A federal appeals court on Monday slapped down Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempts to quash a deposition she gave in a now-settle civil suit and denied her request to combine her appeals of several overlapping cases into one.
According to the Miami Herald, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a ruling by US District Court Judge Loretta Preska earlier this year ordering the release of the 418-page deposition, along with hundreds of other documents in a 2015 lawsuit against Maxwell filed by Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre. The lawsuit was settled in 2017.
The Herald sued for the release of the documents on behalf of investigative reporter Julie K. Brown. Brown’s November 2018 series “Perversion of Justice” detailed how former US Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, then a US Attorney in south Florida, brokered a sweetheart deal that allowed Epstein to escape any serious consequences of a conviction for procuring a young girl for prostitution, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell of an apparent suicide last August while he was awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was arrested at her New Hampshire hideaway this summer and is currently in jail in Brooklyn awaiting trial on sex trafficking and perjury charges.
Giuffre has said Maxwell recruited her for Epstein while she was working at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in 2000. She says that she was abused by Epstein and that Maxwell participated in the abuse, allegedly forcing Giuffre to have sex with Prince Andrew and others when she was a teen. She sued Maxwell for defamation after the 58-year-old British socialite accused Giuffre of fabricating the allegations. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum.
Monday’s ruling said that Preska’s decision to release the documents was correct, the Herald said, saying that “the District Court correctly held that the deposition materials are judicial documents to which the presumption of public access attaches, and did not abuse its discretion in rejecting Maxwell’s meritless arguments that her interests superseded the presumption of access.”
The panel also found Maxwell’s arguments to combine her appeals “to be without merit.”
It’s not clear when Preska might release the deposition. She has already released hundreds of documents and is known to be considering requests from two “John Does” that she redact their names from any release because of the potential to harm their reputations.
Read more on the Ghislaine Maxwell and the court fight here on CrimeOnline.
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