the times | Monday February 21 2022 9
News
Julian Assange should be released from
prison and moved to house arrest while
fighting extradition, a United Nations
expert has said.
The WikiLeaks founder, 50, has been
held at the high-security Belmarsh
prison in southeast London since being
evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy
in the capital in April 2019. He had
spent seven years in the embassy to
Ghislaine Maxwell’s older brother has
said that he fears for her safety after a
former modelling agent accused of
trafficking young girls to her paedo-
phile boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, was
found dead in a French prison.
The death of Jean-Luc Brunel, 75,
who was found hanging from knotted
sheets in his cell in Paris’s Santé prison
on Saturday, came two and a half years
after Epstein, 66, also hanged himself
while awaiting trial in New York.
“It’s really shocking. Another death
by hanging in a high-security prison.
My reaction is one of total shock and
bewilderment,” Ian Maxwell told the
New York Post.
Brunel, alleged to be a central figure
in Epstein’s sex abuse ring, was arrested
in Paris in December 2020 and was
awaiting trial on rape and sex traffick-
ing charges.
He was a former business partner of
Epstein, an American billionaire who
lent Brunel $1 million to set up MC2, a
Miami-based modelling agency, then
used it to recruit girls for sexual abuse,
steering them to orgies at his homes in
Florida and New York.
Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein
who agreed to a multimillion-pound
out-of-court settlement from Prince
Andrew last week after claiming that
she also had been trafficked to him for
sex two decades ago, stated in a 2015
affidavit that “Epstein has told me that
he has slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s
girls”.
Brunel previously ran Karin Models,
a noted modelling agency in New York,
during the 1990s.
“The suicide of Jean-Luc Brunel, who
abused me and countless girls and
women, ends another chapter... I am
disappointed that I was not able to face
him in a final trial,” Giuffre stated.
Courtney Powell Soerensen, one of
Brunel’s alleged victims, called on
Andrew to “speak openly with all
authorities about what he knows”. She
told The Sun: “It is past time for Prince
Andrew to step up and provide justice
for those denied the opportunity by
Brunel and Epstein’s deaths.” Andrew
denies the allegations against him.
Mathias Chichportich, a lawyer for
Brunel, dismissed conspiracy theories
around Brunel’s suicide, telling The
Miami Herald and the French news-
paper 20 Minutes that the alleged pimp
had attempted to take his own life
several times over the past 14 months.
He was briefly released from custody
after a suicide attempt at Christmas, but
then was detained again and held in
an area of the prison reserved for “vul-
nerable” detainees, where guards check
on inmates’ welfare up to six times a
night.
In a joint statement with Brunel’s
other lawyers, Marianne Abgrall and
Christophe Ingrain, he added: “Jean-
Luc Brunel has continued to proclaim
his innocence. He multiplied his efforts
to prove it. His decision to end his life
was not driven by guilt but by a deep
sense of injustice.”
The prison authorities in Paris saidthat there had been no security breach
and that an investigation had been
launched into Brunel’s suicide.
Despite voicing concern about his
sister’s safety, saying that he “feared” for
her in prison, Ian Maxwell also com-
plained at the frequency of welfare
checks being conducted at the Man-
hattan Detention Centre in New York,
where the 60-year-old is being held.
She was convicted in December of five
charges related to her involvement in
Epstein’s sex ring and is due to be
sentenced in June.
“Despite the psychiatrist advising to
the contrary, she was deemed a suicide
risk and they are continuing to wake
her up every 15 minutes in the night,
Maxwell said. “It’s a complete violation
of prisoner rights and human rights.”
Thysia Huisman, a former modelfrom the Netherlands who alleged that
Brunel had drugged and raped her as a
teenager in 1991, said that his death had
robbed her of justice.
“It makes me angry because I’ve been
fighting for years. For me, the end of
this was to be in court and now that
whole ending, which would help form
closure, is taken away from me,” she
said.
Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for
victims of Epstein’s sex abuse ring, said
that Brunel’s suicide would not end the
push for justice.
“For the women who have stood up
and called for accountability from law
enforcement around the world, it is not
how these men died but how they lived
and the damage they caused to so
many. The fight to seek truth and
justice goes on,” she said.Maxwell fears as suspect hangs himself
Jacqui Goddard
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICEA woman was unaware for 12 years
that she was registered as divorced
after her signature was forged on
official documents, a judge has
ruled.
A family court has now set aside
the divorce after the judge ruled
that the woman had no knowledge of
it and that her signature had been
forged by or on behalf of her husband.
The ruling now raises the possibility
Woman unaware of divorce for 12 years after signature forged
that her husband, who has remarried, is
a bigamist.
The judgment came as family
lawyers have warned that fraudulent
divorces could increase once the law is
changed to remove fault from the pro-
cess and because the majority of appli-
cations are now submitted online.
Rachpal and Kewal Randhawa were
married at Slough register office, Berk-
shire, in 1978, when they were respec-
tively 19 and 16.
Judge Moradifar said that over the
years the couple had “amassed a smallfortune” through property transac-
tions. They separated in 2009 and the
husband moved in with and then
married another woman in 2011, with
whom he had a child.
Mrs Randhawa said she had been
aware of rumours that her husband had
a child with another woman, but said
that she did not know that he was
married to her. She had accepted that
they were separated but thought they
were still married.
The court was told that the pair still
attended family functions as husbandand wife and that Mr Randhawa
claimed that the child was his grand-
child, who had been born using the re-
productive cells of the couple’s son, who
had died when he was 14.
Setting aside a divorce decree from
2010, Moradifar said that Mr Randha-
wa was “the only person with oppor-
tunity and motive to ensure that the
divorce proceeded without difficulties”.
The husband’s lawyer, Daniel Debid-
in, would not comment on the possi-
bility that Mr Randhawa was a bigamist.
The legal position depends on whetherthe husband’s second marriage ceremo-
ny was recognised under English law.
A family law expert said that the case
highlighted the potential for spouses to
commit fraud to escape an unhappy
marriage. “The divorce process is open
to abuse like so many other types of
administration,” James Brown, a part-
ner at Hall Brown Family Law, the law
firm, said. Family law specialists have
pointed out that the online divorce por-
tal, launched by the HM Courts and
Tribunal Service four years ago, could
create greater opportunities for fraud.Jonathan Ames Legal Editor
Catherine Baksi
Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein
and Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel, above,
was found dead in his cell in ParisAssange should be released from prison, says UN torture expert
David Brown avoid extradition, leading to a £13 mil-
lion police surveillance operation.
Nils Melzer, the UN special rappor-
teur on torture, said that the UK was
breaching international law by keeping
Assange in jail.
“We have a man locked up in solitary
confinement in a high-security prison
who’s not violent, who’s not serving a
sentence,” he said. “He should be free,
perhaps with house arrest.”
Augusto Pinochet, the former
Chilean dictator, spent 18 months
under house arrest while successfully
fighting extradition to Spain after his
arrest in London in 1998.
Melzer said: “[Pinochet] was free to
receive as many visitors as he wanted
and have access to the public... and
that’s precisely, it seems to me, what the
government wants to prevent because
there is no legal basis for keeping Julian
Assange in a high-security prison.”
Assange sought sanctuary in theEcuardian embassy to avoid extra-
dition to Sweden on sexual assault
charges, which he denied. Melzer said
two women who accused Assange of
sexual assault in 2010 should “reassess”
what had happened in light of
Assange’s diagnosis while in prison of
Asperger’s syndrome.
He told the Foreign Press Associa-
tion in London that the “extremely
restrictive conditions” at Belmarsh
were “destroying” Assange’s health.Melzer, professor of international law
at Glasgow University, said that there
had been an “incapacity of the British
authorities at all levels to ensure
humane treatment and due process of
Julian Assange”.
Assange is wanted on charges of
espionage and hacking. Last month he
was allowed to seek permission to ap-
peal to the Supreme Court after the
High Court overturned a block on his
forced move to the United States.