Alleged child sex groomer, Ghislaine Maxwell has told Manhattan Federal Court to throw away her court case as she needs testimony from the late Jeffrey Epstein and others to defend herself against charges she groomed the multimillionaire underage victims.
Maxwell is accused of recruiting Epstein’s underage victims in the 1990s and taking an active role in their abuse.
New details about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s alleged crimes emerged in thousands of pages of documents unsealed last week in a civil suit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre
One witness, whose name was redacted from the unsealed paperwork, testified he “watched Maxwell direct a room full of underage girls to kiss, dance, and touch one another in a sexual way for (Maxwell) and Epstein to watch.”
In papers filed on Thursday, the British socialite says her former boyfriend — if he were alive — would testify she knew nothing about underage sex trafficking.
According to Maxwell, so much time has passed since the alleged incidents happened, therefore the people who could come to her defense are either dead or won’t be able to remember key details.
According to her, the people that could help her defence include Epstein’s mother, Paula, who died in 2004; Mike Casey, the agent of one of her accusers, who died in 2017; and Joseph Recarey, the lead detective in the Palm Beach police department’s Epstein investigation, who died in 2018.
She contends that Epstein’s mother would have vouched for her character and testify that she didn’t see her with any of her son’s accusers.
She adds that Casey would have said she didn’t interact with the accuser he represented, and that Recarey would help her case by saying her name never came up in interviews with any of Epstein’s accusers.
“The charges (against Epstein) were ultimately dismissed because Epstein died while in federal custody,” wrote Maxwell’s lawyer, Jeffrey Pagliuca. “Left with no fish to attempt to fry, the government, belatedly, turned to Ms. Maxwell.”
Her former boyfriend, Epstein hanged himself in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan on Aug. 10, 2019.
Pagliuca said the government delayed prosecuting Maxwell for years in “bad faith,” and as a result, witness memories have fadrd, and the defense has no access to records kept by both Maxwell and Epstein that were destroyed decades ago.
“There is no legitimate justification for the extraordinary delay associated with this prosecution,” he wrote.
