The woman who accuses Prince Andrew of rape has said billionaire child-abuser Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was the worst of the pair.
Virginia Giuffre spoke to New York magazine's The Cut on Wednesday after Maxwell was convicted in the New York Federal District Court. The jury found her guilty of five out of six charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy.
"I have been dreaming of this day for the last 10 years, not knowing that it was going to come," Giuffre said. "It’s a bittersweet emotion because I have been fighting for so long."
She dubbed Maxwell the "devil’s right-hand man" for her role in finding and grooming girls like here — many of them underage — to feed Epstein's perverted sexual appetite.
"She’s definitely worse than Epstein. She used that charm, that wit, that smile to come off as somebody you want to trust," Giuffre stressed. "She’s worse to me, more evil than Epstein. What Ghislaine did to so many of us, it’s unforgivable".
Maxwell used her "womanly abilities to make me feel comfortable," Giuffre said. “The deceit hurts even more because I fell naively into her trap. I mean, she is poised. She looks sophisticated. She didn’t raise any hairs on the back of my head."
Giuffre first met Maxwell at the age of 17 in 2000 when she was working as a spa attendant at future president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. She said the older woman spotted her reading a book on massage therapy — a career she wanted to pursue — and used that to worm her way into the girl's confidence.
“The thing about predators is they seek the vulnerable, find out what they want, and promise them a dream. That’s how they work," Giuffre said.
"Cages and chains come in all different shapes and sizes. I wasn’t tied to a radiator or anything, like you’ve seen in movies. My shackles were Epstein and Ghislaine’s wealth and the powerful people they knew."
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The guilty verdicts against Maxwell showed that "no matter how rich or how connected you are, you can still be held accountable," Giuffre said.
Epstein's high-profile friends and acquaintances included former presidents Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as former British PM Tony Blair's right-hand man Peter Mandelson
The high-rolling financier was found hanged in his New York jail cell in 2019. The circumstances of his death were been disputed by Epstein's lawyers, with suspicions raised over the failure of guards to place him with a cellmate and check on him every 30 minutes as agreed, and the malfunction of CCTV cameras in front of his cell.
Maxwell, now 60, is the daughter of late Czech-British-Israeli newspaper baron Robert Maxwell, who was rumoured to have connections in MI6, the KGB and Mossad. Maxwell died in 1991, also in mysterious circumstances, after falling off his yacht near the Canary islands, not long after he was exposed for stealing hundreds of millions from his employees' pension funds to pug holes in his publishing empire's finances.