NEW YORK — Ghislaine Maxwell will not take the stand to testify in her defense and her legal team will rest its case Friday, one day after her defense began.
“Your honor, the government has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt so there’s no reason to testify,” Maxwell said, addressing U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who is presiding over the case.
Earlier, her legal team appeared to be struggling to mount her defense and was admonished by Nathan for delay, one day after the judge had rejected several of her lawyers' requests related to witnesses they intended to call.
Maxwell’s lawyers did call Eva Dubin, the physician wife of hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin and Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, as a witness. Maxwell faces six counts related to the sex trafficking of minors and is accused of recruiting and grooming several girls for Epstein’s abuse between 1994 and 2004. And they called a former employee of Epstein’s, Michelle Healy.
But the defense indicated it was having problems with other witnesses it intended to call.
The 81-year-old owner of the Nags Head pub in London, which is across the street from Maxwell’s former home, could not get to New York before Monday. Kelly Bovino who worked for Epstein and would be expected to plead the Fifth to avoid self incrimination, had so far ignored a federal subpoena. Maxwell’s team dropped a threat to try to have Bovino arrested for ignoring the subpoena. They couldn’t call another witness because he had tested positive for COVID-19.
In the morning session, Nathan took Maxwell’s lawyers to task for potential delays in bringing their defense.
“You have your next witness or else you rest,” Nathan said. “I’m not delaying the trial.”
Maxwell’s attorney Laura Menninger pleaded with Nathan for more time.
“Our client’s life is on the line,” Menninger said.
Maxwell’s trial, which began Nov. 29, was originally scheduled to take as much as six weeks, but the prosecution rested its case early, last Friday, Dec. 10. The trial was then put on hold for the first three days of this week due to a scheduling conflict. Nathan argued that even though the prosecution rested its case early, the defense had plenty of warning about the change in schedule.
The defense’s decision to rest Friday suggests that the jury could reach a verdict in the case before Christmas, which is also Maxwell’s 60th birthday.
On Thursday, Nathan rejected what she called an “unprecedented” request by Maxwell’s team to allow three of the witnesses the lawyers intended to call to testify using a pseudonym or only by their first name. She also rejected their request to call lawyers who had represented two of her accusers, but allowed them to call a lawyer who had represented another of her accusers, on a limited basis. The defense had sought to call them to argue that the lawyers had convinced their clients to testify against Maxwell to improve their payouts from a fund established to compensate Epstein’s victims as well as various civil suits.
Dubin was asked about a claim by the first victim who testified in the trial, under the pseudonym Jane, that she had participated in group sex with a woman named Eva.
Dubin said “absolutely not,” when asked if she had participated.
She also said she had no discomfort with Epstein spending time with her children.
She was also asked about her recollections of several flights she had taken on Epstein’s plane, but she said she couldn’t recall much about them.
On cross-examination from prosecutors, Dubin, 60, indicated that she suffers from memory problems.
“I can’t remember the past or even sometimes what happened a month ago,” she said.
Dubin is a former Swedish model who dated Epstein for more than a decade before marrying Glenn Dubin in 1994. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, has indicated that she was directed to have sex with Glenn Dubin and a former employee of the Dubins testified in a 2015 civil suit brought by Giuffre against Maxwell that he had encountered a 15-year-old nanny for the Dubins who was in tears and told him that she had been taken to Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands and forced to have sex with Epstein and friends of his. The employee, Rinaldo Rizzo, said that the nanny told him she had been physically threatened by Epstein and Maxwell, who had seized her passport to keep her on the island.
Dubin was asked little about Maxwell and wasn’t asked about Rizzo’s allegations.
Also during the early portion of Friday’s proceedings, the defense revealed that the FBI had seized millions of documents, files and other data from a raid of Epstein’s home in July 2019, the same month he was arrested on sex charges and taken into custody. Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell in August 2019 in what has been ruled suicide.
Epstein’s arrest came more than a decade after Epstein had agreed to a remarkably lenient plea deal related to his abuse of numerous girls in Palm Beach County, one that was the subject of the Miami Herald’s 2018 "Perversion of Justice" series. Maxwell was arrested on a 156-acre estate in New Hampshire roughly one year after Epstein’s arrest and has been held in federal custody since then.
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