A federal judge on Tuesday upheld Ghislaine Maxwell’s convictions for child sex trafficking with Jeffrey Epstein, rejecting her “rambling” request to erase her record and calling the case against her “the epitome of a virtuous prosecution.”
Maxwell argued that new information from the Epstein files exonerated her.
But Judge Paul Engelmayer said the files added to the evidence of her guilt.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of five counts related to her enticing, grooming and trafficking girls and young women to Epstein, who died in 2019.
Judge Engelmayer said the trial was thorough and fair and conclusively proved Maxwell’s intimate involvement with Epstein’s doings, running his household and demanding obedience and silence from his employees about his activities.
“Maxwell’s rules facilitated Epstein’s and her sexual abuse of young girls,” the judge said.
He said Maxwell’s new claims of innocence, which she lodged without a lawyer’s help, were already made and lost at trial or appeal, or could have been made and weren’t.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for her crimes.
Her conviction was previously upheld by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court declined her request to review the case.
Maxwell, in her new request, claimed juror bias, prosecutorial misconduct and judicial errors she said tainted the case against her.
In one example, she said prosecutors breached a 2007 non-prosecution agreement reached with Epstein. She said the evidence for the breach came from the newly released Epstein files.
Judge Engelmayer said the non-prosecution agreement only applied to the U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida, which struck the deal. It didn’t bind the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who brought the new cases against Maxwell and Epstein, who took his own life while awaiting trial.
Judge Engelmayer said the non-prosecution agreement argument was also made and lost at trial and on appeal, and nothing in the Epstein files alters those judgments.
Maxwell also argued selective prosecution, saying the government should have also charged four co-conspirators named in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement, or charged men who entered into settlements with Epstein victims.
Judge Engelmayer called that argument “patently frivolous,” saying Maxwell, more than any other figure, was the chief enabler of Epstein’s horrific crimes.
“On the contrary, Maxwell has not implicated any other person in the child sex abuse scheme,” he wrote. “And for all the [Epstein files] records that Maxwell invokes as purported support for her petition’s claims, she does not cite any that reveals the existence of an uncharged confederate, let alone one as instrumental as she is in facilitating Epstein’s horrific crimes.”
The judge’s reading of the Epstein files would seem to undercut claims made by some Trump opponents, including congressional Democrats, that those documents contain a road map to charge other people with crimes.
Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress earlier this summer that he would welcome any new tips and is prepared to pursue anyone he can make a case against.
