NEW YORK _ New details about Jeffrey Epstein's alleged abuse of underage girls are closer to being made public after a federal appeals court refused to reconsider an order to unseal 2,000 pages of documents related to the disgraced money manager.
The appeals court in Manhattan on Friday denied a request by British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was close to Epstein for years, to reconsider a ruling to make documents public from a defamation lawsuit against her.
The documents are part of a 2015 civil suit filed by Virginia Giuffre, a Floridian who claimed Epstein sexually abused her for two years starting in 2000, when she was 16, and that Maxwell participated. In her suit, Giuffre claimed that Maxwell, daughter of the late British publisher Robert Maxwell, defamed her by publicly calling her a liar.
The case attracted public attention last month when a federal appeals court ordered U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to unseal 2,000 pages of documents that may identify people described in court filings as "prominent individuals" connected to the case.
Epstein, a convicted sex offender who served 13 months in jail a decade ago after pleading guilty to soliciting a minor, was arrested in early July and charged with sexually assaulting teenage girls from 2002 to 2005. He has pleaded not guilty.
Maxwell has long denied she was involved with Epstein's alleged sexual abuse of underage girls. Last month, her lawyers told the appeals court that the media's "furious feeding frenzy" justified keeping the documents sealed and she asked for a rehearing by a full panel of the appeals court.
Giuffre also sued Epstein's lawyer, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, accusing him of defaming her by calling her a liar and denying her claims that he also sexually abused her. Dershowitz denies that he defamed her and says he was defending himself against her allegations.
