Is Ghislaine Maxwell’s Last Chance at Freedom a Presidential Pardon?

“The United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.”

Of the many long tails of the Jeffrey Epstein saga, that phrase, embedded in his 2007 plea deal with federal prosecutors, carried the most immediate legal weight for Ghislaine Maxwell, the late financier’s ex-girlfriend and accomplice. Over a summer of backlash to Donald Trump’s administration’s handling of the Epstein files, the British socialite, convicted in 2021 of facilitating Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors, returned to the fore as a theoretical Rosetta stone for the mysteries that continue to haunt the ever relevant case. More quietly, Maxwell was pursuing an effort to overturn her conviction on the basis that the sweetheart deal, and its crucial stipulation, should have extended to her. While Epstein’s deal was reached in Florida and Maxwell was prosecuted in New York, her attorneys argued that a federal deal is a federal deal in any state of the union.

“The United States cannot promise immunity with one hand in Florida and prosecute with the other in New York,” Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus said. “President Trump built his legacy in part on the power of a deal—and surely he would agree that when the United States gives its word, it must stand by it.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Maxwell’s appeal.

“We’re, of course, deeply disappointed that the Supreme Court declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s case,” Markus said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “But this fight isn’t over. Serious legal and factual issues remain, and we will continue to pursue every avenue available to ensure that justice is done.” Maxwell’s family echoed Markus’s comments in a statement and added, “Although disappointing, we respect the Supreme Court’s denial of review of our sister Ghislaine’s case.”

When Markus, who hosts a podcast and has been a willing interlocutor with the press, filed in support of Maxwell’s appeal in July, furor over Trump’s relationship with Epstein was cresting. Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and is suing The Wall Street Journal over its report that his name was on one of the contributions—a drawing of a nude woman bearing a reference to shared secrets—to a book of well-wishes Maxwell put together for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

Maxwell’s effort was not without some support in the legal community. Writing for The New Yorker in August, Harvard Law scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen noted that the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had filed a brief supporting Maxwell, in which it argued that letting the United States get out of a nonprosecution agreement “would work a detriment on the entire plea system,” which resolves the vast majority of criminal cases, because “defendants must be able to rely on the written promises made by the government and trust that courts will honor and enforce those promises down the road.” Gersen also wrote that, for reasons both technical and political, the Supreme Court might await a more suitable case with which to resolve the questions that Maxwell’s appeal raised.

“That’s what likely happened here,” she told me on Monday. “A decision to wait for a better vehicle than the Maxwell case.”

The Monday ruling immediately raises the prospect that Maxwell’s last foreseeable chance at freedom—at 63, she is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence—lies in her long, much-scrutinized relationship with the president. Before Maxwell and Trump traveled in overlapping New York and Palm Beach social circles in the ’90s, her father, the media mogul Robert Maxwell, hosted Trump on his yacht, then called the Lady Ghislaine, after attempting to buy the New York Post.

“I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said after Ghislaine Maxwell was indicted in 2020.

Toying more freely with his pardon powers in an untethered second term, he told reporters outside the White House in July, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”

Days after Justice Department lawyers asked the Supreme Court to reject Markus’s petition in July, the agency held an unusual interview with Maxwell. She and Markus met with Todd Blanche, the department’s number two official and Trump’s lead lawyer in his New York hush money trial last year, in a Florida courthouse for two days. About a week later, she was moved to a lower-security Texas prison. When the interview tapes were released in August, they revealed the most extensive record to date of Maxwell’s speaking voice; her insistence, immediately broadcast across MAGA-friendly social media accounts, that she had never seen Trump do anything wrong; and perhaps not much else.

“I wish I could respond to those critics,” Markus told me in August when I raised to him the prevailing concerns about a quid pro quo. “But we’re just not going to comment on that.”

For the large and vocal community of Maxwell-watchers across social media, the intrigue surrounding a potential pardon continues to percolate. Lady Victoria Hervey, a former girlfriend of Prince Andrew and Mar-a-Lago regular who knew Maxwell from the ’90s London party scene, told me in July that “the only way to really deal with this situation” is to allow Maxwell to “have her voice.” I asked her on Monday if she still thought, as she had mentioned a few times, that a pardon was in the works.

“I think it’s highly possible,” Hervey said.