Longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is now begging the president and the Supreme Court to unravel her prison sentence.
Maxwell filed a petition Monday asking the nation’s highest court to consider whether plea deals made by U.S. attorneys “on behalf” of the entirety of the United States are legally binding, arguing that her sentence violated a nonprosecution agreement that Jeffrey Epstein had made with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida in 2007.
“We are appealing not only to the Supreme Court but to the President himself to recognize how profoundly unjust it is to scapegoat Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s crimes, especially when the government promised she would not be prosecuted,” her attorney David Oscar Markus said in a statement.
Maxwell filed the appeal in April, but the sex trafficker made her final plea to the Supreme Court Monday, imploring it to take her case before it breaks for the summer recess. Lower courts have ruled that the deal was only applicable to the district it was made in and did not extend to the Southern District of New York, where Maxwell was tried.
“Rather than grapple with the core principles of plea agreements, the government tries to distract by reciting a lurid and irrelevant account of Jeffrey Epstein’s misconduct,” Markus wrote in the brief. “But this case is about what the government promised, not what Epstein did.”
The British socialite was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, including identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding in the victimization of hundreds of girls.
But the bold new request is opportunistically timed, arriving mere days after Maxwell met with the Justice Department and reportedly provided more than a hundred names allegedly related to Epstein’s criminal empire in a potential pardon quid pro quo.
Speaking with reporters at his Scottish golf club Monday, Trump not only refused to say that a pardon for the convicted sex offender was off the table but underscored that he is “allowed” to give one. Actually getting to the point of aligning the Trump administration with Maxwell, however, has been a tricky play of political theater.
In an attempt to soothe his appalled base after claiming the Epstein affair was a Democrat-invented “hoax,” the Trump administration has opted not to release the relevant case files, which would ostensibly include the names of Epstein’s associates. Instead, it seems officials would rather lean on Maxwell as a potential source of “new” information.
But whether Maxwell—a reputed liar and convicted criminal—can be trusted at all is in doubt, or whether her testimony would be tampered with prior to being made public. It’s still unclear why the 63-year-old would choose to unveil supposedly new information related to Epstein’s associates now, after spending several years behind bars, rather than when the evidence could have been used to minimize or even prevent her initial sentence.
The renewed conundrum of involving Maxwell also casts confusion over the Justice Department’s July 6 memo, in which the agency claimed there was “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed his clients and that there was no cause to bring investigations against “uncharged third parties.”
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