Ghislaine Maxwell’s private emails hacked after court error

GHISLAINE MAXWELL’S private emails have been hacked by cyber criminals in a new twist in the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The British heiress was targeted after she was publicly accused of procuring young girls for Epstein, legal papers seen by The Daily Telegraph reveal.

Ms Maxwell, 58, has barely been seen in public since August, when the US court of appeals for the second circuit unsealed allegations that she conspired with Epstein to recruit and groom underage girls.

Her US lawyers are currently battling the release of around 8,600 further documents from the same civil case, said to contain damaging new sex claims about Epstein’s vast network of celebrity friends.

In a legal letter seen by The Telegraph dated Dec 5, Ms Maxwell’s attorneys say that hackers “breached” her computer after her personal email address was mistakenly included in the first tranche of documents.

“Despite the second circuit’s best efforts, it made serious mistakes,” her lawyers state. “It redacted Ms. Maxwell’s email address (which linked to her own domain name) in one location but not another; shortly afterward hackers breached the host computer.”

In December, it was revealed that Ms Maxwell exchanged emails with the Duke of York in 2015 about Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accuses him of having sex with her three times when she was aged 17. He has always emphatically denied the allegations.

A spokesman for Ms Maxwell would not reveal last night whether her personal emails had been accessed or stolen, or if the culprits had yet been identified. The security breach will raise the prospect that emails could be made public, or sold to the highest bidder. There were even suggestions last night that a rogue state may have targeted her in search of incriminating information on powerful people.