Two years after Jeffrey Epstein's suicide behind bars, a jury has been picked in New York City for Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. Video / AP
A federal appeals court should reverse the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell or grant a new trial on charges that she joined and enabled the sexual abuse that Jeffrey Epstein committed on scores of teenagers and young women for more than a decade, her lawyers argued in court papers Tuesday.
The arguments the lawyers submitted to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals essentially repeated claims she unsuccessfully made to a trial judge who sent her to prison for 20 years.
The 61-year-old British socialite argued through her lawyers that the convictions violate an agreement Epstein reached with federal prosecutors 15 years ago, they violated the statute of limitations and should be tossed because a juror failed to reveal he was a victim of child sex abuse.
She also cited judicial error and a miscalculation of the federal sentencing guidelines range as reasons to reject her conviction and sentence.
Maxwell is serving her sentence at a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, where yoga, Pilates and movies are available.
Ghislaine Maxwell says a federal appeals court should reverse her conviction on charges that she joined and enabled the sexual abuse that Epstein committed on scores of teenagers and young women. Photo / AP
She was convicted in December 2021 of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, an American financier with hundreds of millions of dollars and an appetite for daily massages used to persuade vulnerable and most financially desperate girls to engage in sexual acts for hundreds of dollars.
Her lawyers had unsuccessfully argued previously that Maxwell became a scapegoat for prosecutors desperate for someone to blame after Epstein committed suicide in a federal prison cell in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
Her trial featured testimony from some women who were victimised when they were children as well as the testimony of pilots who dropped the names of famous men — Britain’s Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump — who flew on Epstein’s private jets.
Evidence showed that Epstein had transferred over US$30 million ($48 million) to Maxwell, his one-time girlfriend, during and after a stretch of years from 1994 to 2004 when they were most closely connected.
Lawyers for Maxwell, a once privileged daughter of a shipping magnate, said in court papers that prosecutors should never have been able to press their case against her because a deal Epstein reached in September 2007 with federal prosecutors in Florida protected not only himself from prosecution but “any potential coconspirators.”
They also argued that a law used to convict her no longer applied once her accusers reached the age of 25, which all of them had by the time of the trial.
The lawyers repeated their claims that a juror’s disclosure to reporters after the verdict that he had failed to reveal that he was a victim of child sexual abuse even though he had been asked was grounds to reverse the verdict. They said the trial judge mishandled the controversy.
And they wrote that Maxwell’s “deplorable conditions of confinement” at a federal jail in Brooklyn prior to trial left her “so disoriented and diminished that she was unable meaningfully to assist in her own defence, much less to testify.”
They also criticised the judge for letting three of four women who testified about the sexual abuse they suffered to use pseudonyms even though one granted an interview with the Daily Mail after the verdict and another made public statements even before testifying.
