by A federal appeals court should overturn Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction or grant a new trial on charges she participated in and allowed Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse dozens of teenagers and young women over more than a decade, her lawyers have argued in court. documents on Tuesday. .
The arguments presented by lawyers to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely echoed the claims she unsuccessfully made to a judge who sent her to prison for 20 years.
The 61-year-old British socialite argued through her lawyers that the convictions violated a deal Epstein reached with federal prosecutors 15 years ago, violated the statute of limitations and should be thrown out because a jury failed to reveal she was a victim of child sex abuse.
He also cited miscarriage of justice and a miscalculation of federal sentencing guidelines as reasons for throwing out 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.
He was convicted in December 2021 of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, an American financier who had hundreds of millions of dollars and an appetite for daily massages used to persuade vulnerable and mostly financially desperate girls to engage in sexual acts for hundreds of dollars.
Her lawyers had previously argued unsuccessfully that Maxwell became a scapegoat for prosecutors desperate to indict someone after Epstein killed himself in a federal prison cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
Her trial included testimony from some women who were victimized as children, as well as testimony from pilots who named famous men — Britain’s Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump — who flew on Epstein’s private jets.
Evidence showed that Epstein had transferred more than $30 million to Maxwell, his one-time girlfriend, during and after several years from 1994 to 2004, when they were most closely associated.
Attorneys for Maxwell, the once-privileged daughter of a shipping tycoon, said in court documents that prosecutors should never have been able to build their case against her because a plea deal Epstein reached in September 2007 with federal prosecutors in Florida was protecting not only himself from prosecution, but “any potential conspirators.”
They also argued that the law used to convict her no longer applied once her co-accused turned 25, which they all had by the time of trial.
Lawyers reiterated their claims that a juror’s disclosure to reporters after the verdict that he failed to disclose that he had been a victim of child sexual abuse, even though he had been asked, were grounds for the verdict to be thrown out. They said the judge mishandled the controversy.
And they wrote that Maxwell’s “deplorable conditions of confinement” in a federal prison in Brooklyn before her trial left her “so disoriented and impaired that she was virtually unable to assist in her defense, much less testify.”
They also criticized the judge for allowing three of the four women who testified about being sexually abused to use pseudonyms, even though one gave an interview to the Daily Mail after the verdict and another made public statements even before testifying.
