Why Did New York Prosecutors Decline to Pursue Jeffrey Epstein in 2016?
A lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell pressed a federal appeals court on Tuesday to overturn a ruling that the longtime associate of late financier Jeffrey Epstein says jeopardizes her ability to defend against criminal charges she enabled his sexual abuse of girls.
Maxwell’s lawyer Adam Mueller told the 2nd U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals in Manhattan that releasing Maxwell’s sworn April 2016
deposition, which was taken in a separate civil case, threatened to undermine
her trial scheduled for next July.
The British socialite has said bad publicity from disclosing
“intimate, sensitive, and personal” details from the deposition would violate
her right against self-incrimination, and imperil a fair trial because
prospective jurors may hold it against her.
“We’re concerned about preserving the status quo,” Mueller
told a three-judge panel in a nearly 2-1/2-hour hearing. “There’s going to be a
public criminal trial, and this will all be aired in open court ... We think
that vindicates the public interest.”
Maxwell, 58, has pleaded not guilty to charges she helped
Epstein recruit and groom underage girls as young as 14 years old to engage in
illegal sexual acts in the mid-1990s, and not guilty to perjury for having
denied involvement under oath.
Her 418-page deposition came from a long-settled defamation
lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre, who has said Epstein kept her as a “sex slave”
with Maxwell’s help.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered the deposition
unsealed in July, saying Maxwell did not overcome the presumption the public
had a right to see it.
Mueller, however, said the deposition was filled with
suggestive questions akin to “when did you stop beating your wife,” and that
Maxwell’s denials to certain questions could be as “revealing” as her
admissions.
“It certainly implies that the other side has an evidentiary
basis to ask the question,” he said.
David Boies, a lawyer for Giuffre, countered that there was
a “substantial presumption” of public access, but drew skepticism from the
panel about why his client deserved it.
“What does she care about it?” Circuit Judge Rosemary Pooler
asked. “Sure she wants the whole thing out, but what’s the legally cognizable
interest?”
Boies responded it was important that materials be unsealed
in an “even-handed way,” to ensure that no context is lost.
Christine Walz, a lawyer for the Miami Herald newspaper,
which also wants the deposition unsealed, told the appeals court that Maxwell’s
“mere speculation” about how an unsealing would affect her criminal trial was
no justification to block it.
Maxwell was arrested on July 2 in New Hampshire, where
prosecutors said she had been hiding out.
She has been locked up in a Brooklyn jail after U.S.
District Judge Alison Nathan, who oversees the criminal case, called her an
unacceptable flight risk.
Epstein, a registered sex offender, killed himself at age 66
in August 2019 at a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking
charges.
The appeals court also considered a second Maxwell appeal,
from Nathan’s refusal to let her share materials produced by the government in
the criminal case with Preska in the civil case.
Maxwell’s lawyers hope to use those materials to convince
Preska not to unseal the April 2016 deposition, saying the judge deserved to
know how prosecutors obtained them and from whom.
Prosecutors countered that Maxwell’s appeal was a “thinly
veiled attempt” to have the appeals court declare they gathered evidence
illegally.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said ruling for
Maxwell would “blur the lines” between the criminal and civil cases, and the
court lacked jurisdiction to hear the appeal.
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