(Bloomberg) -- Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of engaging in a 10-year sex-trafficking scheme with former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, asked a judge to sentence her to less than six years in prison, far less than the 20 years US probation officials said she deserves.

Maxwell’s lawyers, in a letter to the judge, said the British socialite should be sentenced to 51 months to 63 months. According to US sentencing guidelines calculations, her crime warrants a sentence of 24 years to 30 years.

“The court cannot be influenced by this inexorable drumbeat of public condemnation calling for her to be locked away for good,” Maxwell’s lawyers Bobbi Sternheim and Christian Everdell wrote. “The court cannot heal the wounds caused by Epstein by heaping on Ms. Maxwell’s shoulders the pain of every one of his victims, the outrage of society, the public scorn of the community, and then driving her out of the community forever.”

A federal jury in late December found Maxwell, 60, guilty of five of the charges against her, including sex-trafficking of a minor, after four women testified they were sexually abused by the couple. Prosecutors cast the Oxford-educated Maxwell as a “sophisticated predator” who often acted like a big sister, taking girls shopping or to the movies, before pushing them into sexual encounters with Epstein. 

Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state prostitution charges, was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges. He killed himself a month later in a federal lockup in Manhattan while awaiting trial. 

In her submission, Maxwell’s lawyers argued that prosecutors resurrected the decade-old case against Epstein, by charging her after they were thwarted by his suicide.

Maxwell’s lawyers said it wouldn’t be fair to impose the same sentence on her as Epstein would’ve received if convicted.

There would be “no meaningful distinction between the most serious offenders and those with lesser culpability,” they wrote.

They also noted Maxwell committed no crimes in almost 20 years since ending her involvement with Epstein. And she was in two long-term relationships in that time “without even the slightest hint of impropriety,” the lawyers wrote.

Maxwell said she was married to her former husband for more than seven years and called herself a “devoted stepmother” to his two children, but said the relationship “could not survive the negative impact of this case nor a husband’s association with his dishonored wife.” News reports have identified Maxwell’s former husband as tech entrepreneur Scott Borgerson.

The high-profile case reached back decades and intersected with some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in high society. Maxwell herself is the daughter of a disgraced British publishing baron Robert Maxwell. 

In her submission Wednesday, Maxwell said her father abused and berated his children and even employed “corporal punishment.” When she was 13, Maxwell said her father pounded her hand with a hammer after she marred a wall with a tack. 

She also argued she’d been subjected to unusually harsh conditions in a Brooklyn federal jail where she’s been held since her July 2020 arrest. An inmate in her jail unit threatened to kill her, “claiming that an additional 20 years’ incarceration would be worth the money she’d receive for murdering” her, Maxwell claimed.

Prosecutors will file their own sentencing submission next week. Maxwell is scheduled to be sentenced June 28.  

(Updates with details from Maxwell submission beginning in first paragraph)

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