A lawyer representing the victims of Ghislaine Maxwell has welcomed the 20-year prison sentence handed down to her.
Lisa Bloom criticised Maxwell for issuing a “non-apology apology” to her victims.
She told GB News: “It’s a wonderful day for justice.
“It was decades in the making victims were complaining about Epstein and Maxwell all the way back to the 1990s and finally she was brought to trial, she was convicted of multiple felonies and now she’s spending the next 20 years behind bars.
“My clients never thought that they would see the day but the day is here.”
She criticised Maxwell’s apology in court: “We call it the non-apology apology and that’s because it’s missing the crucial element of an apology which is acknowledging that you have done something wrong.
“She does not do that. She doesn’t say that she made any mistakes. She doesn’t apologise for what she did.
“She simply says she’s sorry for the victims’ pain. This is obviously written by her attorneys and an attempt to make her look empathetic but I think it fell flat.”
She told Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster in an interview that she had destroyed the lives of many of her victims.
Ms Bloom said: “They talked about being suicidal, wanting to throw themselves off a cliff at Jeffrey Epstein’s Island.
“That they can’t have any healthy normal relationships, can’t get married, can’t have children, the depression, the post traumatic stress.
“I mean, the pain that she caused because of her felonies will live on for many, many years with the many victims.”
Asked why Maxwell did. not issue a fulsome apology for her actions, she said: “Well if you think about what it takes for someone to sexually abuse underage girls, in this case, as young as 14 years old, these are people who are very selfish, who are sociopathic, who are not going to then turn around and become a completely different person and say, ‘oh my gosh, I’m so sorry’.
“She is going to continue to fight, she’s going to appeal. Her attorneys probably tell her not to admit anything, because that would undermine the appeal.
“So I think there’s the psychological reasons and I think there’s the legal reasons that we just rarely see a true apology.”
Asked if more prosecutions could follow, Ms Bloom said: “That’s always possible. We heard at her trial, a lot of other names of other women who were recruiters because remember most of the girls and women who went to Epstein they did because of Ghislaine and the female recruiters.
“If you’re 16-years-old and a middle aged man comes up and says I want you to come to my house to give me a massage, most girls and women are going to say ‘no’, but when a woman asks you and vouches for him, it’s very different.
“I would like to see some of the other recruiters brought to justice but so far, I don’t see any sign that that’s going to happen.”
