Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty on all counts of conspiring to sexually assault a business associate in the early 1990s.
The former model and former supermodel of the rich and famous and notorious Elizabeth Taylor were charged with drugging and sexually assaulting Ghislaine Maxwell, the former wife of the now disgraced British model and socialite Alexander Lebedev, now 46.
Maxwell’s only daughter, Roxy, was 15 at the time of the alleged assault and has given evidence against her mother and Lebedev during the trial.
On Friday the jury of seven women and five men returned a verdicts, and Maxwell was found guilty on three counts of conspiracy and two counts of false imprisonment in relation to an assault that took place at an apartment in London’s Grosvenor Square in 1991.
Maxwell, 48, claims she has not seen her daughter since 1996, when she left to start her modeling career.
She will be sentenced on September 4.
In 2014, Lebedev was convicted of sexual assault on five people, including three men and two teenage boys, and banned from having unsupervised contact with women. He was released from prison in June this year.
On Friday, Maxwell’s lawyer, Anthony White, said her client was “a 100% innocent person and a devout Christian,” who had dedicated her life to her family and the church.
A secret society
Lebedev made his career as a published writer and editor at Britain’s The Spectator magazine before leaving to found the Russian edition of Tatler and then The Evening Standard newspaper in London in 1987.
During the trial, Maxwell’s attorney, Anthony White, had argued that Maxwell had been entrapped by the “renegade courts of the boys’ school mafia.” He claimed that three boys had conspired to obtain “negative information” about her in exchange for her “helping them gain entry into secret social society” on the British social circuit.
According to a series of damning allegations made by three of Maxwell’s former clients, the publication of that information provided by the teenage boys led to their ostracization from social circles and ridicule.
Maxwell’s real motive, her defense argued, was to silence her children in a bid to prevent them from becoming scandalous figures in the media.
But the boys said Maxwell had never asked them to stay silent and instead had offered them money to act as the “silent witnesses” in exchange for their staying quiet.