Convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell secured a secret prison transfer after the Bureau of Prisons waived a rule designated to punish sex offenders.
Maxwell, alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein‘s accomplice, has spent the last three years serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. She was transferred to a lower-security federal prison camp closer to her family in Bryan, Texas, last week after she reportedly spent two days speaking with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about her connections to Epstein.
The move required the bureau to waive its policy that convicted sex offenders must be held at least at a low-level prison, according to NBC News. Maxwell received a waiver to facilitate the move, according to MSNBC reporter Ken Dilanian, which gave her access to a less restrictive prison environment than the one in Tallahassee.
A federal prison camp is a minimum-security facility with dorm-like housing, meeting the Bureau of Prisons’ lowest security-level designation. Low-level security prisons are a step up from prison camps.
A prison consultant told Dilanian he had “never seen this done before for a sex offender,” Dilanian wrote on X.
The Bureau of Prisons, which confirmed Maxwell’s move last week, did not respond to immediate requests for comment, including whether it waived the policy for Maxwell. Maxwell’s attorney also did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown predicted that Maxwell would be moved on the Daily Beast podcast this week. Brown, whose reporting on Epstein in 2018 renewed interest in the story and led to new federal charges, noted that jails were inherently dangerous places. “She wouldn’t necessarily be safe anywhere,” Brown said.
“It is so easy to cover up a crime in jail,” Brown said. “The cameras are broken, guards fall asleep—they are, for the most part, very corrupt.”
The move also came after she was reportedly threatened by other inmates for being a “snitch,” according to the Daily Mail. The publicity around her conversations with the Justice Department reportedly put a target on her back.
“As soon as Ghislaine spoke to the government, she was considered a snitch by other inmates at Tallahassee,” a source told the Mail. “There were very real and very credible threats on her life.”
Federal Corrections Institution (FCI) Tallahassee, where Maxwell had stayed before her transfer, has faced challenges in recent years. Multiple guards have been convicted of sexually assaulting inmates in recent years, and Maxwell had already faced threats from inmates after she reported them over a blackmail campaign, according to the Mail.
The Bryan, Texas, prison, however, is “a professionally run prison camp with a great warden, working cameras everywhere and properly trained staff,” the source told the Mail on Sunday.
“There is a different class of people at Bryan, so she is less likely to be attacked,” the source said.
The prison also houses disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah. The families of Epstein victims condemned the move, saying it “smacks of a cover-up.”
Maxwell is currently working to overturn her December 2021 conviction for grooming young girls for Epstein to abuse. Her lawyers have argued that a 2007 plea agreement between Epstein and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Florida, which agreed not to prosecute multiple unnamed co-conspirators, also applied to her, Reuters reported.
Maxwell has also reportedly sought a pardon from President Donald Trump, who has not ruled it out as his alleged connections to Epstein have become a topic of intense speculation even among his most loyal followers.
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