Ghislaine Maxwell suffers from hair and weight loss due to 'extraordinarily onerous conditions' at Brooklyn jail
Ghislaine Maxwell is losing a lot of her hair and weight due to “extraordinarily onerous conditions” at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, her lawyer has claimed. The lawyer’s filing in favor of Jeffrey Epstein’s “madam” came after the federal Bureau of Prisons stated in a letter that she is being treated well at the jail. In a letter written to US District Judge Alison Nathan, attorney Bobbi Sternheim said: “While her weight may currently be fairly consistent, she had lost over 15 pounds, and she is sustaining hair loss.” Sternheim also stated that now Maxwell's meal plan may meet the standards of the Bureau of Prison policy, in the initial six weeks of her stay it did not.
The attorney said that the British socialite was kept in isolation and barred from educational and leisure programs, religious services, and movies. “It is obvious that Ms. Maxwell is bearing the brunt of BOP (Bureau of Prisons) incompetence,” Sternheim wrote before adding that the Brooklyn prison has “imposed extraordinarily onerous conditions of constraint on Ms. Maxwell to avoid the catastrophic consequences of negligence occurring at the MCC that resulted in the death of Jeffrey Epstein.” Besides, the attorney also demanded that the warden of the cell should be brought to court to provide details about Maxwell’s condition.
However, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has stated that Maxwell is being treated "the same as other inmates" at her Brooklyn jail, rejecting her lawyer's claim that she was subjected to unduly restrictive conditions. As Maxwell prepared a new bail application, the bureau's lawyers also said in a letter, released on Monday, that the 58-year-old British socialite "remains in good health" despite a Covid-19 outbreak at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
These new claims from Maxwell's lawyer are coming in after he recently alleged, in late November, that Maxwell’s is disturbed every fifteen minutes by a flashlight to check if she is alive. “Despite non-stop in-cell camera surveillance, Ms. Maxwell’s sleep is disrupted every 15-minutes when she is awakened by a flashlight to ascertain whether she is breathing,” the attorney said as she continued that the 58-year-old “is overmanaged under conditions more restrictive than inmates housed in 10South, the most restrictive unit in the MCC; or individuals convicted of terrorism and capital murder and incarcerated at FCI Florence ADMAX, the most restrictive facility operated by the BOP.”
The claim from Sternheim at the time added that her client “has spent the entirely [sic] of her pretrial detention in de facto solitary confinement under the most restrictive conditions where she is excessively and invasively searched and is monitored 24 hours per day.” In addition, earlier in October, a close friend of Maxwell also alleged that she faces a strip search every three hours as authorities fear she might kill herself like the disgraced financier. “She is on her own floor and has a very small cell but doesn’t have a table to put her computer on. I’m told by the family that she has a camera in the ceiling and another camera that is 4 feet away from her and they adjust it when she moves about. They were waking her up every three hours to search her and the noise outside her cell with the guards laughing and joking and yelling to each other is very disturbing, so she hasn’t got much sleep. It’s bizarre,” Brian Basham, a public relations veteran, claimed.
Maxwell was arrested in July this year in New Hampshire as she allegedly hired girls as young as 14 for Epstein to abuse in the mid-1990s. She is facing multiple charges related to sex trafficking and is now awaiting trial. Her alleged co-associate and convicted sex offender, Epstein, was also awaiting trial when he hanged himself at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in August 2019. A number of women have come forward accusing the two. Virginia Giuffre is also one of them, who claimed that she was forced by Epstein and Maxwell to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was just 17.