What Do We Know About Women Like Ghislaine Maxwell?
Ghislaine Maxwell's case draws attention to the rare crime of female sex offending.
Posted August 9, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
With Ghislaine Maxwell in the news again, as well as the trial of Sean Combs, the issue of sex offending again rises to the fore. Combs, also known as P. Diddy or just Diddy, was found guilty of two counts of interstate prostitution, but acquitted of the original charges that included sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in assisting, facilitating, and participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse and exploitation of minor girls over a 10-year period.
Both cases were in the news because of the fame of the perpetrators (and/or their associates) rather than the crimes themselves. Unfortunately, sexual abuse of minors is prevalent in our society, and the stories of these girls and women, as horrifying as they are, are familiar ones. What makes the Maxwell case different is that she’s a woman.
Female Offenders Are Rare
According to US Department of Justice data , females accounted for only about 8 percent of arrests for sex offenses against minors; the U.S. Sentencing Commission ( 2021 ) reports that 93 percent of offenders were men. We can assume that the number of sex offenses perpetrated by female offenders is vastly underreported. But we can also assume sexual abuse is vastly underreported in general.
Offending With a Man Isn't Rare
This data makes Maxwell, a female sex offender, a rarity. However, amongst women who commit sex offenses, her actions were far common. In the description of her crime , Maxwell helped to recruit, groom, and participate in the abuse of her victims, but Epstein was the main driver and actor of the actual abuse. In the U.S. National Incident-Based Reporting System, 45 percent of female child sexual abuse perpetrators co-offended with a male partner (compared to only about 2 percent of male offenders who had accomplices).
The truth is, adjudicated female sex offenders are so rare that we know much less about them than we do male offenders. In my decades of working with people who offend , few have been female. That said, one of the things we do know is that females are far more likely to offend in conjunction with a male offender than males are. Ghislaine Maxwell is one of them. This doesn’t make her crimes less heinous, but it does make her motivations more curious.
To learn more about my work with sex offenders, see my book Evil at Our Table: Inside the Minds of the Monsters Who Live Among Us .
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Samantha Stein , Psy.D., is a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco. She works with couples and individuals, specializing in intimacy, sexuality, and self-realization.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.