Ghislaine Maxwell serves Trump like she served Jeffrey Epstein

Ghislaine Maxwell serves Trump like she served Jeffrey Epstein
She's using her gender to dupe a man's targets into compliance

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published August 27, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Between his effective takeover of Washington, D.C., and empty gestures like faux-banning flag-burning, Donald Trump has successfully bounced his Jeffrey Epstein scandal from mainstream news headlines. But there are still signs that the larger American public — including the conspiracist portion of Trump’s MAGA base — is not yet ready to move on. It remains true that the child sex predator once described Trump as his “closest friend” and that the White House has reneged on promises the president made during the 2024 campaign to release the voluminous FBI files collected over the course of two federal investigations into Epstein for sex crimes against minors.

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Trump and congressional Republicans have been trying to create the illusion of releasing information. But they’ve actually been suppressing it through strategies like issuing a blaze of subpoenas for testimony from former Democratic officials to create a smokescreen of activity — all the while not actually doing anything meaningful. By far, the most controversial of the efforts at faking transparency has been the interview of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and convicted co-conspirator, who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for sex trafficking minors — although it’s a stretch to call what she offered to Deputy Attorney General (and former Trump defense attorney) Todd Blanche an “interview.” Instead, Maxwell served up a bunch of lies and deflections that he mostly accepted at face value. In a seeming reward for her actions, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum security prison, which is typically not an option for convicted sex offenders.

But Trump got what he must have wanted: Maxwell claimed she never saw him do anything “inappropriate” and even, laughably, denied Trump and Epstein’s well-documented close friendship. What is immediately apparent to anybody of good faith is that her word on this matter means less than nothing.

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What’s especially unsettling here is how Maxwell’s strategy to help Trump resembles her tactics in recruiting victims for Epstein. In both cases, she has used her gender to create assumptions that she’s safe and reliable. She allowed her targets to put their trust in her so she could exploit them for the benefit of the man for whom she’s hustling. When Maxwell was with Epstein, she approached teenage girls and offered to “help” them get better jobs. They went along with it because they weren’t afraid of a woman as they might have been with a man. What’s frustrating is that, on average, women are safer than men, who do commit crimes at much higher rates than women. But as the Maxwell case shows, averages aren’t promises. There are plenty of female criminals, even if there are fewer of them than men. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/27/ghislaine-maxwell-serves-trump-like-she-served-jeffrey-epstein/