U.S. court unseals new documents in case against Ghislaine Maxwell

A cache of documents in civil litigation against the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell were unsealed on Thursday night. The documents include early 2015 correspondence with her longtime confidant Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Federal authorities arrested Maxwell on 2 July and charged her for allegedly participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking. Maxwell, daughter of the late publishing baron Robert Maxwell, pleaded not guilty on 14 July. She is being held in jail pending trial, which is scheduled for next July. Maxwell’s attorneys in the civil suit had argued to keep these records under seal, maintaining previously that “this series of pleadings concerns [attempts] to compel Ms Maxwell to answer intrusive questions about her sex life”. The documents, they argued, are “extremely personal, confidential and subject to considerable abuse by the media”. Manhattan federal court judge Loretta Preska ruled on 23 July to unseal them, however, saying: “The court finds that the countervailing interests identified fail to rebut the presumption of public access.”Documents involving Maxwell’s deposition have not been released yet, as her lawyers are appealing their unsealing. The documents in question stem from Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil action against Maxwell. Giuffre has claimed that Maxwell lured her into Epstein’s orbit at 15 years old, under the guise of offering work as a masseuse. Maxwell met Giuffre at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in south Florida, where the then teen was working as a locker-room attendant. In this suit, which has since been settled, Giuffre claimed that Maxwell had defamed her, by stating that she was a liar for accusing Epstein and Maxwell of sexual impropriety. An extensive collection of documents in this suit was also unsealed last August. They featured both bombshell claims, and denials that world leaders participated in Epstein’s sex ring. These filings were disclosed shortly after Epstein’s arrest last July. Epstein killed himself in jail last August
.https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/jeffrey-epstein-document-release-ghislane-maxwell.html