Ghislaine Maxwell, Former Girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, Reportedly Arrested

Ghislaine Maxwell, a British heiress and one-time girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein accused of involvement in his alleged sexual crimes, has been arrested by the FBI, senior law enforcement sources told News 4 New York Thursday. Maxwell was reportedly arrested on Epstein-related charges in New Hampshire, and is expected to appear in a federal court later today. Spokespeople for the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan declined to comment to the outlet.

Maxwell is the daughter of media proprietor Robert Maxwell, and was a confidante of Epstein's for decades. She is also alleged to have helped Epstein procure and groom teenage girls for a sex trafficking ring. One of the girls, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused Maxwell of just that in her case in a 2015 defamation suit.

Giuffre alleged publicly that she was obtained and groomed by "madame" Maxwell as teenage "sex slave" for Epstein, and claimed she claimed had sex with Prince Andrew when she was just 17. While Buckingham Palace has emphatically denied Andrew's relationship with Giuffre, she claimed in legal documents that he "was an abuser, he was a participant."

She also alleged she was trafficked to Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who served as Epstein's lawyer, saying in the docuseries Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich that Epstein "forced [her] to have sex" with him. Dershowitz denied Giuffre's claims, but his accuser has not backed down. "He's denied being with me. Is one of us telling the truth? Yes. Is that person me? Yes," she said on the Netflix docuseries.

Maxwell has denied allegations she acted as a procurer of teenage girls for Epstein, with a spokesperson telling The Sun in November, "The allegations made against Ghislaine Maxwell are untrue." They continued that the socialite "strongly denies allegations of an unsavoury nature, which have appeared in the British press and elsewhere, and reserves her right to seek redress at the repetition of such old defamatory claims."

Epstein was arrested last summer on federal sex trafficking charges in the case of dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s. The registered sex offended attempted suicide in custody in July 2019, and died after another suicide attempt at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in August of that year. Two guards tasked with watching Epstein in his cell are facing federal charges for not supervising him correctly before his death.