Ex-con lays out what awaits Ghislaine Maxwell behind bars: Scrubbing toilets, maggoty food and beatings from inmates
Attorneys for Ghislaine Maxwell have requested that she serve her 20-year sentence at FCI Danbury, a minimum-security federal prison in Connecticut that has housed a Real Housewife and a hip-hop star — and served as the inspiration for the Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.”
And the inmates are ꦡready and waiting for the notorio✨us sex criminal.
“She will have a rough six to eight months,” Jacqueline Polverari, who spent less than a year in Danbury for mortgage fraud, told The Post.
“I’ve already gotten emails from women who wrote to say that they ‘hear Maxwell will be coming this way.’ They’re preparing for her arrival, already requesting that they don’t want her in their dorms. And the camp counselor won’t put Maxwell where she is not wanted, for fear that she may get hurt.
“Danbury will not be a picnic for Maxwell,” she added.
Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with her billionaire pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse young women and girls, would likely be ostracized by other prisoners and subjeᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚct to abuse herself.
“Women are worse than men about [prisoners convicted of] sex crimes,” said Polverari, who was at Danbury in 2015. “You have mothers there. They see a white woman charged with a sex crime and they think any one of their children could have been her victim. She [Maxwell] would get a lot of flak. She would get the s–t beaten out of her a bunch of times.”
Polverari, who now runs a Connecticut-based company that helps women reintegrate into the community after serving time in prison, began her sentence at the prison on the same day as “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Giudice, who was sente🅰nced to 15 months on fraud c꧒harges in 2015.
“If [Maxwell] is smart, she will hire a consultant to set her up with people inside,” said Polverari. “Teresa Giudice had that. She had a mentor set up inside. Somebody waited for her. She had a mentor walking her around, someone to say she is off-limits.”
But that can backfire.
“People looked at Teresa, like, ‘Who the hell is she? She’s hiring somebody and now we can’t speak with her directly?’ That was a negative. Plus all the people who didn’t like the mentor instantly didn’t like Teresa,” Polverari said. “It was as though she thought she was better than everyone else. Women can be catty. It took a few months before her big mouth got her into humiliating situations. On the phone, she was heard saying, ‘Prison is hell.’ Other prisoners asked, ‘Who is she to say that?’ Then they started taking pictures of her without makeup or hair extensions.”
At Danbury, which has a population o🦩f just over 1,000 prisoners, Maxwell would occupy an 8-by-8-foot cubicle with a bunk bed and two lock❀ers.
“There are 30 cubicles in each dorm,” Polverari told The Post. “The dorms do not have locks or bars … You are never in handcuffs.”
Maxwell’s days would likely begin with breakfast, which is served between 5 and 7 a.m.
“Sometimes there were maggots in the oatmeal,” said Polverari, adding that Maxwell might be assigned to janitorial work, cleaning toilets until 11 or 12 o’clock before breaking for lunch.
“Monday she may have beef tacos, corn and an apple,” Polverari said. “But the women steal all the apples to make hooch. Getting an apple is impossible.”
Vegan Maxwell famously complained about the “inedible” food at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. At Danbury, Polverari said, “There is no vegan or vegetarian menu. She will have to eat like everybody else.”
The prison provides kosher meals that are of better quality than the standard menu, Polverari added, but women who choose that without religious restrictions often get heat: “It makes people like you even less [if you get kosher food] because you are getting something that very few people get.”
Still, the prison would be a step up from MDC, where Maxwell has filed more than 100 complaints during the 22 months she has spent in solitary confinement, her brother I🔴an Maxwell 𝔉told The Post.
“Frankly, getting … out of the hell hole of MDC must be an absolute priority,” he said.
If she has her way, however, Maxwell will eventually be transferred to a prison in the United Kingdom. Her brother Ian that there is a “program where overseas nationals can serve their time in the country of their nationality.”
The final word on where Maxwell serves her time will be up to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 🌳which will conduct a lengthy evaluation about the type of facility that would suit such a high-profile prisoner.
“They will do a custody and security classification on her,” said Larry Levine, the founder and director of , a company that provides pre-custody consultations. “This comes out of the Bureau of Prisons’ Designation and Sentence Computation Center [DSCC] in Grand Prairie, Texas. She will be classified and custody-scored. It is based on elements that include severity of offense, how much of a threat she is to the public, the length of her sentence and her criminal history. Those are the … main things.”
Both Levine and Polverari said it is unlikely that BOP will recommend Danbury, which has housed Lauryn Hill — the Grammy-winning hip-hop artist served three months in 2013 for tax evasion — and billionaire businesswoman Leona Helmsley, who was convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 1989. The New York hotelier served 18 months at Danbury beginning in 1992.
For Piper Kerman, being in Danbury proved to be a pretty good deal. The Smith College graduate got busted for smuggling drug money and wound up incarcerated in the Connecticut camp for 13 months beginning in 2014. Her experiences there inspired “,” which was published as a best-selling book in 2010 and turned into a hit Netflix series three years later.
Both consultants said Maxwell might end up serving her time at West Virginia’s FCI Hazelton, a medium-security prison, because of its greater levels of separation and protection for inmates. “There, she would be locked up in a cell,” said Levine.
“She does not have a popular crime,” Levine said. “People will try to take her out. They will try to beat the crap out of her. [Prison officials] will want to put her in protective custody at Hazelton. If somebody from the outside pays off somebody who has a relative in prison, maybe somebody already serving a life sentence, they could put a sheet over her head, sharpen a toothbrush and stab this b–ch.
“Can you imagine the uproar if she gets killed?”
