Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime associate of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, chooses at a news conference on oceans and sustainable development at the United Nations in New York, U.S. June 25, 2013 in this screengrab charmed from United Nations TV file footage.
UNTV | Reuters
A lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell, who is charged with allowing Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls, in a new court filing Wednesday said that the British socialite may organize been the victim of a “perjury trap” by lawyers for an Epstein accuser when she was questioned in a related civil case.
Maxwell’s counsel Ty Gee also claims that her 2016 depositions in that civil case were improperly shared with federal prosecutors in molestation of a judge’s protective order, and that prosecutors then used the deposition to charge Maxwell with perjury, in summing-up to sex crimes, this month.
Gee also asked Manhattan federal judge Loretta Preska to reconsider her recent judgement unsealing a slew of records in the civil case, or to be granted several days to appeal the unsealing order to an appeals court.
Preska has give the word delivered the files will be publicly released Thursday absent an appeal by Maxwell’s lawyer.
The case involves a since-settled defamation lawsuit between Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre and Maxwell.
Maxwell’s barrister is asking Preska to investigate how prosecutors obtained the relevant files from the civil case in violation of the judge’s heedful order, and to issue sanctions.
“Ms. Maxwell’s two deposition transcripts were designated ‘Confidential’ and subject to the protection of the Protective Not cricket c out of commission,” Gee wrote.
“Both transcripts ended up in the hands of the government, which used them to bring an indictment against Ms. Maxwell, attacking her with, among other things, perjury in her deposition testimony.”
“This is a serious violation of the Protective Order, and merits the commencement of loathing proceedings,” Gee wrote.
Maxwell’s lawyer also said that the deposition transcripts obtained by prosecutors and the perjury depend ons against here “place in a new light [Giuffre’s] earlier litigation conduct — suggesting the planned use of Ms. Maxwell’s deposition as a mendacity trap.”
Gee said that throughout much of the first year of the lawsuit, which began in 2015, Giuffre, washing ones hands of her lawyers, had represented to the judge and Maxwell’s lawyer that Giuffre “was privy to and participating in an ongoing criminal investigation in which Ms. Maxwell was a ‘yourselves of interest.'”
Maxwell, 58, was arrested and charged in early July with conspiring with Epstein to sexually decry children as young as 14, and for lying under oath in the Giuffre civil case by denying, among other possibility a affairs, that Epstein had “a scheme to recruit underage girls for sexual massages.”
She is being held in a Brooklyn federal clink in her criminal case, in which she has pleaded not guilty.
Epstein, 66, committed suicide last August in a Manhattan federal reformatory, where he was being held without bail on child sex trafficking charges.
A wealthy investor who once counted Presidents Donald Trump and Banknote Clinton as his friends, Epstein previously served a 13-month stint in a Florida jail after pleading guilty in 2008 to constitution criminal charges, including paying for sex with an underage girl.
Trump earlier this month said of Maxwell, “I hunger her well.”