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Accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell is “fighting for her life” in custody — but eager to “confront” her accusers in court to prove her innocence, her brother said in an interview aired Monday.
“I’m not minimizing the seriousness of the allegations, but my sister’s fighting for her life,” Ian Maxwell, 64, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” of conditions in her Brooklyn lockup that he deemed “torture.”
Insisting that Ghislaine was being used as a “patsy” for her pedophile ex Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide in custody, Ian Maxwell said that his 59-year-old sister is eagerly awaiting her day in court on sex trafficking charges.
“Ghislaine wants to confront the accusers head-on and deal with this and get on with her life,” he told the breakfast show of the trial scheduled to start in July.
“She is not Epstein. Epstein was guilty. He did time. And he was gonna do a hell of a lot more time. But she is not him.
“She deserves to be treated as Ghislaine, presumed innocent,” he told ABC.
“She is as convinced as she can be that she will be exonerated. We as a family are behind her, solidly behind her,” he said, sharing a photo from a June 2019 reunion of all seven siblings.
At the time of the reunion in the UK, Ghislaine was “getting on with her life,” married with two stepchildren, her brother said — even though he previously revealed that his sister kept that key life development from her siblings.
“And then bang!” he said of the “extraordinary development out of left field” when Epstein was arrested on serious sex charges.
“Suddenly he dies, and they’ve got this really serious problem,” he told ABC of Epstein’s suicide in his Manhattan lockup in Aug. 2019.
“And it seems to me inescapable that the authorities decided they had to do something about it,” he said.
Despite his sister having been linked to Epstein’s abuse in court filings stretching back several years, Ian Maxwell insisted that authorities only focused on Ghislaine to make up for losing their high-profile inmate.
“Why is Ghislaine Maxwell being treated differently? She’s a patsy for Epstein … whom they lost on their watch,” he said in the interview in the UK.
“They are taking it out on my sister. Dammit, that’s wrong,” he said.
A lawyer for the Maxwell family, David Oscar Markus, also insisted that Ghislaine was suffering from “the Epstein effect.”
“She’s being held because of her association with Epstein from all those years ago, which is absurd. You can’t hold someone in detention based on guilt by association,” the Miami-based lawyer told GMA.
“The government wants to keep her in custody to torture her, to break her down.”
Ghislaine is accused of acting as Epstein’s madam, allegedly procuring underage girls and young women for him to sexually abuse. She has pleaded not guilty.
She has been in custody since July, when she was arrested at a New Hampshire hideaway, with her brother previously admitting he could only contact her via her lawyers.
Maxwell has been repeatedly denied bail, deemed a flight risk because of the seriousness of the charges, her substantial wealth and international ties. Her alleged victims have also opposed her release.
Still, Ghislaine’s brother insisted that his sister’s public image is only bad because it has “been whipped up by a lynch mob media performance.”
“The real problem is that the media frenzy about her, which had shifted from Epstein onto her, drove her absolutely mad,” he complained of his sister, who had been repeatedly named in court documents years before her arrest.
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