Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is seeking to have her 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking overturned.
Maxwell’s lawyers filed a writ of habeas corpus in New York on Wednesday challenging her 2021 conviction, arguing that “substantial new evidence” has emerged since then.
The petition alleges that juror misconduct and collusion among victims, lawyers and the government violated her due-process rights.
She said the cumulative effect resulted in a “complete miscarriage of justice.”
A habeas corpus petition (or writ of habeas corpus) is a legal request for a court to review the legality of someone’s detention, requiring that the prisoner be brought before a judge to justify the imprisonment and serving as a fundamental safeguard against unlawful confinement and arbitrary detention by ensuring due process.
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Filed by or on behalf of someone in custody, it challenges constitutional violations, such as ineffective legal counsel or unfair trials. It seeks release or other relief, often as a last resort after appeals are exhausted.
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Ghislaine Maxwell’s grand jury records to be released in Epstein case, U.S. judge rules
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The filing came two days before records in her case were scheduled to be released publicly as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s signing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law, signed after months of public and political pressure, including from Epstein’s victims, requires the Justice Department to release Epstein-related records to the public by Dec. 19.
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Maxwell’s lawyer, David Markus, wrote on her behalf earlier this month that while Maxwell currently “does not take a position” on the unsealing of documents from her case, doing so “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial” if her habeas petition is successful.
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The records, Markus said, “contain untested and unproven allegations.”
Last week, federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer granted their release.
Compelled to act, the government said it would release documents organized into 18 categories, likely including search warrants, financial records, notes from interviews with victims, and data from electronic devices.
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Maxwell was arrested in 2020 — a year after Epstein was found dead in his cell while awaiting trial at a New York jail — and convicted on multiple sex trafficking charges, including conspiracy to entice minors, in December 2021.
The Justice Department’s second in command, Todd Blanche, interviewed Maxwell in July, where she said she never saw Trump acting inappropriately. Shortly after, she was transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a lesser security prison camp in Texas.
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Trump and Epstein were friends for a time in the 1990s and early 2000s. The president claims to have cut ties with the former financier after Epstein tried to poach one of his employees. Trump has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in the Epstein case and denies ever visiting Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, where former president Bill Clinton and former Harvard president Larry Summers both went, according to flight logs.
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In October, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Maxwell in which she argued that a non-prosecution agreement Epstein made with authorities in Florida should apply to her.
— With files from The Associated Press
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