Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted sex trafficking associate Ghislaine Maxwell plans to represent herself in a new long-shot legal bid to get out of prison, her attorney said in court filings Tuesday.
Maxwell, 63, who recently failed to persuade the Supreme Court to hear an appeal of her conviction and 20-year sentence, intends to represent herself in an upcoming petition challenging the lawfulness of her detention.
Her attorney, David Oscar Markus, revealed the plan in correspondence with Manhattan Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer regarding the Justice Department’s request to unseal transcripts from the 2020 grand jury proceedings that produced Maxwell’s indictment.
Markus said that the British former socialite took no position on the government’s unsealing request, given President Trump had signed off on the Epstein Transparency Act, which orders the Justice Department and the FBI to release information gathered in investigations into the deceased financier’s serial sexual exploitation of teenage girls.
“At the same time,” Markus continued, “Ms. Maxwell respectfully notes that shortly she will be filing a habeas petition pro se. Releasing the grand jury materials from her 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.”
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Getty Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend de Grisogono Sponsors The 2005 Wall Street Concert Series Benefitting Wall Street Rising, with a Performance by Rod Stewart at Cipriani Wall Street on March 15, 2005 in New York City. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
It was not clear why Maxwell is handling this herself, and Markus did not immediately respond to a Daily News inquiry. A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
The last-ditch effort comes after Maxwell has this year sought to work her way out of prison from all angles. Over the summer, she sat down with the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, Todd Blanche, purportedly to help the government learn more about people who may have enabled Epstein’s abuse.
The highly unusual sit-down came as Trump faced sustained scrutiny over his ties to the deceased multimillionaire predator following bombshell exposés about their friendship in The Wall Street Journal and reports that the government had informed him he featured in the publicly sought files. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
Stopping just short of praising him, Maxwell revealed no incriminating information about Trump, nor meaningful details about other influential figures who spent time in her and Epstein’s orbit. The jailed madame was abruptly transferred to a far cozier setup in the wake of the meeting, moving to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.
A whistleblower last month told lawmakers she’s receiving special treatment at the camp and has been preparing a “Commutation Application” that would ask Trump for clemency.
The nation’s high court in October rejected another bid in Maxwell’s multi-pronged effort, refusing to hear an appeal that argued she should have been protected from prosecution based on the sweetheart deal the feds afforded Epstein in 2008 that shielded some of his co-conspirators.
A Manhattan jury in December 2021 found Maxwell guilty of facilitating Epstein’s sexual abuse and trafficking of teenage girls and young women for at least a decade starting in 1994 after hearing devastating testimony from four women victimized by the duo in their youth, one of whom has since died. Federal authorities have estimated that Epstein’s victims number more than 1,000.
Previous efforts by the Justice Department to unseal grand jury minutes were rejected by Engelmayer and the judge who presided over the prosecution that was pending against Epstein before he was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019. The feds previously conceded that much of the information in Maxwell’s grand jury transcripts is public knowledge.
The new requests are based on the Epstein files bill Trump signed into law on Nov. 19, following immense public pressure. The full release of more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence the government has said it’s gathered on Epstein could be affected by ongoing investigations, including one ordered by Trump, and active legal proceedings, such as those planned by Maxwell.
In a filing later Wednesday, a lawyer for Annie Farmer, one of the women who testified against Maxwell, asked Engelmayer and the judge on Epstein’s case to make clear “for the avoidance of doubt” that their decisions on whether or not to release the tip-of-the-iceberg transcripts has no impact on the government’s ability to release its much larger collection of investigative materials.
“Only transparency is likely to lead to justice, and for this reason the victims fought tirelessly to achieve the Transparency Act’s passage,” Sigrid McCawley wrote.
Nothing in these proceedings should stand in the way of their victory or provide a backdoor avenue to continue to cover up history’s most notorious sextrafficking operation.”
