D which were dumped online by the US judiciary The new Epstein files are tough. Donald Trump appears over 38,000 times, but so far he has completely ignored him. There is less Teflon in the UK. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is wobbling here because he knew that his former Labor Party colleague Peter Mandelson was stuck much deeper and longer in the Epstein swamp. But despite this knowledge, Starmer initially sent him as British ambassador to Donald Trump’s court.
Meanwhile, German media is enjoying the bizarre fact that Epstein’s former girlfriend and helper Ghislaine Maxwell apparently once had a German press card. “They get upset about such formalities, but don’t take it as an opportunity to pay more attention to the victims and give them a voice,” said the roommate.
The ID card thing is also inaccurate. An ID card from the International Federation of Journalists (IfJ), an international umbrella organization, appeared in the files, on which the German Journalists Union (DJU) at Verdi is named as Maxwell’s “home association”.
I am familiar with press cards; I am the honorary chairman of the German Journalists’ Association (DJV) for Berlin and Brandenburg. Like its colleagues at the DJU, the DJV also issues the so-called nationwide press card. The thing is called federally uniform because it has the blessing of the Press Council and the Federal Conference of Interior Ministers. Therefore, only full-time journalists can get it with appropriate proof. However, this has only been the case again since 2018. Previously there was a higher quality ID card.
ID card wasn’t even signed
It was precisely during this time that Ghislaine Maxwell’s IFJ card fell, which, according to the circulating pictures, was valid until September 15, 2017 and which does not even appear to be signed by Maxwell. Since the international ID cards are valid for two years, Maxwell must have applied for it in autumn 2015. Now the IFJ is a thing anyway. The DJV left there in 2023 after long discussions, the reasons for which were “lack of transparency, lonely decisions by the IFJ leadership and undemocratic behavior”.
The US justice system has been investigating Maxwell himself since 2015. At the time, she was so low-profile that court documents couldn’t be served on her and no one knew where she was. It’s cheap to make fun of the fact that the press card arrived for this purpose.
And unfortunately, this is exactly the pattern that still occurs far too often when reporting on sexualized abuse of power. The question of where the press card comes from and how authentic it is doesn’t help at all. But make sure that the stories of those really affected, i.e. those of Epstein and Maxwell exploited women and girls slide backwards.