make their decision. The Supreme Court similar amount of time. Uh, I think in habeas, um, petitions, I suspect that’s gonna’ be shorter because the, um, the, as I said, the, the, the rules governing habeas and the, the particular hurdles that have to be reached and, and specific requirements of the habeas are relatively easily, um, apprehended by any judge.
And that’s why so many of them are chucked out pretty quickly. But I think and I hope that Ghislaine’s petition will give him very serious pause for thought.
You know, uh, he’s entitled to say, “Well, I’m not gonna’ go behind the judge’s decision here,” or, “I’m not going,” you know, “She had discretion there,” or, “She was entitled to do this or take that view,” and so on. But when it comes to black and white binary evidence that shows what the government should by law have done, and in the case of the juror, uh, or jurors, uh, that were not straight about their, uh, backgrounds and did not therefore enable the defense to strike them for cause, I think that is, these are very serious points, and, uh, I hope at the very least he will order an evidential inquiry into certain of these aspects because they merit, uh, they merit such an inquiry.
And because if there is doubt in the public’s mind that a fair trial did not take place, then that is not good for the justice system. And it doesn’t matter if you’re called Ghislaine Maxwell and everybody hates you, you’re still entitled to a fair trial. You are still entitled to, uh, 12 jurors who are not biased or at least, uh, make the best effort they can not to be and don’t, and disclose where they are in doubt about it.
You’re entitled to that, and you’re entitled to expect that the government hands over material that it is duty-bound to do. If none of those things take place, then, you know, you might as well chuck away the key, and they’ve banged her up without the trial, because that’s exactly what happened.
JB: And so worst-case scenario, though, um, and this habeas petition fails, she can of course appeal the decision, but if that fails too, what’s the, the next step, the final step? Will she seek a pardon from President Trump?
IM: Look, I’m not gonna go there, because I want to see how this plays. I think that we will, and I really hope that Ghislaine does get a fair crack of the whip, and that the judge, uh, really looks at it properly and, um, um, um, gives her some relief. And there are numerous things he could do. He could reduce the sentence, he could reduce the fine, he could have an evidentiary hearing, he can declare a mistrial, he can order a retrial, he can release her on this. He’s got lots of options in front of him, so I’m hopeful that, that he will see that this is a case that is, deserves, uh, for him to issue some relief.
That’s the first thing. Uh, the second thing to say is that were Ghislaine to seek a commutation of her sentence or a presidential pardon, she must have gone down the route of the habeas because any such request, any such application, and there are, you know, it’s a form to be filled out like anything else in the world, you must be able to declare that you have exhausted all possible lines of appeal.
You’ve been to the Supreme Court, you’ve done the habeas, you’ve appealed, they’ve gone, it’s finished. There is no other way. So that, it’s a requirement that you have exhausted the appeal process. That is also true, Jay, uh, in the case of repatriation. Should Guillen, uh, decide that, uh, that is, uh, a better option, she must also have s, have, have exhausted all the appeal process there.
So, that’s the, that’s a technical point but it’s, it nonetheless it needs to be said, as to whether she would go down, uh, a commutation or a pardon route or a, uh, repatriation route if that is not available, I think we have to see how how this plays out and then we can, um, uh, be very happy if you invite me back to come back on your, on your, uh, show and, uh, we can then discuss what comes of it.
The only thing I know is that whenever President Trump has been asked about it, he has said that he has the power to grant her a commutation or a pardon, but he hasn’t thought about it, and no one has put it to him. So, let’s leave the last word with President Trump.
JB: Why aren’t journalists telling the truth about any of this, Ian? So for the whole, throughout the whole duration, not just about your sister’s trial, but about her before the trial, for, for probably over a decade, journalists just seem to refuse to tell the truth, and they’ve been promoting false accusations from discredited witnesses like Virginia Giuffre while intentionally ignoring any evidence that supports the innocence of the accused, evidence that supports people like your sister for instance.
Why are they doing that?
IM: I’ll tell, you why. Uh, it doesn’t fit the cultural narrative. Remember that when this, uh, blew out, when Epstein was, uh, arrested for the second time 2019, that we would just, we’d just come over the cusp of the, uh, the high point of the Me Too movement.
And that’s a movement which in shorthand basically says believe all women.
And that is fine as an idea, but when President Biden, and people have often forgotten this, found himself, when he was running for the presidency in 2020, and he was accused by a lady from many years earlier in his life of being handsy, if you know what I mean, he had to, he had to react and he had to react carefully. And he said something rather nuanced. He said, he didn’t say ‘believe all women’ or ‘all women must be believed’, he said, “All women must be heard.”
It’s a very subtle difference. So what it says is you’re entitled to be heard. Your story, your abuse, your allegations, you are entitled, and indeed they must be. But it doesn’t follow that they must be believed because the difference between being heard and being believed is the difference between can you stand it up.
And although it’s difficult for victims of abuse, rape and so forth and it’s a horrible business to have to go through and I wouldn’t want my sisters to have to go through it, but nonetheless there’s always ... other side to this story. And if that other side is kicked into touch at the off, then we don’t have a justice system and we are not governed by law.
And so to come back to the answer of your question, why has this narrative got to the point where Ghislaine is depicted as, uh, a monster and, uh, that she’s given no shrift by any court? They wouldn’t give her bail. They didn’t give her any appeal system. They ground her down in MDC.
They leak her mails. They behave atrociously and all the time from the sidelines, the family of Giuffre is asking for more, more pain. She must suffer more, she must be... have her nose run. She must not have anything. She must not have a life. She must stay in jail forever, forever.
You know, obviously they’ve lost their sister, but it doesn’t follow that my sister should have to pay the price for their sister’s lies and for the many lies told by many of these people, including, uh, other accusers, uh, most of whom did not, by the way, feature in the trial of Ghislaine.
Notably, Giuffre didn’t feature, nor Ransome and others and why was this? Because their evidence was so difficult to present if you’re a prosecution. It was gonna be shot down by the defence every time. They couldn’t make it stand up.
So, the point is that the stories, it’s like catnip to journalists. You’re mixing sex, royals, money, presidents, glamour, uh, youth, all of this. It’s a fantastic cocktail and what does it do? It sells newspapers, and selling newspapers pays advertisers, pays the salaries of journalists, and so this is a gravy train. Keep it going, keep it going, everyone’s doing well, everyone’s making money, uh, but fundamentally, people’s lives are also being ruined.
So, I mean, that’s the real story here.
JB: And, and for now, the very final question I have for you is where can people read the truth about this case? You have a website, right? Do you... You and your siblings have a website. Do you regularly update that?
IM: realghislaine.com. This is simply, um... It’s a factual site and it, it, it doesn’t seek to big up Ghislaine. It says, “Look, you wanna’ know the basics about Ghislaine Maxwell? This is what’s happened. This is how it’s happened. This is the judgments. These are the appeals. Here are the news items,” and so on. It’s a factual website. It’s not very glamorous. It doesn’t have too many bells and whistles. It just says what it does on the tin.
So by all means go there, but luckily there are journalists such as yourself and others that have been prepared to read the documents, that have been prepared to look at the petitions, and also been prepared to hold certain journalists and other players to account. At the moment, sadly you’re in the minority. But as the evidence comes out, as the Epstein files gradually are put into the public domain, we a chance to read... The key thing that I want people to take from Ghislaine’s petition is that there is a whole other side of this story. This isn’t “new evidence” in inverted commas. It’s old evidence that was suppressed.
It’s not complicated. And why do people not want to read it? It’s because, you know, they don’t want to give Ghislaine the time of day. Well, I’m her brother. I don’t have a choice. I love her. And I want to see her get justice, real justice. Not this hangman’s justice.
