Jeffery Epstein sex abuse: Ghislaine Maxwell convicted of recruiting teenage girls

Sealing a remarkable fall from grace for the British socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty by a US jury of helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.

60-year-old Maxwell was accused of recruiting and grooming four teenagers between 1994 and 2004 for Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex abuse charges of his own. 

Maxwell dated Epstein for several years in the 1990s, when the pair attended high society parties and traveled on luxurious private jets.

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Maxwell's attorneys had argued she was being used as a scapegoat for Epstein and sought to portray the accounts of her four accusers as not credible, saying their memories had been corrupted over the decades and that they were motivated by money.

She was convicted on five of six counts. 

Along with the trials of movie producer Harvey Weinstein and singer R. Kelly, Maxwell's case is among the highest-profile trials to take place in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which encouraged women to speak out about sexual abuse by famous and powerful people.