(Adnkronos) – The Supreme Court rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal, confirming her 20-year sentence for luring and recruiting minors for Jeffrey Epstein’s network. The lawyers for the former partner and accomplice of the pedophile financier, who committed suicide in a New York cell in August 2019, sought the annulment of the conviction, appealing to the plea bargain Epstein made in 2006 with Florida prosecutors, now widely criticized as too lenient, which excluded the possibility of new indictments against him or his accomplices.
The Court did not issue a comment, but at the heart of the appeal was the question of whether the non-prosecution agreement is valid only in the federal district where it was negotiated or is binding on all federal prosecutors, given that Maxwell was tried and convicted in New York in 2022. The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to reject the appeal, stating that the Florida agreement had no value outside the district.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s case has returned to the spotlight in recent months, with the eruption of controversy regarding the Trump administration’s failure to publish the Epstein files, particularly the list of famous clients, despite repeated electoral promises.
In this context of criticism and pressure, from the Maga electoral base itself, and with media spotlights on the long years of close friendship between Trump and Epstein, last summer the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who is Trump’s former personal lawyer, met Maxwell for hours in prison. She was subsequently transferred to a minimum-security prison in Texas, with better detention conditions than those in the Florida prison where she was held.
According to the transcripts of those conversations, Maxwell, who can now only hope for a presidential pardon to get out of prison, stated that she had never seen Trump “in inappropriate situations” during the years she associated with Epstein, assuring that “every time I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, said he was “deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision.” “But the fight is not over,” he added, “serious legal and factual issues remain, and we will continue to pursue every possible avenue to ensure that justice is done.”
