Justice Department lawyers urged the US Supreme Court not to toss the criminal conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman serving a 20-year prison sentence for trafficking girls to Jeffrey Epstein for sex.
In a brief filed Monday, Justice Department lawyers asked the court to reject arguments from Maxwell’s lawyers that she should have been shielded from prosecution in New York because of a deal struck years earlier between Epstein and a federal prosecutor in Florida.
“It would be extremely strange if the NPA left Epstein himself open to federal prosecution in another district — as eventually occurred,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in the brief, referring to Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, “while protecting his coconspirators from prosecution anywhere.”
A jury in Manhattan federal court found Maxwell guilty in 2021 of trafficking girls to Epstein for sex and for sexually abusing some of them herself.
The prosecution of Maxwell and Epstein, who killed himself in jail before trial, has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have previously promised to make the “Epstein files” public, fulfilling one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises.
But in a memo made public last week, the Justice Department and FBI changed tack and said “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” Trump has personally tried to convince his supporters to drop their interest in the case, urging them in a Truth Social post Sunday to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein.”
Elon Musk, in his political split with Trump, has highlighted the Epstein controversy, suggesting on social media that the president is trying to hide details of his own association with Epstein.
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Maxwell’s trial, which took place in November and December of 2021, featured harrowing testimony from four women who all described how Maxwell groomed them as teenagers to feel comfortable around Epstein, who repeatedly raped them.
Maxwell is serving her sentence at a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee.
Maxwell’s appeals have focused on the controversial non-prosecution agreement Epstein signed in 2007 with Alexander Acosta, who at the time served as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. The agreement, approved in court in 2008, allowed Epstein to serve a light sentence on a single prostitution solicitation charge even though law enforcement investigators believed he had abused dozens of girls.
The agreement says that the United States “will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.”
The judge who oversaw Maxwell’s trial previously ruled that the terms were impossibly broad and could not be applied to Maxwell’s case. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling in September that the non-prosecution may have bound federal prosecutors in Florida, but not in the Southern District of New York, which brought the charges.
David Oscar Markus, a prominent Florida-based criminal defense lawyer representing Maxwell in her Supreme Court appeal, said in an April brief that the language should have protected her from prosecution. He said that different courts across the country have come to different conclusions about the scope of non-prosecution agreements and that the Supreme Court should review the issue.
“Despite the fact that the term ‘United States’ has a widely accepted meaning in perhaps every other context, when this term is used in a plea agreement, it means something different in New Jersey than it does across the river in New York City,” Markus wrote.
Monday’s brief argues that the Justice Department rules did not allow a single US Attorney from one district to bind all other districts without their permission. It also says Maxwell doesn’t have the standing to enforce a deal made between Epstein and the Justice Department, anyway.
The Supreme Court has twice extended the deadline for the Justice Department to respond to Maxwell’s appeal at the request of Solicitor General John Sauer, who previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Andrew Rohrbach, who was on the trial prosecution team and successfully handled the Second Circuit Court of Appeals argument to keep Maxwell behind bars, resigned from the Justice Department earlier this year after he refused to drop an indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams at the instruction of a Trump-appointed official.
Maurene Comey, another prosecutor who worked on the case, has been busy for several months with the criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, which resulted in a jury verdict earlier this month.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has filed a Supreme Court brief in support of Maxwell, arguing in May that her prosecution was unfair.
“The intentionally broad scope of this NPA may be surprising in retrospect but that does not change the words on the page,” lawyers for the group wrote.
