Judge unseals documents about accused Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, but delays release
A federal judge on Thursday unsealed civil court documents related to Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite arrested earlier this month on charges of aiding the sexual abuse of minor girls by the now-dead investor Jeffrey Epstein.
But Judge Loretta Preska postponed the release of the documents in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by up to one week to give Maxwell’s lawyers time to file an appeal of her decision.
Preska reportedly said during a hearing that the public’s right to see the documents “far outweighed” Maxwell’s right to avoid being embarrassed by their contents.
The documents include a more-than-400-page deposition that Maxwell gave during litigation in the civil case, as well as depositions of several accusers of Epstein.
The documents are part of a now-settled civil case filed by Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Maxwell of recruiting her for Epstein’s abuse years ago, when she was 17 years old.
At the time, Giuffre was working as an assistant in the spa at President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Giuffre has said Maxwell directed her to have sex with Prince Andrew of Britain, a then friend of Epstein’s, as well as with Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
Both of those men deny Giuffre’s claims.
The Miami Herald, whose investigation of Epstein led to his arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges in July 2019, had sued to win release of the documents.
Epstein, 66, died last August in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in what authorities ruled was a suicide by hanging.
Shortly before his death, a federal appeals court ordered the release of more than 2,000 pages of documents from Maxwell’s civil case.
Among those documents was a deposition of Giuffre, in which she says that Maxwell directed her to have sex with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, ex-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, hedge funder Glenn Dubin, late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, modeling company founder Jean Luc-Brunel, the owner of a large hotel chain, and another prince besides Andrew.
All of the living men named by Giuffre have denied her claim.
A former friend of Trump and President Bill Clinton, Epstein was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and owned luxurious residential properties on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Palm Beach and New Mexico, and he owned a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/23/jeffrey-epstein-judge-unseals-ghislaine-maxwell-documents-delays-release.html