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Ghislaine Maxwell says she will ask a court to free her from prison
In a court filing, a lawyer for the onetime companion of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein said she would seek to be released from her minimum-security federal lockup.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, plans to ask a court to release her, according to a letter filed Wednesday in New York City federal court.
The letter, submitted by her lawyer, offers no details about what grounds Maxwell will cite in her filing, known as a habeas petition. But the letter indicated that she would file the request shortly and that it would be done without a lawyer representing her.
Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, declined to comment Wednesday when asked about the letter.
Maxwell has already been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. The move occurred about a week after she was interviewed over two days about the Epstein case by Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s second-in-command and one of President Donald Trump’s former lawyers.
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Blanche met with Maxwell amid a firestorm of criticism from Trump supporters who called for the administration to release all federal files related to Epstein.
Markus’ letter suggests that Maxwell, in her habeas petition, will challenge her December 2021 conviction, which came after a monthlong trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The jury found her guilty of sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking of a minor and other counts.
The Epstein matter has become a consistent headache for the Trump administration. The president and Epstein knew each other socially, and Trump has alluded to Epstein’s involvement with young women.
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But many of Trump’s most fervent supporters came to believe that as president, he would open all investigative files on the case, divulging secrets about a cabal of powerful men. Indeed, several top aides to Trump led the president’s followers to believe that the papers would be quickly made public. But the Justice Department in July released a letter saying there would be no further disclosures, sparking fury.
The letter from Maxwell’s lawyer came about two months after top officials at the Justice Department informed Trump that he was mentioned in the files. A person’s name appearing in the documents is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing.
In his letter Wednesday, Markus told the judge overseeing Maxwell’s case that his client took no position on a recent request by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the court release sealed materials related to the grand jury investigation of Maxwell.
At the same time, Markus wrote, releasing the materials from Maxwell’s case, “which contain untested and unproven allegations, would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial should Ms. Maxwell’s habeas petition succeed.”
Although the judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, previously denied a request by the Justice Department to release those documents, Bondi made her latest motion under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed by Trump last month.
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Bondi has made a similar motion seeking release of grand jury materials involving Epstein to Judge Richard M. Berman, who oversaw the Epstein case in Manhattan federal court. In 2019, Epstein was found hanged in his jail cell — a death ruled a suicide — as he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Lawyers for Epstein’s estate told Berman on Wednesday that they took no position on the release of the grand jury materials, as long as there were “appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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