Ghislaine Maxwell on Sept. 20, 2013 in New York City.
Laura Cavanaugh | Getty Images
Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of crimes related to procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, filed a petition on Wednesday seeking to vacate her conviction, claiming “substantial new evidence has emerged” that undermines the case against her.
Maxwell’s long-shot habeas petition in U.S. District Court in Manhattan could, if approved, see the former British socialite released from the federal prison in Texas where she is serving a 20-year sentence.
However, such petitions are routinely denied.
The Supreme Court earlier this year declined to hear Maxwell’s appeal of her conviction.
Habeas petitions are, as a rule, the last option for an imprisoned person to void their convictions. Maxwell filed her petition “pro se,” or on her own, without a lawyer representing her in that effort.
The petition comes two days before a congressionally mandated deadline for the Department of Justice to release its investigative files about Epstein and Maxwell.
Maxwell says in her court filing that the new evidence she bases her application on “emerged from related civil actions, Government disclosures, investigative reports, and documents demonstrating constitutional violations that undermined the fairness of her proceedings.”
The filing says her conviction must be vacated because a juror at her trial in 2021 “gave false answers during voir dire” — the jury selection process — “concealing a history of sexual abuse directly relevant to “issues at trial.”
“Subsequent interviews, new evidence and sworn statements confirm intentional concealment and actual bias” by that juror, the filing says.
In her second stated point, Maxwell said prosecutors concealed a police detective’s grand-jury testimony, “which conflicted with his trial testimony … and undermined the Government’s only evidence, a massage table,” which had established an element required for jurors to convict her of two of the counts in the case.
