In a court filing, Ghislaine Maxwell, the "fixer" for convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, said 29 friends of the disgraced New York financier were shielded through "secret settlements" by the Justice Department.
Maxwell claimed in a habeas corpus petition filed Dec. 17 seeking to overturn her conviction that prosecutors cut side deals with acquaintances of Epstein, who killed himself in a federal prison in 2019, while prosecuting her, claiming no such agreements existed, the Daily Mail reported.
The petition claimed 25 men reached undisclosed deals while four other co-conspirators were known to investigators but never charged, the Daily Mail reported.
Maxwell claimed the alleged concealment of these deals undermined the fairness of her trial and violated her constitutional rights.
"None of these men have been prosecuted and none has been revealed to Petitioner; she would have called them as witnesses had she known," the filing said.
She said the cumulative effect of the constitutional violations resulted in a "complete miscarriage of justice."
"Since the conclusion of her trial, substantial new evidence has emerged from related civil actions, Government disclosures, investigative reports, and documents demonstrating constitutional violations that undermined the fairness of her proceeding," the filing in Manhattan federal court said. "In the light of the full evidentiary record, no reasonable juror would have convicted her."
The filing came two days before records in her case were scheduled to be released publicly after President Donald Trump's signing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. A month later, he was found dead in his cell at a New York federal jail. His death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell, a British socialite, was arrested a year later and was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021.
She was interviewed by the Justice Department's second-in-command Todd Blanche in July and was soon afterward moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas.
After the Justice Department asked a New York federal judge to permit grand jury and discovery materials gathered prior to her trial to be released publicly, attorney David Markus wrote on her behalf that while Maxwell now "does not take a position" on unsealing 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 succeeds.
The records, Markus said, "contain untested and unproven allegations."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Sam Barron ✉
Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.
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