Ghislaine Maxwell is no victim

The disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced yesterday to 20 years for crimes relating to sex trafficking. After three weeks of silence, Maxwell finally spoke, saying she was ‘sorry’ for the ‘pain’ her victims experienced. She told the court that she hoped her ‘conviction’ and ‘incarceration’ would bring ‘closure.’

There was one particular line that stood out in her statement: ‘I also acknowledge that I have been a victim of helping Jeffrey Epstein commit these crimes.’

This is syntactical subterfuge. First, there’s the strange use of the present perfect tense – ‘I have been a victim’, rather than ‘I was a victim’, suggesting that her victimhood is still ongoing, rather than ending with Epstein’s death. Then there’s the paradoxical phrase ‘victim of helping’. People are normally victims of nouns – murder, robbery, fraud, domestic violence – not verbs. Verbs imply action, agency, control, intention: all the very things Maxwell supposedly wants to deny. Yet she is desperate to paint herself as a victim rather than an accomplice; she doesn’t say that she sympathises with those she caused ‘pain and anguish’, she says she empathises with them.

This is coming from a woman who, for years, derided and threatened those she abused in a bid to silence them, reportedly calling them ‘trash’ and ‘scum’. The entire legal case was based around impugning witnesses, blaming, shaming and dismantling the testimony of the women who Maxwell groomed, trafficked and abused. Epstein may have ‘fooled everyone in his orbit’, but Maxwell is no fool, and her closing statement was as disingenuous as it was deceptive.

It may be tempting to want to explicate her actions. We can psychoanalyse her ‘daddy issues’, we can blame her father’s bullying, we can list all of the ways in which she may have been ‘vulnerable’ to Epstein and say that perhaps she ‘feared’ Epstein’s rejection. Yet I can’t help but wonder if her privilege – and her sex – are why we are so desperate to exculpate her, if only partially. If we believe in equality, then shouldn’t we treat male and female predators equally? Why should we assume that Maxwell wasn’t responsible or in control of her own actions? Can we not just accept – however unpalatable it may be – that Maxwell enjoyed and revelled in her behaviour and the luxury lifestyle it brought her?

Women’s rights rest on the idea that women can legitimately make their own decisions. That means accepting women have the ability to make bad choices, even criminal ones. Women are not hapless children who can’t be held responsible for their own behaviour. Yes, women can be coerced. But Maxwell had immense power and privilege, and she was not coerced into perpetrating a victimless crime.

Some have argued that Maxwell’s sentencing is disproportionately harsh: that despite the judge’s insistence that Maxwell is ‘not being punished as a proxy for Epstein’, that she is still paying the price for Epstein escaping justice. Would there be the same reservations if Maxwell were a man? Maybe, maybe not – but the debate is still a dangerous distraction from the fact that there are still plenty of perpetrators walking free.

At the end of her statement Maxwell says that she hopes the ruling ‘will bring a terrible chapter to an end.’ Yet this is not the whole story. What about the regular passengers on the ‘Lolita Express’ and the visitors to ‘Paedophile Island’? Maxwell could not have sold women and girls for sex without men buying women and girls for sex, so why have none of her clients been arrested and charged?

The more we obsess over Maxwell’s supposed victimhood, the less we focus on the other individuals involved in her and Epstein’s network. This is the real question, and in the meantime we should give Maxwell as much compassion as she showed her victims.