Northern Ireland

Ghislaine Maxwell 'was on IRA hit list' as a child, lawyers claim

British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. File picture by Chris Ison, Press Association
British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. File picture by Chris Ison, Press Association British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. File picture by Chris Ison, Press Association

LAWYERS for paedophile ring trafficker and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell have claimed she was on an IRA hit list.

Maxwell (60), daughter of the late press baron Robert Maxwell, was convicted late last year of recruiting and grooming young girls to be abused by her paedophile ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.

Her lawyers claim she went into hiding from July 2019, when Epstein was arrested, until she was caught in 2020, because she had received death threats.

Maxwell is due to be sentenced in Manhattan's federal court on June 28.

In legal documents prepared for her sentencing next week, her lawyers claimed she was an IRA hit list when her father was an MP in the 1960s.

Robert Maxwell was elected as an MP for Buckingham in 1964. He lost his seat in 1970, when Ghislaine Maxwell was nine.

Her lawyers told New York Judge Alison Nathan that Ghislaine Maxwell was on an IRA hit list.

Lawyers told the court: "Decades earlier, when Ms Maxwell was just a child and her father was a Member of Parliament, UK authorities found a hit list of potential targets in a safehouse used by the Irish Republican Army."

According to the Sunday Life, her team added: "Ms Maxwell's name was first on the list."

The lawyers also said that Maxwell "had a difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father".

Maxwell's lawyers urged Judge Nathan to sentence her to four years, less than the probation department's recommended 20 years.

A jury found her guilty on five of six counts, including for sex trafficking minors, in December.

Her sentencing was delayed while the court decided whether a juror unfairly influenced the jury by failing to disclose his history of sexual abuse.

A judge found he did not.

Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, hanged himself in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019.

Ghislaine Maxwell's marriage to tech tycoon Scott Borgerson (46) collapsed after she was arrested for child sex abuse.

Robert Maxwell, who was born as Jan Hoch in what is now Czech Republic, escaped Nazi occupation and joined the British Army where he won him the Military Cross.

After the war, he became a British citizen and started Pergamon Press. He later bought Mirror Group Newspapers.

Following his death in 1991, it emerged that he had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds.