#Authorities are letting Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer Ghislaine Maxwell get away with it

We got Osama bin Laden, but we can’t catch a repulsive fugitive socialite?

Since the death of sex trafficker-rapist-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein last August, the woman who allegedly recruited his many, many underage girls and sexually abused them herself has been in hiding.

And Ghislaine Maxwell has hardly been moving cave-to-cave.

Most recent reports put the 58-year-old in a luxury apartment in Paris, right off the Champs Elysees.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Paris, too, is on COVID-19 lockdown. The Sun reports that Maxwell is currently living on Avenue Matignon in the city’s 8th arrondissement, in an apartment reportedly owned by a Normandy-based millionaire.

This would put her just five minutes away from the late Epstein’s own Parisian apartment, which was raided shortly after his suicide.

So: where is the urgency? Why hasn’t this depraved criminal suspect, one who by many credible accounts sexually abused minors for years, been arrested yet?

France may not have an extradition treaty with the U.S., but that doesn’t explain why French authorities haven’t taken her into custody. It’s well-known that Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator who knew no geographic boundaries. Maxwell appears to have been his madam, his pimp, his enabler, his co-conspirator, and reportedly a sexual offender herself.

The world would be better off without her moving around in it. Yet it seems there are powerful people who disagree. What other explanation is there?

Maxwell is one of the world’s most wanted women, sought by the FBI for questioning. Yet before the lockdown, she was seen swanning around Paris, patronizing high-profile, four-star restaurants and cafés, dropping into art galleries, a scarf tied around her head as if she were Jackie O on Fifth Avenue.

These are the defiant actions of a remorseless woman who knows she is well protected. Her hiding seems almost performative. Maxwell isn’t hunkered down on a private island or on a yacht in international waters. Her whereabouts are well known.

Yet we’re still playing “Where in the World is Ghislaine Maxwell?”

There’s a reason conspiracy theories still swirl around Epstein’s suicide. At the time, he was likely the most high value suspect in U.S. federal custody. As it was, his arrest was long overdue. His case made international headlines. He was on suicide watch.

And he was friends with very powerful men, heads of state and royals among them, hosted at his homes and on his private island, flying on his private jet, known to all as The Lolita Express.

So the idea that none of these men knew about Jeffrey Epstein, again, defies the most basic logic.

Sure, Prince Andrew has “stepped down” as a senior royal. So what? What does that even mean? He has never faced any consequences of any kind, even though Virginia Guiffre Roberts has made consistent and credible claims that Epstein sex trafficked her to Andrew when she was just 17.

And that Maxwell recruited and groomed her back in 1999, along with many other underage girls through the years.

Maxwell doesn’t even have the temerity of a Roman Polanski, who also fled to France and whose stance for decades has been “Yes, I raped a 13-year-old girl. Bygones.”

We are living in a fraught and electric moment, one in which all manner of injustice is no longer tolerated, protests in the streets day after day, forcing us to ask hard and painful questions in pursuit of a fairer and freer world.

Don’t let Ghislaine Maxwell benefit from this as a distraction. Make her part of it. Make her — and whoever else, no matter how powerful — pay.