My sister Ghislaine was denied justice

There is a cartoon doing the rounds this week that shows two women having a drink. One says to the other ‘My dream is to travel back in time’. Her friend replies ‘Just book a ticket to the USA’. No doubt the cartoonist had in mind the topical issues of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade and its striking down New York’s law requiring ‘proper cause’ to carry guns in public.

But it could equally apply to a federal court’s decision this week to impose a 20-year sentence of imprisonment on a 60-year-old woman, my sister Ghislaine. This cruel sentence arises from her conviction at trial six months ago and follows two years of incarceration in the medieval Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Based on a manifestly flawed judicial process, the sentence is a genuflection by a politically appointed judge to a mob whipped up by an embarrassed attorney general, William Barr, who was denied Epstein when he died on his watch.