U.S. Judge Rejects Ghislaine Maxwell’s Bid to Overturn Conviction in Jeffrey Epstein Case
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, Aug 25 (Reuters) - A Manhattan federal judge has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s latest attempt to overturn her conviction and 20-year prison sentence for helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.
In a 67-page decision made public on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer said Maxwell’s claims were meritless, and that all or almost all were frivolous. Most rested on arguments she had already made and lost, or failed to raise, in her earlier challenge to the December 2021 conviction, he wrote. Much of the supposedly “new” evidence released this year under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, he said, was irrelevant.
“On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges,” Engelmayer wrote.
The judge also dismissed Maxwell’s assertion that prosecutors illegally withheld evidence as “conclusory, cynical, and wrong.” Maxwell represented herself in the latest proceeding. Engelmayer said an appeal would not be taken in good faith, meaning the court would not pay her filing fees if she declared she could not afford them.
A jury in Manhattan convicted Maxwell in December 2021 on five counts of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004. The trial was held before a different judge.
The petition for a writ of habeas corpus was Maxwell’s broadest effort to overturn a conviction that stands as the most significant successful prosecution to emerge from the Epstein scandal. An earlier appeal by Maxwell focused on Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, which led to his 2008 guilty plea on a Florida state prostitution charge. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that appeal last October.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which prosecuted Maxwell, declined to comment. Prosecutors had argued in court filings that Maxwell’s latest claims were baseless, filed too late, or failed to show that her trial was unfair.
In her latest challenge, Maxwell said documents disclosed this year under the Epstein files law showed that lawyers for Epstein’s accusers had served as “de facto prosecutors and agents of the government.” She also accused prosecutors of failing to do any real investigating of their own, citing in part their failure to interview Leslie Wexner, the retail billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret who hired Epstein to manage his personal finances.
Wexner, 88, told Congress in February that he severed ties with Epstein in 2007 and did not know about Epstein’s crimes. Maxwell also objected to alleged gaps in witness testimony and to the alleged government suppression of potentially exculpatory grand jury testimony from a Palm Beach, Florida, police detective about a green massage table at Epstein’s villa there.
Epstein was 66 when he died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, five weeks after his arrest on sex trafficking charges. New York City’s medical examiner called the death a suicide.
Maxwell is housed at a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. She is eligible for release in July 2037, when she will be 75.
The ruling effectively closes the door on Maxwell’s habeas corpus challenge, although she could still seek review from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Engelmayer’s good-faith finding could make it harder for her to pursue an appeal without paying filing fees. The case has remained a touchstone for victims’ advocates, who have pointed to Maxwell’s conviction as a rare measure of accountability in a scandal that stretched across elite circles in the United States and abroad for decades.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Mark Porter and Deepa Babington)