In any other era, the shockingly cushy treatment for the convicted sexual offender Ghislaine Maxwell would be a weeks-long scandal.
The longtime associate of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein sat down with a justice department attorney last month and then, before long, was transferred to a minimum-security prison in Texas known for its arts and crafts programs and inmates’ ability to move around the grounds.
The Maxwell prison transfer – outrageous as it is – is just another element of the many-ringed circus act that is American politics these days.
To Donald Trump, who claimed this week he knew nothing about it in advance, Maxwell’s transfer earned a mere shrug. It’s “not a very uncommon thing”, he claimed.
But like much that Trump utters, that’s false.
Such a move is not just uncommon. It is “truly unheard of” for a convicted sex offender, as one former prison expert put it.
“Someone gave special preference to Maxwell that, to my knowledge, no other inmate currently in the Federal Bureau of Prisons has received,” Robert Hood, former warden of a super-maximum prison in Colorado, told the Washington Post, speaking specifically about of how convicted sexual offenders are treated.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors. Epstein himself, of course, died in federal prison in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Was that a suicide? The authorities say so; some find that hard to believe.
Maxwell’s crimes are more than just tawdry. She was no innocent bystander to Epstein’s evil; she was, by many a credible account, a predator herself.
And her transfer is more than special treatment; it smacks of a struck deal – a transaction that is deeply unfair, a slap in the face to the many victims of her and Epstein’s exploitation.
The attorney for some of those victims sees it as part of something much larger, and even more insidious.
A “government-sponsored cover-up”, is how Jack Scarola has described the longstanding effort to keep all the facts about Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse from coming into full public view.
As he sees it, a strong blast of sunlight would have disinfectant properties, possibly even healing ones.
“The hope lies in the fact that now Americans’ eyes are being opened to these unanswered questions,” he said this week in an MSNBC interview.
Keeping everyone in the dark piles harm upon harm, particularly to those who were abused. The secrecy and the endless speculation revictimize them at every turn.
What exactly went on in US deputy attorney general Todd Blanche’s lengthy chat with Maxwell is unknown. Her attorney says she was forthcoming about what really happened in scores of case.
Did any of it implicate Trump? Reportedly not.
But that’s just one part of what needs to come out into the light.
We live in an unfair world. Compare Maxwell to the immigrants who’ve been apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and sent to prisons that are closer to hell on earth than to country clubs. No arts and crafts for them.
It would be a start, in this Epstein mess, to see more sincere concern for the former children who were harmed by predators; now young women or adults, they live every day with the trauma that has followed.
Trump still hasn’t ruled out a pardon for Maxwell. But he surely knows that wouldn’t sit well with his base of followers, given their antipathy for the “deep state”.
A prison transfer? That has a better chance of not arousing their all-out wrath while perhaps quieting Maxwell from spilling all she knows or springing any surprises.
A swell deal all around, therefore.
Except for the victims, who remain shamefully low on the priority list.