Why do people cut Ghislaine Maxwell so much slack?

I HEARD ABOUT the special prison favors granted Ghislaine Maxwell while I was reading "Nobody's Girl" by Virginia Giuffre, one of her reported victims.

- KATY BUTLER GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

JOHN MINCHILLO Associated Press

CHARGES were announced against Ghislaine Maxwell (shown with Jeffrey Epstein) in 2020.

The most poignant moment is not the first time Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein allegedly sexually violated her. It's the morning before, when Giuffre sits at the reception desk at the Mara-Lago spa, reading an anatomy book borrowed from the library. Just 16 at the time, Giuffre later wrote, she had already endured temporary homelessness and childhood sexual abuse by a family friend and her own father (who denies it). She wants to become a massage therapist. She's a vulnerable girl from a poor Florida swamp family, with a small, realizable dream.

Maxwell - the striking, mesmerizing, Oxford-educated, upper-class Brit, who would later be convicted for sex-trafficking minors and is now incarcerated at a relaxed prison camp in Bryan, Texas - sweeps into the spa. Like a fairy godmother, she draws Giuffre out and destroys who that young girl might have become.

Maxwell says she knows a wealthy man who "loves to help people" and will fund massage training. That afternoon, in a gauche pink mansion in Palm Beach, Maxwell gives Giuffre a purported "massage lesson" on Epstein's naked body that escalates into sexual servicing. "I had arrived at Epstein's mansion hoping that I was turning a corner," writes Giuffre, who killed herself earlier this year. "I was right back where I'd worked so hard not to be."

Giuffre was primed for victimization. Maxwell saw it and exploited it. "When children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together," Giuffre wrote. She rides home with Maxwell's chauffeur afterward, feeling "gutted."