Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell asked a federal judge on Wednesday to set aside her sex trafficking conviction and free her from a 20-year prison sentence, saying “substantial new evidence” has emerged proving that constitutional violations spoiled her trial.
Maxwell maintained in a habeas petition she has promised to file since August that information that would have resulted in her exoneration at her 2021 trial was withheld and false testimony was presented to the jury.
She said the cumulative effect of the constitutional violations resulted in a “complete miscarriage of justice.”
A habeas petition (or writ of habeas corpus petition) is a legal request for a court to review the legality of someone’s detention, demanding that the custodian (like a prison official) bring the prisoner before a judge to justify the imprisonment, serving as a fundamental safeguard against unlawful confinement and arbitrary detention by ensuring due process. Filed by or on behalf of someone in custody, it challenges constitutional violations, such as ineffective legal counsel or unfair trials, and seeks release or other relief, often as a last resort after appeals are exhausted.
“Since the conclusion of her trial, substantial new evidence has emerged from related civil actions, Government disclosures, investigative reports, and documents demonstrating constitutional violations that undermined the fairness of her proceeding,” the filing in Manhattan federal court said. “In the light of the full evidentiary record, no reasonable juror would have convicted her.”
The filing came just two days before records in her case were scheduled to be released publicly as a result of President Donald Trump’s signing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law, signed after months of public and political pressure, requires the Justice Department to provide the public with Epstein-related records by Dec. 19.
Forced to act by the new transparency law, the Justice Department has said it plans to release 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe, including search warrants, financial records, notes from interviews with victims, and data from electronic devices.
Epstein, a millionaire financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges. A month later, he was found dead in his cell at a New York federal jail and the death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell, a British socialite, was arrested a year later and was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021. She was interviewed by the Justice Department’s second-in-command in July and was soon afterward moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas.
After the Justice Department asked a New York federal judge to permit grand jury and discovery materials gathered prior to her trial to be released publicly, attorney David Markus wrote on her behalf that while Maxwell now “does not take a position” on unsealing documents from her case, doing so “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial” if her habeas petition succeeds.
The records, Markus said, “contain untested and unproven allegations.”
Last week, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in Manhattan granted the Justice Department’s request to publicly release the materials.
On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said during a news conference on another topic that he would follow the law and the judge’s orders pertaining to the records.
Engelmayer, who along with other judges had previously rejected Justice Department unsealing requests before the transparency law was passed, said the materials “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor.”
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