Maxwell, a former British socialite and Epstein accomplice, says her conviction for trafficking a ‘miscarriage of justice’.
Published On 18 Dec 2025
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Ghislaine Maxwell, former girlfriend and accomplice of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has asked a federal judge in the United States to set aside her sex trafficking conviction and quash her 20-year prison sentence.
Maxwell made the long-shot legal bid in a Manhattan court on Wednesday, saying “substantial new evidence” had emerged proving that constitutional violations spoiled her trial in 2021 for recruiting underage girls for wealthy financier Epstein, who died in 2019.
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In the lengthy filing, Maxwell, 63, argues that “newly discovered evidence” proves that she “did not receive a fair trial by independent jurors coming to Court with an open mind”.
“If the jury had heard of the new evidence of the collusion between the plaintiff’s lawyers and the Government to conceal evidence and the prosecutorial misconduct they would not have convicted,” Maxwell wrote.
She said the cumulative effect of the constitutional violations resulted in a “complete miscarriage of justice”.
Maxwell submitted the filing herself, not in the name of a lawyer.
Proceedings of the type brought by Maxwell are routinely denied by judges and are often the last-ditch option available to offenders to have their convictions overturned, the AFP news agency reports.
Maxwell’s filing also comes just days before records in her legal case are scheduled to be released publicly as a result of US President Donald Trump’s signing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The law, which Trump signed after months of public and political pressure on his administration, requires the Department of Justice to provide the public with Epstein-related records by December 19.
The circumstances of Epstein’s death and his influential social circle, which spanned the highest reaches of business and politics in the US, have also fuelled conspiracy theories about possible cover-ups and unnamed accomplices
Critics also continue to press President Trump to address his own once-close relationship with Epstein.
The Justice Department has said it plans to release 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe, including search warrants, financial records, notes from interviews with victims, and data from electronic devices.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges but was found dead a month later in his cell at a New York federal jail, and his death was ruled a suicide.
Maxwell, once a well-known British socialite, was arrested a year later and convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021.
In July, she was interviewed by the Justice Department’s second-in-command and soon afterwards moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas.
Maxwell’s transfer from the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tallahassee – a low-security prison in Florida – to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, was carried out without explanation at the time.
