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Ghislaine Maxwell reveals Donald Trump and Bill Clinton friendship

Convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate – Ghislaine Maxwell – has opened up for the first time about her close friendships with former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump while detailing her association with “the greatest regret of my life’’.

Speaking for the first time since her arrest in July 2020, Maxwell told The Sun of her regrets over her association with billionaire financier and sex abuser Epstein, claiming it had turned her into a “wicked witch” hate figure and damaged those she loved. And she revealed she longs to turn back the clock.

“I said in my court statement that meeting Epstein was the greatest mistake of my life,” Maxwell admits.

“And obviously, if I could go back today, I would avoid meeting him, and I would make different choices.”

Maxwell discussed the high-profile US connections she lost due to her links to Epstein, who was found dead in his cell, aged 66, in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Former US President Bill Clinton, who travelled on the tycoon’s “Lolita Express” private jet, was another relationship she valued.

“It was a special friendship, which continued over the years,” she said.

“We had lots in common. I feel bad that he is another victim, only because of his association with Jeffrey. I understand he, like others, can no longer consider me as a friend.”

One of the few people to have shown her any loyalty, she says, is former President Donald Trump.

“We knew each other and mingled in the same circles, in New York, Palm Beach. I was very grateful when he wished me well after (the arrest). He got bad media for it, but he dared, while others didn’t.

“I was honoured he remembered me. Well, he is known to say what he thinks. It gave me a big boost.”

Maxwell complained friends were “cancelled” just for knowing her.

“There are many people who have been impacted by this story,” she said. “Friends of mine who never even met Epstein lost their jobs. People who literally had nothing to do with him whatsoever have been cancelled.

“For all those people …  I think it’s been a very heavy price that has been paid by the cancel culture. It’s been very difficult for a lot of people.”

Despite that, she admitted she was hurt by the lack of loyalty from so-called friends once desperate for a place in her social circle.

“There are people who have disappointed me and there are people I’m surprised have not, you know, been a little more proactive,” she said. “I completely understand people have livelihoods to protect … children to protect.

“But having said that, there are people who have stood by me privately. Quite a few, actually, and I’m extremely appreciative of their private support.

“I have friends who I have literally known my entire life since I was at kindergarten. It’s good to know there are people out there who know who I am, really.”

As for the others, Maxwell believes they have accepted a false version of her as the “Wicked Witch” in Epstein’s story. “All this is a fictional version of me,” she said. “It has been created to fit the storyline. It has absolutely nothing to do with who I am.

There are many people who have been impacted by this story.

“I find it curious that so many people choose to contribute to the fake, created version, sort of like a Disney character, the Wicked Witch, if you will. The real people who know me and still love me have never spoken.”

An intelligent woman who graduated from Oxford University with a modern languages degree — and says she has worked all her life — Maxwell hates to show weakness.

She said: “I think there are many women who can identify with my story. Many have either fallen in love with or had relationships with men that in hindsight they look back on and say, ‘What was I thinking?’ I imagine there’s not a woman on the planet who would not think that about one or other of their boyfriends.”

But she said she would not discuss individuals — Epstein, Prince Andrew or Scott Borgerson, the husband who reportedly dumped her in a prison phone call — until her appeal has been heard.

Maxwell even refused to deny reports she and Andrew were once a couple, claiming: “I have read and seen and heard and had reported to me so many monstrous inaccuracies that I can’t even start to pick apart all of them.

“If I pick apart one and don’t address all the others, it’s going to be, ‘Well, she said no to this. What about all those others?’

“So I’m not going to discuss anything of that nature. After the appeal, I’m going to be super-happy to address with you any of those things.”

But could they become friends in the future? She said: “I don’t have an expectation. People who I have been friends with — and very close friends with … I can’t think about what they will want to do or not do.”

Maxwell reveals prison murder plot

In the interview, Maxwell also revealed how a fellow inmate plotted to murder her as she slept in her prison bed.

In her first interview since her conviction, Maxwell, 60, says she was at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Centre in New York after her arrest in July 2020.

She says: “There was a woman who made a threat to act in a plan to murder me as I was sleeping. That is real. That happened.”

Maxwell was charged with luring girls as young as 14 to be abused by her former lover, financier ­Jeffrey Epstein, and was then ­convicted last December on five counts, including trafficking a minor, and sentenced to 20 years in jail, The Sun reported.

Epstein was found dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial for sex trafficking in 2019.

Maxwell adds: “Prisons are dangerous. I would tell anybody to do everything possible to avoid jail.

“Jails are not safe spaces. I have seen guards selling drugs and, God, being inappropriate in every which way.”

Her jail ordeal has included maggoty food, a rat-infested cell, sleep deprivation and hunger which has become so extreme at points that she has resorted to ­eating vaseline.

Since July she has been moved to a low-security Florida jail. But there, she is in a Covid lockdown, spending the majority of her life in an 8ft by 10.5ft “cube” which is so small she and her three cell mates take it in turns to stand up.

She said: “The food in Brooklyn was truly, truly terrible. One day I was so hungry that I ate the only thing I had — Vaseline.” She imagined it was mayonnaise, she said, but it was still “very disgusting.”

Maxwell also told me how for two weeks, from June 24 this year, prison bosses put her on a hellish suicide watch as “punishment” for complaining about her filthy, rat-infested cell. She was fed nothing but meagre portions of bread, cheese and baloney sausage.

Exposing the full horror of that ordeal for the first time, she insisted: “I have never been suicidal. It has never crossed my mind in my entire life. The reason they put me on suicide watch was as a punishment because I have filed a number of grievances.

“First, they strip you of any remaining shred of dignity you have. They have you with no clothes, and put you in a suicide smock with velcro straps on it. So there’s nothing to protect your modesty.”

Suicide watch

“They have you with no clothes, and put you in a suicide smock with velcro straps on it. So there’s nothing to protect your modesty.”

Her suicide watch cell had “subzero temperatures”, said Maxwell, who lost more than a stone in the fearsome MDC.

“So you literally are freezing, with neon lights. They don’t feed you. When you’re on suicide watch, you have access to nothing. There’s nothing in the room. You’re not allowed a toothbrush. You’re not allowed anything to drink.

“Every time you want the bathroom, they give you two little sheets of toilet roll. When they did feed me, I was fed the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was two pieces of bread, a piece of baloney and a piece of cheese.

“I’m a vegetarian so I couldn’t eat the baloney. And the cheese had been removed from the plastic and had fingerprints on it. I had no soap and I wasn’t allowed to shower. And I had two cameras on me all the time.”

She repeatedly asked to be moved. Her lawyers said staff spied on her 24/7 as if she was movie monster Hannibal Lecter.

Finally, nearly three months ago, she was transferred to Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution in Florida. It was from there our next recorded interview took place.

But while she admitted she is treated better there, Maxwell claimed she has less freedom than in Brooklyn. The prison has been under a code-red lockdown to control Covid, which meant she was locked in her cell most of the day.

“It’s actually more restricted, which is shocking,” she said.

“We’re on code-red here so there’s no recreation, only for a maximum of an hour. You’re not allowed outside. They don’t give it to you all the time. Otherwise you have to stay on the unit with a maximum capacity of 120 people.

“The only place you can sit is on your bunk bed. I’m in a cube that’s 126 inches by 93 inches. And you have four people in that cube. You only have a little cupboard about 2ft by 3ft to put your stuff.

“If this place ever came off code-red, it would definitely be an improvement. I have not experienced any of the gross violations of my rights that I experienced at MDC. But it’s still a jail.”

Told that Tallahassee has been described as a “cushy country club”, she said: “I can assure you it’s very far from a cushy country club. You’re locked up the entire time and if they let you out for an hour there’s no communal area to get together, there’s not a chair for everybody, there’s no way to watch TV. And when I arrived here, there were only two phones.”

Despite the challenges she is clearly happier in Florida than in Brooklyn. She said: “It was a compound. So I saw the sunlight for the first time.” Asked about her routine, Maxwell said: “They wake you up at six. Then they call for those who are taking medication. So they have to go out and get their pills.”

Breakfast, at 6.20am, consists of milk, cereal and an apple.

“I will be happy never to see an apple [again],” she said. “I haven’t seen a piece of fruit except an apple. You’d think in Florida, at least there’d be an orange. But no.”

She admits, though, the food is better there “by a large margin”.

When we speak, Maxwell has just got a job in the Education Centre law library, and starts work at 7.30am. The library is about 5ft square with no computer or internet access, just an old manual typewriter. Inmates are allowed to send emails to a small list of approved contacts.

Around 10.30am, you go to what they call lunch and then nothing happens until you have to stand up at 4pm and they count you.

“After that you go and get what’s called the main evening meal and you get approximately 20 minutes to eat. The lights go out at around 10pm.”

Jails are not safe

In her New York jail, the modern languages graduate was sometimes allowed to teach yoga and “English to the Spanish ladies and Spanish to the English ladies”.

In Florida, she has offered to teach yoga and translate documents for non-English speakers. And she is working on two projects — helping a cancer charity and improving the prison’s recycling record.

“Some of the ladies never leave the unit, they just sit on their beds,” she said. “I’m sad about that. So I thought I could invite them to donate a dollar from their commissary [jail spending money] to the local Tallahassee Memorial Cancer Foundation. In return they would go out and walk one time around in the outside yard.”

She is also working with 11 other prisoners to reduce the use of styrofoam plates and plastic cutlery.

“If I do it right, I should be able to save some items from going into the landfill, in keeping with what I’ve done for 12 years on environmental projects. Rather than look at what I lost, I look at what I’ve gained, and then I have to help other people.

“Until you’ve been here, you really don’t understand how appalling it is. The incarcerated population has been demonised. These people deserve a second opportunity to make a contribution to society.”

It’s clear she is more at ease now, but added: “Jails are not safe spaces.” She witnessed guards selling drugs, falling asleep and “being inappropriate in every way”, she said.

“There are people who work for the Bureau of Prisons who clearly should not have care of vulnerable people. But I have also met people of great calibre who take their jobs very seriously.

“I am perfectly able to live and work here. If you don’t get involved in illegal activities in jail you could probably be all right.”

Epstein wasn’t. The examiner’s verdict of suicide by hanging was challenged after a series of jail blunders were revealed.

“The Bureau of Prisons has failed to release the autopsy report, and allegedly none of the cameras were working,” Maxwell said. “Allegedly, the guards were sleeping. I think that unexplained death is profoundly suspicious.

“I’ve never been lied to so many times as I have at that detention centre. It was a culture of untruth, a culture of disrespect that frankly needs to be brought to light.”

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘special’ friendships with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton

Ghislaine Maxwell reveals Donald Trump and Bill Clinton friendship Source link Ghislaine Maxwell reveals Donald Trump and Bill Clinton friendship

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