Jogging beneath the Florida sun, Ghislaine Maxwell looks like any other fitness fan going through her daily exercise.
But the disgraced British socialite enjoys her morning run beneath the barbed wire of the prison where she is holed up for 20 years. And not far away is the Palm Beach mansion of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein where sex-trafficker Maxwell enticed and groomed under-age girls to be abused by him.
The Federal Correction Institute Tallahassee may be a far cry from the stylish Fifth Avenue shops, bars and restaurants in New York she once frequented with her aristocratic friends, but it is hardly a gulag either. She has use of the four-lane running track and there is a softball pitch, a basketball court and gardens. Maxwell also has a job in the prison law library.
Prince Andrew’s 60-year-old pal is known among inmates to be a fitness fanatic, sometimes beating other, much younger women in races.
A prison source said: “Ghislaine is incredibly fit. She runs almost every day, and when not jogging on the track, she will walk with one of her friends.
“For her age, she is incredibly active and does a 40-minute session completing lap after lap without stopping before going back inside. She is happy to be allowed out in the open once again, where she has at least some semblance of freedom.
“When not working in the law library, she stays outside in the sun for hours. She is very, very sociable.”
Our exclusive pictures back that up. We watched as Maxwell, dressed in standard-issue grey T-shirt, matching sweat shorts and trainers, pounded the 400m four-lane asphalt track inside the low-security prison and chatted with
a friend while laughing hysterically.
She regularly completes eight laps while walking the course with her much younger friend on other days.
Maxwell has told how she is much happier in the Tallahassee jail than New York’s tough Metropolitan Detention Center where she spent 500 days after her arrest. Her family claimed she was deprived of sleep by guards there. They even contacted the United Nations to highlight her treatment.
Their petition read: “She is awakened constantly at night and has been subjected, for the 500-plus days of her detention, to a ‘suicide watch’, completely inappropriate in the case of a non-suicidal person, involving a flashlight shone every 15 minutes on her face to check that she is breathing, literally preventing her from sleeping.”
Maxwell also claimed she was repeatedly searched and sexually touched by guards.
She said after arrival at Tallahassee: “I saw the sunlight for the first time, and I saw grass for the first time. So that was lovely.”
And in a recent interview Maxwell added: “Everybody here so far has been extremely professional, and I have not experienced any of the gross violations of my rights that I experienced at MDC. I don’t feel unsafe. And I am perfectly able to live and work here.”
Her comments earned her a night in the Special Housing Unit as punishment for speaking to the press while inside. A typical day for Maxwell starts before sunlight.
She is served her breakfast between 5.30 and 6.30am – typically a muffin, cereal, oatmeal, fruit and milk – before heading to her job where she works Monday to Thursday. By 7.30am, she has to have her bed made and be “inspection ready” dressed in her work uniform – a shirt and matching khaki trousers.
Outside these hours and on the weekend, Maxwell is allowed to wear her own clothes, known as “grades”. Once two officers complete a head count of the dorm, she goes to work.
Maxwell has her lunch between 11am and 11.30am and dinner between 4.30pm and 5pm. On the weekend, she is served roast beef, mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables for her evening meal.
When finished, she returns to her dorm, where she chats for hours with her new pal, Narcy Novack. As our sister paper the Mirror revealed, the 65-year-old crook is serving life for masterminding the death of her millionaire hotel heir husband, Ben Novack Jr and his mother Bernice.
She feared Ben, 52, was going to leave her for a porn star and needed both him and Bernice, 87, dead to inherit his fortune.
Maxwell, who was found guilty of sex-trafficking in December last year and sentenced this June, has launched an appeal against her sentence. But if unsuccessful, plans are already afoot to have an application lodged to finish her time in Britain, where she would serve just half
her term.
After three years in the States, she is entitled to apply for a switch to the UK. A source said: “Calculations have been carried out as to where Ghislaine would serve the least time behind bars. She is happy to be freed on licence just to get out of prison, and her best option for getting out quicker is back in the United Kingdom.”
With good behaviour, Maxwell could lose almost three years of her sentence in the US. If her application to transfer to Britain succeeds, it would mean she would have only seven years and seven months left before she is eligible to be released on licence.
Billionaire Wall Street financier and convicted sex offender Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 aged 66. He had been awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial. Maxwell was pictured with Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, the American woman who claimed the Prince had sex with her when she was 17.
Andrew vehemently denies all the allegations against him. But he paid her a settlement believed to be as much as £12million after she sued him for sexual abuse in a US court.
The Prince was later stripped of his military titles and royal patronages.
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