Basically people sentenced to what effectively is going to be a life sentence as Maxwell will no doubt be sentenced to have unlimited appeals, but as time goes by the likelihood of a court accepting one and reversing her conviction is diminished. The main question with appeals was “Was the trial fair?” and I don’t know how many areas of argument there are that it wasn’t a fair trial. I’d say her best chance of overturning it is if the NY court of appeals overturns it or the NY Supreme court overturns it. And if that extremely unlikely event occurs, I have to think they would try her again.
Being a customer of human trafficking carries is a fairly minor charge with a fairly short statute of limitations as long as there was no violence/forcible rape involved.
Aside from the PR implications, its not going to have major penalties in this post-shame media environment,
It must have been so upsetting for Maxwell and Epstein to work so hard to traffic all those teenage girls, offer them to their wealthy friends, and then have their friends go “Nah, I’m good, thanks.”
Because unless I missed something, none of the rich and powerful individuals who happened to spend a lot of time hanging out with this pair of sex traffickers has ever actually been convicted of anything connected to this. I understand that M&E did a certain amount of trafficking for what you might call “private consumption”, but I thought the idea was that they made available their underage prizes to their friends as well. But if they had, you’d think that some of the wealthy and powerful might be facing charges too. But apparently not.
I’ve heard of victimless crimes, but this is apparently a perpetratorless crime, where everyone seems fairly sure that these girls were abused, but no one turns out to have actually committed the abuse. Weird.
Not weird, but working as designed. When those in power more closely resemble those who are harmed by systems that enable and support this injustice, those systems will change. That fear is what drives some folks to prevent women from winning elections or getting political appointments.
I would not be surprised to learn there were shady shenanigans going on here. But I would also be 100% unsurprised if most of the rich and powerful people Epstein and Maxwell hung out with were actually entirely uninvolved with their human trafficing and sexual abuses.
It’s a common idea that the rich and the powerful must be terribly decadent and depraved, but for the most part, AFAICT, they aren’t. If anything, a lot of them are probably far more boring than your average Boing Boing user when it comes to sex, drugs and rock & roll. People like Prince Andrew, or Epstein and Maxwell themselves, are rare exceptions in their own elite circles, just as abusers and pedophiles are (thankfully!) rare exceptions in all walks of life.
I expect that this type of depravity is exactly as common in wealthy circles as it is among the poors. The difference is that wealth and power shields the monsters from consequences in ways that the poors don’t have access to.
A detail from the New Yorker’s review of the Palace Papers
Brown untangles how the two princes, both traumatized by the death of their mother, have attempted to cope by building adult lives almost diametrically opposed to each other. William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, have gone for full domestic quietude: shopping for their own groceries, sharing their weekends with other reliably discreet, titled types in Norfolk, wearing affordable clothes. With their three winsome children—George, Charlotte, and Louis—and the throne distantly in view, they are “Us Five.” (A rumor that William was sleeping around among their Norfolk set was apparently spread by members of his parents’ generation, who couldn’t believe how staid it all was.)
the same review describes Andrew as “The most heinous and depraved of them” (why yes, he is a “member of [Williams’] parents’ generation”, but it’s probably a supposition too far)
