Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged pimp and procurer for pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, is being regularly moved to keep her alive, according to The Daily Mail, which also wants you to know she isn't "Cruella De Vil."

Maxwell’s allies have told The Mail on Sunday that she:

Is not the person who introduced billionaire Epstein to Prince Andrew; Fears dying of Covid-19 while in prison; Insists she and Epstein had not met in person for 15 years; Weeps over friends who have lost jobs because of their association with her; Has not had a haircut in a year and is being moved ‘from cell-to-cell’ for her own safety.

The Mail is a notorious fabricator even by the dismal standards of U.K. tabloids, with recent form for misleadingly edited photographs, outright fake news and even falsifying its own historical stories. The point is that it is about the last outlet you'd expect an anonymously-sourced woe-is-her sympathy piece about Ghislaine Maxwell to appear right now. To paraphrase the Bolsheviks, who fucks whom? Read the rest

Ghislaine Maxwell, the British heiress and longtime confidant of billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, is in FBI custody. She was arrested in New Hampshire, reports NBC News, and charged with conspiracy to sexually abuse children.

The six-count indictment in Manhattan federal court alleges that Maxwell helped Epstein groom girls as young as 14 years old, going back as far as 1994.

"In some instances, Maxwell was present for and participated in the sexual abuse of minor victims," the indictment says. The daughter of media baron Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine was a one-time girlfriend of Epstein's and was at the high-flying investor's side for decades. But she was also alleged to have helped Epstein groom teen girls for sex with the rich and powerful. One of those teens, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, leveled that charge against Maxwell in a 2015 defamation suit, as have a number of other women.

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Prosecutors in the U.S. have demanded an interview with Prince Andrew, pal of dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew, himself accused of raping one of the then-girls Epstein trafficked, has no plans to subject himself to further scrutiny.

The request, made under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or MLAT, is similar to a subpoena in this case for Prince Andrew's testimony. It's a rare move to seek an interview like this through MLAT, officials say, and it's focused on making sure the investigation is as thorough as possible. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman foreshadowed the move in March when he said he would consider legal action after Prince Andrew's representatives had closed the door to an interview. "Contrary to Prince Andrew's very public offer to cooperate with our investigation into Epstein's co-conspirators, an offer that was conveyed via press release, Prince Andrew has now completely shut the door on voluntary cooperation," Berman said, adding that his office is "considering its options."

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Video taken of Jeffrey Epstein's cell on the night of his first suicide attempt was deleted by mistake, according to federal prosecutors

Just keeps getting weirder, doesn't it. Read the rest

There are interesting details in today's federal criminal indictments against two jail guards at the Manhattan jail where pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died. Read the rest

Richard Stallman resigned Monday from his positions at MIT and the Free Software Foundation, following controvery over his remarks suggeting victims of Jeffrey Epstein were willing participants.

Last week it emerged that Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein’s victims. In an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that “the most plausible scenario” was that Epstein’s victim “presented herself to [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing.”

"Stallman cast doubt over the use of the term “sexual assault”"

Stallman also described the distinction between a 17 or 18 year old victim as a “minor” detail, and suggested that it was an “injustice” to refer to it as a “sexual assault.” The emails first came to light after MIT alum Selam Jie Gano posted about them on Medium, and she said they would have been seen by undergraduates who are themselves 17 or 18.

Financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein killed himself last month while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges, amid speculation about his extensive contacts with America's scientific and political elites.

Stallman, who founded the FSF in 1985, said that headlines casting his remarks as a defense of Epstein were a mischaracterization. But they also drew attention to Stallman's long history of jocular sexism and now-repudiated past arguments in favor of permitting child pornography.

MIT's own entaglements with Epstein, and its apparent efforts to conceal them, recently led to the resignation of MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. Read the rest

No surprises in Jeffrey Epstein's social media accounts. Read the rest

UK media moderated its coverage of the country's post-Savile sex abuse scandal, perhaps to maintain cosy establishment relationships and certainly due to Britain's menacing libel laws. American media has few such interests or impediments, and US coverage has sometimes made the difference in exposing a British problem to British audiences. But the delicious and seemingly well-deserved ruin of Prince Andrew needs no foreign encouragement. The Daily Mail:

EXCLUSIVE: Prince Andrew is pictured inside paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's £63million mansion of depravity nine years ago... so how did he miss signs of the billionaire's sexual deviance?

• Duke was spotted peering around the door of the billionaire's Manhattan home on December 6, 2010 • The footage of the Duke was taken less than an hour after Epstein left the house with a young blonde woman • Epstein's alleged 'sex slave' Virginia Roberts claims she had sex with the Prince at financier's New York home • Buckingham Palace has denied any wrongdoing on Duke's part and the Queen has showed him her support

The video above is CBS News' coverage of the release. Read the rest

And check out the book she was reading.

This seems bad. Buzzfeed:

Almost 40 minutes before ABC News first reported Epstein’s death on Twitter, someone posted still-unverified details on 4chan, the anonymous message board popular with far-right trolls and white nationalists. “[D]ont ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this,” read the post, which was published at 8:16 a.m. alongside an image of Pepe, the green frog that has become a mascot for right-wing internet trolls. ... the original poster added more information to the discussion thread, including a detailed breakdown of the procedures allegedly used to resuscitate Epstein, which suggest the poster may have been a first responder, medical worker, or otherwise privy to details about efforts to resuscitate the disgraced financier.

The Fire Department of New York apparently suspects one of their own and is "reviewing" the posting, but insists it is not "investigating" it. Read the rest

From an unbylined, slapdash item at CBS News:

CBS News has learned that the morning of Jeffrey Epstein's death there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell. Guards attempted to revive him while saying "breathe, Epstein, breathe."

The rest of the story is all recap, offering no clarification at all about who was shrieking or even to make clear that it was after Epstein died. The only other new detail in it is that his brother was summoned to identify his body.

This is obviously going to be everywhere today. Is the suggestion that it was a guard or other jail staffer upon discovering his body? That CBS News chose such an ambiguous headline, allowing that it might have been Epstein shrieking, is the stuff institutional regrets are made of. Read the rest

Jeffrey Epstein is dead.

The convicted sexual predator committed suicide overnight at MCC Manhattan, the federal lockup where he had been held pending trial on federal sex trafficking charges, law enforcement officials told ABC News.

He was on “suicide watch,” but the MCC jail failed, twice, to prevent attempts of suicide. The second time, his attempt to escape justice through death worked.

The Miami Herald has confirmed that accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has committed suicide in jail in Manhattan. Story to come. @MiamiHerald

— julie k. brown (@jkbjournalist) August 10, 2019

From ABC News:

Billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein has died by suicide in his Manhattan jail early Saturday morning, three law enforcement officials told ABC News.

He was being held without bail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy and sex trafficking. He pleaded not guilty to the charges, and a judge said he wouldn't face trial before June 2020.

He's accused of arranging to have sex with girls as young as age 14 in the early 2000s at Epstein's residences in Manhattan and Florida.

The 66-year-old was also hospitalized in July after he was found unresponsive in what appeared to be a possible suicide attempt.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Moe urged a June trial date, saying there is "a public interest in bringing this case to trial as swiftly as possible." But Epstein's lawyer, Martin Weinberg, said the case is far from "ordinary," adding the defense team won't be ready before Labor Day 2020.

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Accountability time.

Prosecutors accuse Epstein of coercing under-18 girls into sexual abuse, and paying victims to recruit others

After Alex Acosta helped Jeffrey Epstein get off the hook in Florida for “soliciting prostitution from a minor,” Epstein is reported to have received a number of odd visits while in detention -- from young women and from powerful men.

One of the men was “James E. Staley, a top JPMorgan Chase executive and one of the highest-ranking figures on Wall Street,” reports the New York Times. Read the rest

On Friday, the Palm Beach sheriff opened an internal affairs investigation into the absurdly lenient handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, after Epstein entered a guilty plea in his prostitution case. Read the rest

A judge has ruled that convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein will stay in detention pending his trial. Read the rest