Judge Loretta Preska denied Ghislaine Maxwell’s request to block the release of documentation this week that serves to shed light on the multi-decade, country-spanning scheme of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to traffic minors for sex, and her allegedly central role in helping to perpetuate it. The court began releasing the bulk of the much-anticipated documentation on Thursday night, which stems from the since-settled September 2015 assault, libel, and defamation lawsuit that Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre filed against Maxwell after the late financier’s alleged right-hand repeatedly called her allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation “entirely false.”
Despite enduring efforts by legal counsel for Maxwell, who is awaiting trial in a federal prosecution in connection with her alleged role in Epstein’s sex trafficking, to keep the records under wraps and out of the public sphere, Judge Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered that they be released. In response to Maxwell’s counsel’s emergency appeal to block the release of the documents on Thursday evening, the court asserted that it “is troubled – but not surprised – that Ms. Maxwell has yet again sought to muddy the water as the clock clicks closer to midnight.”
The nearly 50 separate documents unsealed on Thursday evening consist of a transcript of Ms. Giuffre’s deposition in the 2015 case, which includes her allegations that Epstein arranged for her to have sex with an array of powerful men – including Britain’s Prince Andrew, defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, Hyatt hotels chief Tom Pritzker, modeling executive Jean-Luc Brunel, and prominent hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, among others – at Epstein’s various residences, including those in Palm Beach and New York, as well as at his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Also unsealed are a draft of a memoir that Giuffre wrote about the time that she spent working for Epstein between 2000 and 2002, when she was first just 17 years old, as well as previously unreleased emails between Maxwell and Epstein, who died while in a New York jail in August 2019.
As of Friday, one key document that remains unreleased is the transcript for 58-year old Maxwell’s own deposition in the case that Giuffre filed against her. Judge Preska agreed to stay the release of that document until Monday in order to give Maxwell’s legal team time to appeal its release before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
To some extent, Ms. Giuffre’s deposition mirrors the information that came out in the August 2019 document release in connection with the same defamation case, which contained flight logs for Epstein’s various aircrafts and that names individuals – such as former president Bill Clinton, supermodels Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, former Sony Records president Tommy Mottola, and magician David Copperfield – as being on board. The newly-released deposition serves to further implicate an array of the same high-profile individuals.
In the deposition, for instance, Giuffre asserted that Maxwell sent her to have sex with the “owner of a large hotel chain” during a visit to France in 2002, which she said she “believe[s] … was around the same time that Naomi Campbell had a birthday party.”
Campbell is one of the fashion industry figures that has been linked to Epstein in the past, as the supermodel was listed on at least two flight logs for Epstein’s private plane – one for a trip from London to New York in February 2002 and another in October 2002 from Paris to New York, along with Maxwell and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, among others. Moreover, Giuffre name-checked Campbell in a document attached to the November 2016 deposition, stating that she “met Naomi Campbell at a birthday party of [Campbell’s] on a yacht in the South of France,” asserting that Campbell “is a friend of Ghislaine’s.” A rep for Campbell previously told TFL that that the model “never had a birthday party on a yacht.”
Giuffre has since cited the model, among others, in a January 2020 tweeted, in which she stated, “You saw me at your parties, you saw me in Epstein’s homes, you saw me on the plane … you watched me be abused. You saw me!,” and included Epstein, Maxwell, Prince Andrew, and Campbell’s names as hashtags.
After being arrested in early July on criminal charges of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, and perjury, among others, Maxwell, who has pleaded not guilty, was denied bail. The judge said that Maxwell represented a “substantial” flight risk given her wealth and her citizenship in France, which does not extradite its citizens.
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