‘It incriminates her’: Ghislaine Maxwell learns fate in bid to throw out conviction over grooming girls for Jeffrey Epstein

A US judge rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s bid to throw out her conviction and 20-year prison sentence for helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.

Maxwell’s claims were all meritless, and all or almost all were frivolous, Manhattan-based US District Judge Paul Engelmayer said in a decision made public on Tuesday.

He said most were based on arguments Maxwell previously lost or failed to make in challenging her December 2021 conviction, while much of the supposedly “new” evidence disclosed this year through the Epstein Files Transparency Act was irrelevant.

“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,” Engelmayer wrote in a 67-page decision.

Engelmayer also called Maxwell’s claim that prosecutors illegally withheld some evidence “conclusory, cynical, and wrong”.

Maxwell represented herself. Engelmayer said an appeal “would not be taken in good faith,” and the court would not pay her filing fees if she declared herself unable to afford it.

Jurors convicted Maxwell on five charges of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004, in a trial before a different judge.

Maxwell had been seeking a writ of habeas corpus declaring her punishment unlawful.

Her petition represented the broadest effort by the former British socialite and Epstein girlfriend to overturn her conviction, the most significant successful prosecution to emerge from the Epstein scandal.

In her latest challenge, Maxwell said many documents disclosed this year under the Epstein files law showed that lawyers representing Epstein’s accusers served as “De Facto Prosecutors and agents of the government”.

She also said prosecutors did no real investigating of their own, citing among other things their failure to interview Leslie Wexner, the retail billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret who hired Epstein to manage his personal finances.

Wexner, 88, told Congress in February he severed ties with Epstein in 2007 and did not know about Epstein’s crimes.

Maxwell also objected to alleged gaps in witness testimony, and alleged government suppression of potentially exculpatory grand jury testimony by a Palm Beach, Florida police detective about a green massage table at Epstein’s villa there.

Epstein died at age 66 in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, five weeks after being arrested on sex trafficking charges. New York City’s medical examiner called the death a suicide.