Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:56:57 EDT
Consider This Sentence
The following sentence occurs in The Guardian on Apple News. “The Jeffrey Epstein files scandal swirling around Donald Trump and his administration continued to escalate on Thursday as officials from the Department of Justice met with the late sex offenders’ longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, whose lawyer said she ‘answered every question…honestly and to the best of her ability.’”
Long with a little verbiage.
The Jeffrey Epstein files scandal swirling around Donald Trump and his administration… is a little too colorful for me. The meeting is a response to the scandal. We don’t need to mention the scandal in the summary sentence.
The sentence describes Ghislaine Maxwell as a longtime associate of Epstein but does not mention her conviction and that the meeting took place in prison as a consequence of the conviction.
The quote omits the words single and truthfully from Maxwell’s lawyer’s public statement.
My rewrite: “On Thursday, officials from the US Department of Justice met with convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in her Tallahassee prison. Maxwell’s lawyer said that the longtime associate of convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, ‘answered every single question…truthfully, honestly, and to the best of her ability.’”