Ghislaine Maxwell to appeal sex trafficking convictions
The disgraced socialite will claim victims had “faded, distorted and motivated memories”
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Ghislaine Maxwell is to launch an appeal against her sex trafficking convictions.
The disgraced socialite is expected to claim that the four victims who testified against her at trial had “faded, distorted and motivated memories”, according to the Associated Press.
Maxwell, 61, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of five counts of trafficking and abusing young girls over decades with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in late 2021.
Maxwell will file the appeal with the federal court in New York on Tuesday, the AP reported.
Maxwell’s lawyers will argue that she was prosecuted as a “proxy for Jeffrey Epstein” to satisfy public outrage after his death in custody while awaiting trial in 2019.
They will claim that prosecutors breached a non-prosecution agreement, charged her with “time-barred offenses”, and recast Epstein’s crimes to make her the culprit, the AP reported.
They further allege that prosecutors teamed up with victims who were suing Epstein and Maxwell “whose interests were financial, to develop new allegations.”
Maxwell’s attorneys will also argue that she was unable to mount a fair defence due to the strict terms of her incarceration and that she suffered a miscarriage of justice after one of the jurors, who later gave interviews under his first names Scotty David, failed to disclose he had been a victim sexual abuse.
All of the arguments that Maxwell relies upon in appealing her conviction have been heard and dismissed previously by the courts.
At her sentencing last June, Judge Alison Nathan rejected Maxwell’s complaints that she had been treated unduly harshly throughout her two years in jail awaiting trial.
Judge Nathan said Maxwell had “exaggerated” her claims of poor treatment in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center as a “dishonest” attempt to “deflect blame”.
In April 2021, Judge Nathan denied claims that a non-prosecution agreement that Epstein reached with federal prosecutors in 2007 was applicable.
And at a special hearing held three months after the trial ended, Judge Nathan ruled that Scotty David had been a attentive and non-biased throughout the trial.
Since being sentenced to 20 years in prison last June, Maxwell has continued to protest her innocence in jailhouse interviews.
The convicted sex offender refused to apologise to her victims and said they should blame US authorities for “allowing Epstein to die” in an interview broadcast on TalkTV in January.