MIAMI — Ghislaine Maxwell has so far unsuccessfully argued that her detention in a Brooklyn jail is harsh, harmful to her health and hinders her ability to adequately prepare for her trial scheduled for July. In her latest bid to be released on bail, the former girlfriend and alleged accomplice of deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein says that her confinement is also sexist.
Maxwell faces multiple charges related to the sex trafficking of minors and is accused of recruiting and grooming four girls allegedly abused by Epstein between 1994 and 2001. She is accused of participating in the abuse of one of the girls herself. She also faces two perjury charges.
If convicted, Maxwell, 59, potentially faces decades in prison, and federal prosecutors have previously argued that the combination of the potentially lengthy sentence and Maxwell’s access to great wealth make her a flight risk. She also holds citizenship to England and France, the latter of which doesn’t extradite citizens to the United States.
Maxwell has made three bids to be released, offering to put up a bail package worth $28.5 million in money and assets belonging to her and family and friends, to be confined to a residence in New York with one of her lawyers and to renounce her citizenship. So far, none of the offers have swayed U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who is presiding over the case.
In an appeal to the rejection of her third bid for release, Maxwell points to a long list of prominent men facing similarly harsh sentences who were released on bail, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bernie Madoff and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. One of the men cited, New York mafia boss John Gotti, was released on bail numerous times but was actually denied bail the last time he faced criminal charges in 1990. Gotti was subsequently convicted on multiple charges and died in federal prison 12 years later.
The filing, written by a new member of Maxwell’s legal team, Miami criminal defense attorney David Markus, doesn’t explicitly mention the term sexism and it doesn’t specifically say that her treatment constitutes a violation of the equal protection clause of the law.
“The truth is that wealthy men charged with similar or more serious offenses, many of whom have foreign ties, are routinely granted bail so that they can effectively prepare for trial,” the filing reads. “Ms. Maxwell is entitled to the same opportunity as male defendants to prepare her defense.”
Prominent Miami criminal defense attorney Jayne Weintraub, who has represented her fair share of high-profile clients, including Jose Canseco, Sean “P Diddy” Combs and George Zimmerman, agrees.
“I think she makes a good point,” Weintraub said. “This is a case that demands hours and hours every day of reading all the discovery and documents that are being thrown at her by the government in addition to trying to find evidence to defend herself.”
Weintraub doesn’t see the harm in Maxwell being released on bail and sees her continuing confinement as a violation of her constitutional right to an adequate defense. Weintraub knows Maxwell’s new attorney Markus well and appeared on his criminal defense podcast earlier this year.
Wendy Murphy, a former state prosecutor in Massachusetts who teaches a course on sexual violence and the law, disagrees.
“My argument would be that men who probably shouldn’t have been released on bail aren’t enough to convince a court that a woman should be released on bail,” she said.
She points out that the appeal doesn’t cite specific case law that would support overturning Maxwell’s detention based on a claim of sexism and argues that the best point of comparison is Epstein himself, who was held without bail when arrested in July 2019 on sex charges and found dead of suicide in his Manhattan jail cell one month later.
“Even if you could make the argument that it creates the appearance of unfair treatment, the fact is Epstein wasn’t released and she’s basically Epstein’s partner,” Murphy said.
Epstein’s arrest and subsequent death in 2019 came more than a decade after he received an extraordinarily lenient plea deal in Florida in connection with the sexual abuse of numerous girls. Epstein pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges — one for an underage girl — and ultimately served only 13 months in a county jail.
Epstein’s plea deal formed the basis of The Miami Herald’s 2018 Perversion of Justice series and the renewed attention to Epstein’s plea deal helped lead to new federal sex charges against Epstein in 2019.
Maxwell is Epstein’s one-time girlfriend turned employee and several of Epstein’s alleged victims say she played a crucial role in finding girls and young women to meet Epstein’s insatiable sexual appetite, scouring spas and schools for young women whom she groomed for Epstein to abuse under the guise of providing him massages.
She was arrested in July 2020, nearly a year after Epstein’s arrest, on a 156-acre New Hampshire estate that had been purchased in late 2019 through a shell company and which Maxwell had toured using a pseudonym. Federal prosecutors have said that Maxwell initially resisted arrest and that she had taken various measures, including wrapping a cellphone in tin foil, to avoid detection.
Maxwell was denied bail and has been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since being transported from New Hampshire.
In her appeal, Maxwell’s attorney says she is confined in “conditions fitting for Hannibal Lecter,’ the fictional serial killer portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the film “Silence of the Lambs.”
Maxwell is woken up multiple times throughout the night, according to the filing, and effectively kept in solitary confinement. Maxwell was placed in quarantine late last year after being exposed to COVID-19 in the facility. Maxwell ultimately tested negative and it isn’t clear whether she is among the nearly 15% of inmates in the facility who have been vaccinated so far.
The filing says that Maxwell hasn’t been able to properly prepare for her defense because COVID-19 risks have led to fewer visits with her lawyers and the computer she has access to at the facility doesn’t allow her to search through the 2.5 million pages of potential evidence turned over by prosecutors. Officials from the facility have previously noted that Maxwell gets greater computer access than anyone else in the facility.
What’s more, Maxwell’s drinking water is cloudy and her food was being microwaved poorly, causing plastic to melt into it, the filing says, though the improper heating issue has apparently been resolved.
The filing argues, echoing the team’s earlier filings, that Maxwell is being punished for Epstein’s crimes and that her treatment in the jail is a direct response to Epstein’s death while in custody.
“The government only made these allegations after Epstein’s inexplicable death at (the Metropolitan Correctional Center),” the filing reads. “She was charged as a substitute for Epstein.”
The appeal has taken on a greater urgency after federal prosecutors filed a new indictment earlier this week adding the fourth alleged victim, who is alleged to have been abused between 2001 and 2004. While Maxwell is slated to go to trial in July, the new indictment raises the possibility that her trial date could be pushed back, and her legal team has given no indication that Maxwell is considering a plea deal with prosecutors.
Another of Maxwell’s attorneys, Bobbi Sternheim, filed a letter earlier this week in response to the new indictment arguing that bringing new charges against Maxwell just over three months before her trial “is shocking, unfair, and an abuse of power.”
Sternheim wrote in the letter that the new charges put Maxwell in the difficult position of choosing whether to request that the trial be pushed back, which would lengthen the time of her confinement in the Brooklyn facility, or trying to prepare for the new charges on an accelerated timeline. Sternheim wrote that Maxwell should be released from her “BOP cage” and argued that the court should be able to find suitable bail conditions for Maxwell that would “clip her wings.”
