Ms. Maxwell’s trial and conviction were widely seen as the legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein, 66, never had. The disgraced financier hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell one month after his July 2019 arrest as he awaited his own trial on sex trafficking charges.
Mr. Epstein’s high-flying lifestyle, mysterious wealth and cast of famous friends earned him notoriety, even as he was dogged by allegations of sexual abuse. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to Florida state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution — the result of a deal with federal prosecutors that allowed him to avoid more criminal exposure.
Even after his plea rendered him a convicted sex offender, Mr. Epstein socialized with powerful figures in his Manhattan mansion, his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, his private island in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They included politicians like Bill Clinton and Bill Richardson and billionaires like Leon Black and Leslie Wexner. There was even a royal: Prince Andrew, known as the Duke of York. In February, he settled a lawsuit by a woman who said he, Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell forced her, when she was a minor, to have sexual intercourse with him in Ms. Maxwell’s home in London; Prince Andrew has since stepped away from public life.
Wherever Mr. Epstein was, Ms. Maxwell, his longtime romantic and then platonic companion, befriended girls who believed that caring adults were granting them access to a rarefied world. Instead, they became trapped, forced to gratify Mr. Epstein’s apparently boundless sexual desires.
After Mr. Epstein’s arrest in 2019, Ms. Maxwell became the subject of intense public scrutiny, which increased after his death in custody a month later.
Her lawyers, in a sentencing brief, contended that prosecutors turned their attention to Ms. Maxwell after Mr. Epstein’s death only to appease his victims and “repair the tarnished reputations” of the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons, in whose custody he died — a claim the government has roundly dismissed.
