Ghislaine Maxwell appeals US court to throw out sex trafficking conviction
Ghislaine Maxwell has asked a US appeals court to throw out her conviction for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls, saying she was immune from prosecution and citing a slew of errors that allegedly tainted her trial.
In a Tuesday night filing with the second US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan, Maxwell said that if her conviction and the underlying indictment were not thrown out, she deserved a new trial or a re-sentencing.
“The government prosecuted Ms Maxwell as a proxy for Jeffrey Epstein” to satisfy “public outrage” over the case and worked with his accusers “to develop new allegations out of faded, distorted, and motivated memories”, Maxwell lawyer Arthur Aidala said in a statement obtained by Reuters.
Maxwell, 61, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after a Manhattan jury convicted her in December 2021 on five charges for recruiting and grooming four girls for abuse by Epstein between 1994 and 2004.
The daughter of the deceased British media mogul Robert Maxwell is imprisoned in Tallahassee, Florida, and could be freed in July 2037 with credit for good behavior and two years she previously spent in jail.
Maxwell’s lawyers had tried to discredit her accusers and claimed that prosecutors turned the socialite’s case into a legal reckoning that Epstein, a registered sex offender, never had.
Epstein killed himself at age 66 in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, one month after being charged with sex trafficking.
Hundreds of women claimed to be victims of Epstein’s abuse, and famous people, most notably Britain’s Prince Andrew, who were friendly with him, have seen their reputations tarred or destroyed.
Many arguments in Maxwell’s mirror those she made unsuccessfully before, during and after the trial. She has claimed that Epstein’s 2007 nonprosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in southern Florida, arising from alleged abuse at his Palm Beach mansion, also immunized her.
Epstein, in exchange for immunity, pleaded guilty the next year to a Florida state prostitution charge and served 13
months in jail. That arrangement is now widely considered too lenient.
Lawyers for Maxwell have also said she was unable to prepare meaningfully for trial at her Brooklyn jail because of raw sewage, sleep and water deprivation, as well as surveillance resembling Hannibal Lecter’s in the movie The Silence of the Lambs.