Emails between Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein surface as documents unsealed from lawsuit
Documents about dealings between US sex offender Jeffrey
Epstein and his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell were publicly released on
Thursday by a US court, where the British socialite faces criminal charges she
aided the late financier’s sexual abuse of girls.
Among the materials released were email correspondence
between the pair in early 2015, including an email in which Epstein told
Maxwell she had “done nothing wrong”.
US District Judge Loretta Preska had ordered the documents’
release by Thursday, saying the public’s right to see them outweighed Maxwell’s
interests in keeping them under seal.
However, two depositions remain under seal after Maxwell
filed an emergency motion with the federal appeal court in Manhattan earlier on
Thursday to keep them from becoming public.
That court has yet to rule, and the depositions will remain
sealed until at least Monday.
Lawyers for Maxwell have said that in one of those
depositions, filed in April 2016, Maxwell was asked “intrusive” questions
concerning her sex life, and that its release could make it “difficult if not
impossible” to get a fair trial.
Lawyers for Maxwell did not immediately respond to requests
for comment after the documents were unsealed.
The cache of documents released on Thursday and the
depositions that remain under wraps were part of a now-settled 2015 civil
defamation lawsuit against Maxwell by Virginia Giuffre, who said she was
underage when Epstein kept her as a “sex slave” with Maxwell’s assistance.
A lawyer for Giuffre did not immediately respond to a
similar request.
Maxwell, 58, has pleaded not guilty to helping Epstein
recruit and eventually abuse three girls from 1994 to 1997, and committing
perjury by denying her involvement under oath.
She was arrested on July 2 at a home in New Hampshire where
prosecutors said she had been hiding out.
Maxwell has been held in a Brooklyn jail after a judge
denied bail, calling her a flight risk. Her criminal trial is scheduled for
next July.
Epstein was found hanged at age 66 last August in a
Manhattan jail, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges for abusing
women and girls in Manhattan and Florida from 2002 to 2005. He had also pleaded
not guilty.
Pending appeals by Maxwell, Preska had ordered the release
of more than 80 documents in all, including flight logs from Epstein’s private
jets; and police reports from Palm Beach, Florida, where Epstein had a home.
Among the materials released on Thursday were January 2015
emails between Epstein and Maxwell, who were identified respectively as
“jeffrey E” and either “Gmax” or “G Maxwell”.
“You have done nothing wrong and i woudl urge you to start
acting like it,” Epstein wrote on January 25, 2015. “go outside, head high, not
as an esacping convict. go to parties. deal with it.”
Epstein sent the email a day after Maxwell said she would
appreciate it if another woman, identified by a single name only, “would come
out and say she was your g’friend – I think she was from end 99 to 2002.”
Maxwell’s lawyers have sought to distance their client from
Epstein in their unsuccessful effort to win bail.
In a July 10 bail request, the lawyers said the media had
shifted their focus to Maxwell following Epstein’s death, “wrongly trying to
substitute her for Epstein-even though she’d had no contact with Epstein for
more than a decade,” had never been charged with a crime or been found liable
in civil litigation, and had always denied allegations of misconduct.
Other unsealed materials included emails from Giuffre to the
FBI in 2014, including when she expressed interest to the FBI in pursuing a
case against Epstein and proving “how much paedophilia occurred by Jeffrey and
the many other monsters he obliged w underage girls”.
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