Court declines

Supreme Court declines to take up Ghislaine Maxwell appeal

The move leaves a potential pardon from Trump as the only obvious path for Maxwell to avoid serving a 20-year prison sentence.

By Josh Gerstein and Erica Orden

The Supreme Court has turned aside Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal of her sex trafficking convictions for hiring underage girls to engage in sex with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The high court’s action, issued Monday without comment or noted dissent from the justices, leaves a potential pardon from President Donald Trump as the only obvious path for Maxwell to avoid serving the 20-year prison sentence a judge imposed on her in 2022 following her conviction at a jury trial in New York.

Maxwell’s attorney has said she will seek clemency from Trump, who has expressed frustration with nagging questions about his relationship with Epstein and with a continuing furor over top Trump appointees’ reversal of prior vows to disclose detailed records of the federal government’s investigations into Epstein.

In an effort to quell that uproar, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche, in July interviewed Maxwell over the course of two days. In the interview, Maxwell not only denied procuring girls for Epstein, but proclaimed she “never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age,” a statement that contradicted both what Justice Department officials have concluded and voluminous evidence presented at her criminal trial and in numerous civil cases.

Maxwell also sought specifically to exonerate Trump, saying she never witnessed the president “in any inappropriate setting.”

One week after the interview, Maxwell was transferred to a less restrictive, minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a move inconsistent with typical Bureau of Prisons policy for a convicted sex offender.

“We’re, of course, deeply disappointed that the Supreme Court declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s case,” her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, said Monday. “But this fight isn’t over. Serious legal and factual issues remain, and we will continue to pursue every avenue available to ensure that justice is done.”

Maxwell’s lawyers argued to the high court that her indictment in 2020 violated a non-prosecution agreement Epstein signed with federal prosecutors in 2007 in exchange for his guilty plea to state charges. The agreement contained an unusual provision in which federal prosecutors promised not to charge Epstein’s “potential co-conspirators.”

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

However, prosecutors argued that Maxwell had no right to enforce the agreement and that it bound only the U.S. Attorney’s office in Florida that negotiated it, not the prosecution team in Manhattan that brought the case against Maxwell in 2020.