By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Ghislaine Maxwell’s bid to overturn her sex trafficking conviction and be freed from prison was rejected by a federal judge Tuesday who said the claims by Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime associate that new evidence had emerged were “demonstrably meritless.”
Maxwell filed a habeas petition last December seeking to set aside her conviction and free her from a 20-year prison sentence, claiming exonerating information was withheld and false testimony presented at her trial, resulting in a “complete miscarriage of justice.”
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer rejected her arguments, saying in his written ruling they “all or almost all are frivolous” and that she had presented nothing that could upend the outcome of her trial.
“Nearly all its claims are procedurally barred; the overwhelming testimonial and documentary evidence adduced at trial conclusively established her guilt; and her petition’s claims are demonstrably meritless, and generally based on speculation, distortions, and/or outright falsehoods,” Engelmayer wrote.
A request for comment was sent to lawyers who represented Maxwell in the past.
Habeas petitions are often filed as a last resort and to protect against unlawful confinement after appeals are exhausted, as happened after Maxwell’s conviction and sentencing.
Epstein, a millionaire financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges. Ordered detained until trial, he was found dead in his cell at a New York federal jail in August 2019 and his death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell, a British socialite, was arrested a year later and was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021. She was moved from a Florida prison to a prison camp in Texas last year, shortly after she was interviewed by the Justice Department’s then second-in-command, Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now U.S. attorney general.
The judge noted that many of Maxwell’s claims of “new evidence” stem from documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
As a result of that law, the Justice Department over the last eight months has released 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe, including search warrants, financial records, notes from interviews with victims and data from electronic devices.
Engelmayer said that material is “largely irrelevant to the charges against Maxwell and does not support her claims of error.”
“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,” he wrote.
The judge also rejected Maxwell’s claim that she was selectively prosecuted and made a “scapegoat” when the Justice Department did not indict four co-conspirators named in a government document or 25 men who settled with victims.
Engelmayer said she could have raised that claim on appeal after her trial, but he found it to be frivolous nonetheless.
Among the recently released Justice Department documents, “she does not cite any that reveals the existence of an uncharged confederate, let alone one as instrumental as she in facilitating Epstein’s horrific crimes,” the judge said.