Reporter's Notebook: Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest shocks rural New Hampshire town

A local shopkeeper called the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein's confidant, Ghislaine Maxwell, "surreal."

On a muggy midsummer morning last July, as the nation was in the grips of a second surge of the coronavirus, a racial reckoning following the police murder of George Floyd and a contentious presidential campaign, one pastoral New Hampshire farm town found themselves perplexed as a swarm of FBI agents stormed one particularly secluded property. Shortly thereafter, they learned the jaw-dropping identity of the mysterious neighbor who federal authorities had handcuffed and taken into custody on July 2, 2020: Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend and alleged co-conspirator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Despite intense interest from the news media, the British socialite, who had previously been a regular fixture photographed on red carpets and around the glamorous New York City social circuit, had mostly gone unseen seen in public since 2016. Now one of the world's most notorious accused sex traffickers, Maxwell currently awaits trial on charges brought by the Southern District of New York, which hadn't stopped investigating Epstein's associates after his jailhouse death by suicide in 2019. The charges against her include allegations of conspiring to entice minors to travel to different states which Maxwell knew would result in their sexual abuse and perjury. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against her.