Ghislaine Maxwell is no victim

The disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced yesterday to 20 years for crimes relating to sex trafficking. After three weeks of silence, Maxwell finally spoke, saying she was ‘sorry’ for the ‘pain’ her victims experienced. She told the court that she hoped her ‘conviction’ and ‘incarceration’ would bring ‘closure.’

There was one particular line that stood out in her statement: ‘I also acknowledge that I have been a victim of helping Jeffrey Epstein commit these crimes.’

This is syntactical subterfuge. First, there’s the strange use of the present perfect tense – ‘I have been a victim’, rather than ‘I was a victim’, suggesting that her victimhood is still ongoing, rather than ending with Epstein’s death. Then there’s the paradoxical phrase ‘victim of helping’. People are normally victims of nouns – murder, robbery, fraud, domestic violence – not verbs.