US court upholds British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction
NEW YORK — A US court ruled in favor of the discredited British socialite on Tuesday The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell on charges of human trafficking for helping the late businessman Jeffrey Epstein abuse underage girls.
Maxwell’s lawyers had argued that her convictions violated a agreement reached by Epstein with federal prosecutors 15 years ago in which he agreed to plead guilty to sex crimes and his accomplices were granted immunity. The attorneys also said some of the charges were filed after the statute of limitations had expired, and alleged judicial errors during her trial and sentencing.
But a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York rejected all of those arguments.
“Since no errors were found in the court’s handling of this complex case, we affirm the trial court’s judgment of conviction,” Judge Jose Cabranes wrote in the ruling.
Maxwell, 62, was found guilty in December 2021 of luring young girls to Epstein so he could abuse them between 1994 and 2004. In June 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Epstein sexually abused children hundreds of times over more than a decade, exploiting vulnerable girls as young as 14. Prosecutors say Maxwell, his faithful companion, aided and abetted the abuse.
He committed suicide in 2019, while awaiting trial.
The case has attracted a lot of attention because of Epstein and Maxwell’s ties to royals, presidents and billionaires. Maxwell herself is the daughter of the late British media magnate Robert Maxwell, who once owned the New York Daily News.
While their celebrity connections didn’t play a major role in Maxwell’s trial, mentions of friends like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump showed how the pair abused their connections to impress their prey.
The trial revolved around allegations of just a handful of Epstein’s accusersFour testified they were abused at Epstein’s mansions in Florida, New York, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In 2007, Epstein reached a deal with federal prosecutors in Florida in which he agreed to plead guilty to two sex crimes and serve 18 months in prison. As part of the arrangement, known as an NPA, prosecutors agreed not to prosecute any of Epstein’s accomplices.
The appeals court ruled that the agreement applied only to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida and not to prosecutors in New York.
“There is nothing in the NPA that affirmatively demonstrates that the NPA was intended to bind multiple districts,” Carbanes wrote. “Instead, where the NPA is not silent, the scope of the agreement is expressly limited to the Southern District of Florida.”
The court also rejected suggestions that some charges were filed too late, saying Congress had passed legislation in 2003 that said there would be no statute of limitations for crimes involving the sexual or physical abuse of minors “during the child’s lifetime.”
“The text of the law makes clear that Congress intended to extend the time to bring sexual assault charges for conduct prior to the law change because the previous statute of limitations was insufficient,” Carbanes wrote.
Maxwell is serve her sentence in a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.