Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell asks court to overturn conviction
Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, the 62-year-old accomplice and former lover of the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein, will ask a federal appeals court to throw out her convictions Tuesday.
Maxwell was convicted in federal court in 2021 for her role procuring teen girls as victims for Epstein between 1994 and 2004 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Her appeal is being heard in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. In a brief filed last year, her attorneys asked the court to review the statute of limitations, whether Maxwell's trial violated a prior non-prosecution agreement, an allegation of juror misconduct, and Maxwell's sentencing.
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Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend an event on March 15, 2005, in New York City. (Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting his own trial. He was 66. Both Maxwell and his brother, Mark Epstein, have publicly doubted the official finding that he hanged himself while alone in his cell.
Maxwell's lawyers have argued that after Epstein's death, she became a scapegoat due to outrage over his crimes and the lenient sentence he received in 2008 for a prior sex-trafficking conviction – 13 months with work-release.
Photo from 2001 that was included in court files shows Prince Andrew with his arm around the waist of 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who says Jeffrey Epstein paid her to have sex with the prince. Andrew denied the charges. In the background is Epstein's girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. (U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals)
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If her appeal fails, Maxwell isn't eligible for release until July 2037 on multiple counts of child sex trafficking. She is an inmate at Federal Correctional Institute Tallahassee, a low-security prison in Florida.
Separately, the Epstein saga has received much attention so far in 2024 – with the unsealing of hundreds of documents as part of a civil lawsuit between Maxwell and accuser Virginia Giuffre, a civil lawsuit by a dozen other accusers against the FBI, and a new law in Florida designed to make previously sealed filings in Epstein's criminal case public.
The unsealed documents cast renewed scrutiny on a number of figures in Epstein's inner circle, including the United Kingdom's Prince Andrew.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein smile in an undated photograph that was among several unearthed during her sex trafficking trial in the Southern District of New York. (U.S. Department of Justice/Mega)
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Epstein got a sweetheart plea deal on federal charges in 2008 in connection with that case and was only charged with more serious crimes in 2019 after a series of Miami Herald reports unveiled the lenient terms of his initial punishment.
The lenient deal also created the non-prosecution agreement cited in Maxwell's appeal, which protected potential co-conspirators.
Federal prosecutors in New York, however, counter that they are not bound by that deal, which Epstein struck with a former U.S. attorney in Florida. Separately, attorneys for at least one of Epstein's accusers have argued that the deal should be void because it violates the Crime Victims' Rights Act.
The new Florida law, taking effect on July 1, will allow grand jury testimony from cases involving dead suspects and crimes against children to be made public.
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