On Contact: The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell

RT

On the show this week Chris Hedges talks to investigative journalist Nick Bryant about the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center and denied bail, will be tried this fall on sex-trafficking charges for allegedly recruiting and grooming teenage girls to engage in sex acts with the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein. She is reputed to have procured teenage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004 and allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash after each encounter with Epstein. Epstein died in a New York jail cell in August 2019 in what authorities ruled was a suicide, although a doctor hired by Epstein’s family to conduct an independent autopsy has disputed that conclusion. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty. But this is not a routine sexual abuse and trafficking case. Epstein socialized with the political, social and financial elites, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, former Democratic Senate Majority leader George Mitchell, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and Bill Gates. It is alleged that he made his stable of underage women available to his powerful friends and filmed their sexual encounters with elaborate, hidden surveillance cameras set up inside his residences. And yet, none of these powerful figures have been charged or investigated. The surveillance videos have vanished. The investigative journalist Nick Bryant first made public Epstein’s black book with the names, phone numbers and addresses of Epstein’s elite social circle along with the star-studded passenger logs to Epstein’s private plane, known as the “Lolita Express,” which often took his powerful guests to his private Caribbean island, nicknamed Orgy Island. Bryant has written on the Epstein case for Vanity Fair and other publications. Nick Bryant is a journalist whose work largely focuses on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States. His mainstream and investigative journalism has been featured in Gear, Playboy, the Reader, and on Salon.com. He is author of The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal.