Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has reportedly said that she is “much, much happier” after the Trump administration transferred her to a minimum-security federal prison in Texas, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
Maxwell, 63, was moved from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas in August – just days after she was interviewed about the Epstein case by deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche. Blanche is a former personal lawyer for Donald Trump, who had been friends with the late Epstein – a convicted sex offender – before winning two presidencies.
The interview with Blanche came as the administration faced growing pressure to release more documents related to the Epstein investigation, a pledge that Trump had made during his campaign.
Maxwell’s transfer, which experts described as “unprecedented”, prompted questions as well as outrage from victims of Epstein, who died by suicide while incarcerated in 2019. They wondered why a convicted sex offender like Maxwell was moved to a facility where most of the inmates are serving time for non-violent offenses and white-collar crimes.
And now, NBC News has obtained and revealed several emails that Maxwell reportedly sent to friends and relatives after her transfer that expressed delight at her new surroundings. The outlet says the emails were recently shared with the House Judiciary Committee.
“My situation is improved by being at Bryan,” she wrote in one email. In another, she wrote: “The institution is run in an orderly fashion which makes for a safer more comfortable environment for all people concerned, inmates and guards alike.”
Maxwell described the living conditions, stating that the kitchen “looks clean too – no possums falling from the celling to fry unfortunately on ovens, and become mingled with the food being served”.
“I feel like I have dropped through Alice in Wonderlands looking glass,” Maxwell wrote in an email to a relative. “I am much much happier here and more importantly safe.”
The food, she said, was “legions better” than where she was held previously. “The place is clean, the staff responsive and polite – I haven’t seen or heard the usual foul language or screaming accompanied by threats leveled at inmates by anyone,” she wrote. “I have not seen a single fight, drug deal, passed out person or naked inmate running around or several of them congregating in a shower!”
NBC also reported that in other emails, Maxwell praised the prison camp warden as a “true professional” and also complained about “people selling rubbish stories and making money from their lies”.
The emails were reportedly shared with the House judiciary committee after Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to the warden of the Texas facility on 30 October. Raskin asked about reports that suggested Maxwell was receiving “VIP treatment” at the prison. He cited a Wall Street Journal article from October, where some current and former inmates said that Maxwell was getting “unusually favorable treatment at times”.
In response to NBC’s reporting of Maxwell’s emails, one of her lawyers, David Oscar Markus, told the outlet: “There’s nothing journalistic about publishing a prisoner’s private emails, including ones with her lawyers.
“That’s tabloid behavior, not responsible reporting. Anyone still interested in that kind of gossip reveals far more about themselves than about Ghislaine. It’s time to get over the fact that she is in a safer facility. We should want that for everyone.”
Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, also told NBC in an email that messages between him and his sister are “personal and private by their very nature”.
If those emails were sent to Congress and a reporter, he said, “then they were stolen and leaked without authorization and represent a breach of intellectual property rights and the fundamental right of all citizens to privacy.”
The US supreme court in October declined to hear an appeal from Maxwell on her sex-trafficking conviction.
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