Documents reveal final indignity: Epstein jilts Maxwell in court case

New documents unsealed Monday reveal for the first time Ghislaine Maxwell’s desperate effort to get her ex-boyfriend and confidante Jeffrey Epstein to testify on her behalf in the explosive 2015 defamation lawsuit that would ultimately lead to her criminal undoing.

Maxwell, a British socialite who had long been associated with the New York financier - first as his girlfriend, then as his madam - stood accused of helping him recruit countless underage girls and young women to satisfy his sexual appetite. She faced a perilous legal action filed by one of Epstein’s victims.

Virginia Giuffre claimed Maxwell recruited her when she was 16, forcing her into a relationship of sexual abuse and servitude by the couple. When Giuffre went public with the abuse, Maxwell called her a liar, prompting Giuffre to file a civil defamation lawsuit - which her lawyers used as a mechanism to expose Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking crimes.

Few people were willing to come to Maxwell’s defense. She had no witnesses on a trial list. To make matters worse, she faced an “adverse inference jury instruction” - meaning the judge would instruct the jury that she had failed to meet certain obligations during the discovery process leading up to the trial. Not only did Maxwell angrily refuse to answer questions, but she failed to turn over e-mails as instructed by the judge, court documents show.

Perhaps the only person who could help her - by denying she was involved in trafficking - was Epstein. But he refused, using his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination some 600 times during a September 2016 deposition, court records show.

Read more: Behind closed doors with Epstein and Maxwell: His obsessions, their threesomes, her exit

Maxwell’s attorney, Jeff Pagliuca, argued that the judge overseeing the defamation case should force Epstein to provide answers, contending that Epstein didn’t face any risk of self-incrimination because he was protected by a controversial non-prosecution agreement he reached with federal prosecutors as part of his sweetheart plea deal in 2008.

Epstein’s lawyer, Martin Weinberg, countered that the protections provided by that agreement were limited to events that occurred in Florida. Testifying in Maxwell’s trial could expose him to additional charges for crimes committed outside of Florida, he said.

“He pled guilty to two very narrow state offenses that dealt with two women,” Weinberg said. “That gives him no protection against a federal prosecution, no protection against any other allegation, no protection against the specific allegations that are front and center in the complaint in this case, where Ms. Giuffre says that Mr. Epstein with Ms. Maxwell committed a whole universe of criminal offenses against her in places, including Florida, but also in New Mexico, in New York, in the Virgin Islands in France and England and on planes.”

Former federal prosecutor David S. Weinstein told the Miami Herald he’s not surprised that Epstein’s lawyers would advise him not to testify and risk opening himself up to new charges.

“That’s what lawyers are paid to do,” he said. “It comes off as harsh, perhaps, but it all comes down to self preservation.”

Epstein’s concern about his potential legal jeopardy was justified because almost a decade after serving 13 months in a Florida jail after his initial plea deal, he was re-arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York. Months after that, in August 2019, he was found dead in his Manhattan jail, his death ruled suicide by hanging. Maxwell was left alone to answer for his crimes.

The Giuffre case came back to haunt Maxwell, as federal prosecutors used some of her testimony from the defamation case to indict her in 2020 on criminal charges, including perjury.

Read more: Miami Herald fights for transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein case — and wins | Opinion

Maxwell’s attorneys have argued that she too was protected by Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement – which shielded “any potential co-conspirators of Epstein” from prosecution. That argument is one of the chief components of her appeal of her 2021 conviction on five of six charges related to sex-trafficking and her subsequent 20-year prison sentence.

The fight over Epstein’s testimony in the defamation case wound up being moot, as Giuffre and Maxwell settled in May 2017, before the case went to trial. Maxwell reportedly paid Giuffre millions to settle the case.

New documents reveal allegations by another Epstein victim

Also on Monday, new documents reveal controversial allegations by another one of Epstein’s victims, many of which she later recanted.

Sarah Ransome told the New York Post in 2016 that she had video tapes of various men, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, having sex with girls and young women and that she wanted to expose Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

But she later recanted her statements, telling the Miami Herald in 2019 that she made up the stories because she was alarmed that the U.S. media had failed to investigate whether Trump and Bill and Hillary Clinton were connected to Epstein. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton were running for president at the time she made the false statements.

Ransome stood by her allegations that she had been sexually abused by Epstein and Maxwell. She gave a sworn deposition about being trafficked as part of the 2015 Giuffre civil lawsuit. The documents in that lawsuit have been released over the past week on a rolling basis in response to a legal action brought by the Miami Herald in 2018.

Ransome’s deposition in that case has thus far not been unsealed, but portions of it - including photographs - are included in other documents made public on Monday. (The court later rescinded the photographs, saying they should not have been made public).

Ransome sued Epstein and Maxwell in 2017. The lawsuit was settled a year later.

Clinton has previously said he had no knowledge and was not involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.

The FBI raided Epstein’s New York mansion in 2019 and photographed what appeared to be boxes of videotapes. It is not clear whether they were seized during the raid. Ransome and victim Maria Farmer have filed legal notice that they intend to sue the FBI for $600 million for failing to investigate the sex trafficker in the 1990s when the FBI was first alerted that Epstein may be abusing girls and young women.

Ransome, a native of South Africa, claimed that she was brought into Epstein’s web by a Russian woman she had met at a New York nightclub. At the time, she was 22 and looking for work while trying to get into New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Maxwell and Epstein sold themselves as benefactors who had contacts who would help her get into the school, and they also gave her an apartment to live in in New York. Ransome wrote her 2021 book, “Silenced No More: Surviving My Journey to Hell and Back,” about her experiences in the perverse world of Epstein, which she termed a “rape pyramid scheme.”

The Miami Herald’s original “Perversion of Justice” series:

• How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime

• Cops worked to put serial sex abuser in prison. Prosecutors worked to cut him a break

• Even from jail, sex abuser manipulated the system. His victims were kept in the dark

• Sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein was surrounded by powerful people. Here’s a sampling

• For years, Jeffrey Epstein abused teen girls, police say. A timeline of his case