On Monday, the Supreme Court chose not to review the appeal to overturn the 2021 conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of sex-trafficking and known for her close ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was found guilty of conspiring with and aiding Epstein in his sexual abuse of underage girls. She was thrust back into the spotlight this summer as the Trump administration faced intense pressure to release new information about the decade-long scheme.
Her appeal to the justices turned on a 2007 nonprosecution agreement Epstein signed with federal prosecutors, which she claimed her conviction violated.
The deal let Epstein avoid federal charges for pleading guilty to state-level sex crimes in Florida and serving 18 moths in prison. It also included an unusual co-conspirators’ clause, which she argued binds every U.S. attorney in the country from pursuing certain charges against her.
Lower courts found that the deal only covers the Southern District of Florida, where the agreement was signed, and does not apply to the federal prosecutors in New York who secured Maxwell’s conviction.
“In this case, the government made a written promise that Epstein’s co-conspirators would not be prosecuted by the United States, and Maxwell was in fact prosecuted as a co-conspirator of Epstein by the United States,” Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, wrote in her April petition to the justices.
“The only question is whether the government’s promise that the ‘United States’ would not prosecute her was enforceable against the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York, or only against the Southern District of Florida,” he continued, urging the court’s review.
The Justice Department opposed Maxwell’s appeal, rejecting her contention that the nonprosecution agreement applies to every judicial district in the country.
“While ‘the United States’ could conceivably refer to the entire federal government, as petitioner urges, the entirety and context of the NPA here make clear that the term is used — as it often is — as one alternative way to refer to the USAO executing the agreement,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court in July.
As Maxwell’s petition awaited review at the Supreme Court, she simultaneously made overtures to President Trump, who has faced sharp criticism over his administration’s handling of the so-called Epstein files.
Trump’s political base exploded with frustration after the Justice Department in July stated Epstein did not have a “client list” and confirmed his 2019 death was indeed a suicide, two flash points for skeptics who have long claimed the government covered up the truth.
Amid growing tensions, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell over the course of two days, during which she said she “never saw” Trump in “any inappropriate setting.” The president’s critics have accused him of withholding information about Epstein’s case because he is named in the files.
After the meeting, Maxwell was transferred from a correctional facility in Florida to a lower-security prison camp in Texas. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform asked DOJ’s inspector general’s office to investigate the move.
Trump said in July that he’s “allowed to give her a pardon,” but that “nobody’s approached me with it.”
