Ghislaine Maxwell appeals verdict and 20-year sex-trafficking sentence

Ghislaine Maxwell argued this week that the judge presiding over her 2021 trial prevented her from mounting a “meaningful defense” and that anonymity granted to several of the victims who testified against her turned the trial into “a form of Kabuki theater.”

The arguments she made for why her verdict and sentence should be overturned are not new, but they now will face a new audience of three appeals court judges.

A New York jury found Maxwell guilty on Dec. 29, 2021, on five of the six counts she faced, including sex trafficking of a minor.

At her trial, four women testified about the former socialite’s role in recruiting and grooming them as teenagers to be abused by Maxwell’s ex-boyfriend, financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“What she did was wrong and she picked vulnerable young girls and trafficked them,” said one of the victims at the trial, testifying under the pseudonym Carolyn, who said she was first abused by Epstein at the age of 14.

Maxwell grew up in a life of privilege as the daughter of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, and counted members of the royal family and world leaders among her friends. She and Epstein enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, hopscotching the globe in his private jets and staying in his luxury properties, which included mansions in Palm Beach and New York and a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Those luxurious homes were also the site of Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of girls, which Maxwell facilitated and on at least occasion participated in. Numerous victims have also accused Maxwell and Epstein of trafficking them to their high-powered friends.

Maxwell was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years in prison and now calls a federal prison in Tallahassee home.

Maxwell’s appeal made the following arguments:

▪ That the crimes she was prosecuted for had exceeded the statute of limitations

▪ That she should have had a new trial because one of the jurors subsequently told reporters after the case that he had inadvertently failed to disclose his prior sexual abuse during juror screening

▪ That Judge Alison J. Nathan denied their request to provide clarification about one of the charges in response to a question from the jury during deliberations, which could have led the jury to misunderstand the charge and convict her erroneously

▪ That the sentencing guidelines used to determine Maxwell’s sentence were incorrect.

Maxwell was denied bail four times and complained bitterly about her conditions in federal custody ahead of her trial, which her lawyers said Tuesday was one more factor against her in preparing for trial.

“By the time of trial, Maxwell was so disoriented and diminished that she was unable meaningfully to assist in her own defense, much less to testify,” her lawyers wrote.

Maxwell had previously tried to have the case thrown out by arguing that it had exceeded the statute of limitations and invoking the non-prosecution agreement, but both arguments were rejected by Nathan.

Nathan also declined to invalidate the verdict after Maxwell raised the issue of the juror’s post-trial admissions, finding that his mistake was “highly unfortunate, but not deliberate.“

Ahead of Maxwell’s sentencing, her lawyers had argued that Maxwell should be sentenced to no more than five years and three months based on the timing of the crimes and less-stringent sentencing requirements in place at that time.

Four women spoke at Maxwell’s June sentencing about the damage Maxwell and Epstein’s crimes had done to them and their hope that Maxwell would receive a long sentence.

“For over two and a half decades, I felt like I was in prison,” said Elizabeth Stein, who said she first met Maxwell in 1994 when Stein was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and was abused by Maxwell and Epstein for years afterward. “She had her life. It’s time to have mine.”

During her sentencing, Maxwell acknowledged the suffering that the four women had endured, but stopped short of apologizing for her role in it.

That contributed to Nathan’s decision to sentence Maxwell to 20 years, rather than the lighter sentence her attorneys had sought.

“What wasn’t expressed was acceptance of responsibility,” Nathan said. “A lack of expression of remorse for her own conduct.”

In Tallahassee, where Maxwell is serving time in a federal prison facility, she has reportedly become friends with Narcy Novack, a stripper turned socialite who received a life sentence in 2012 for hiring hit men to murder her husband, Fontainebleau hotel heir Ben Novack, and her mother-in-law, Bernice Novack. Maxwell — who once dined with royalty and world leaders — is also reportedly teaching etiquette and yoga classes.

Despite Maxwell’s previous life of luxury, she has reportedly had money troubles since her conviction. She was sued by her longtime law firm, Haddon, Morgan, Foreman, in August 2022 over non-payment. The suit was voluntarily dismissed in December.

Maxwell was arrested in July of 2020 in the tiny town of Bradford, New Hampshire, where she had been holed up in a 156-acre estate purchased months earlier through a shell company.

Her arrest came roughly one year after Epstein had himself been arrested on a fresh set of sex charges. He died in federal custody one month later in what has been ruled a suicide.

More than a decade earlier, Epstein had escaped harsh penalty after being investigated in Palm Beach for sexually abusing dozens of girls. He cut a deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida that allowed him to plead guilty to two state solicitation charges and served just over a year in the private wing of the Palm Beach County jail, where he was allowed to leave for several hours a day to work in a nearby office. Epstein’s deal was the subject of the Miami Herald’s 2018 Perversion of Justice series, which led federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to revisit Epstein’s crimes.

Following Maxwell’s guilty verdict, Maxwell’s friend Prince Andrew settled a suit with Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, reportedly for more than $10 million.

Giuffre, Andrew and Maxwell are pictured together in a notorious photograph that Maxwell said in a recent interview she believes is fake. Andrew is reportedly exploring options to have his settlement with Giuffre thrown out after she agreed to drop a defamation suit against famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who represented and was friends with Epstein. Giuffre, who said she was recruited by Maxwell at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club as a teenager and was subsequently abused by Epstein and trafficked to Epstein and Maxwell’s friends, admitted as part of her agreement with Dershowitz that she might have been mistaken in identifying him as one of her abusers.