Jeffrey Epstein's alleged madam won't be waiting out her trial date in a luxury New York hotel suite.
On Tuesday, Ghislaine Maxwell was ordered held without bail as she awaits a reckoning on charges related to allegedly procuring three girls for Epstein to abuse and participating in the abuse in at least one instance. She's also charged with lying about Epstein's activities in a federal lawsuit.
"The court concludes that Ms. Maxwell poses a substantial risk of flight," said U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan in denying Maxwell bail at the conclusion of a two-hour hearing in New York City.
Federal prosecutors allege that she recruited and groomed three girls between 1994 and 1997, befriending them and normalizing them to the idea of sexual activity to prepare them for Epstein's abuse at numerous locations, including Epstein's estate in Palm Beach, his massive New York mansion, his ranch in New Mexico and Maxwell's apartment in London.
Maxwell pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Annie Farmer, one of the three victims referenced in the indictment, spoke at the bail hearing, imploring the court to keep Maxwell locked up.
"She has never shown any remorse for her heinous crimes," Farmer said. "The danger Maxwell poses must be taken seriously."
Another of the three alleged victims, identified only as Jane Doe, provided a witness statement saying that Maxwell was an integral part of Epstein's crimes, which Maxwell's lawyers have denied.
"Without Ghislaine, Jeffrey could not have done what she did," the alleged victim said. "She was a predator and a monster."
She also urged the government to deny Maxwell bail.
"If she believes she risks prison, she will never come back," the statement said.
"Maxwell's presence as an adult woman helped put the victims at ease as Maxwell and Epstein intended," said Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, in announcing the charges against Maxwell at a news conference in early July.
The charges against Maxwell came nearly one year after federal prosecutors in New York brought new charges against Epstein. Those charges were driven in part by the Miami Herald's Perversion of Justice series, which detailed Epstein's lenient sentence for sex charges a decade earlier. Alexander Acosta was U.S. attorney for Southern Florida at the time of the initial sentence and personally approved a nonprosecution agreement that ensured Epstein was spared the prospect of federal prison and protected his co-conspirators from facing charges. Epstein served a short stint in the Palm Beach County jail.
Maxwell's lawyers argued that the non-prosecution agreement applies to Maxwell and should nullify the charges brought against her earlier this month, which federal prosecuteors dispute. While Nathan didn't rule on whether the nonprosecution agreement applies to Maxwell's charges, she said that it didn't weaken the government's case at this stage.
Epstein was found dead in a federal prison one month after he had been charged last year and Maxwell's lawyers said that she has been held effectively in solitary confinement with the lights constantly on "apparently because they're afraid of what happened with Mr. Epstein," said her lawyer Mark Cohen.
Epstein's death came a day after documents unsealed in a federal lawsuit provided extensive details about Maxwell's alleged role in procuring girls for Epstein to abuse. Her perjury charges are related to lies she allegedly told in connection with that lawsuit, which was brought by Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Maxwell had recruited her in 2000 at President Donald Trumps' Mar-a-Lago estate around the time of her 17th birthday, and that Epstein and several of his famous friends had sexually abused her over the next several years.
Giuffre expressed relief upon hearing that Maxwell had been denied bail.
"I'm thrilled with Judge Nathan's decision to keep Ghislaine Maxwell in jail pending trial," Giuffre said. "Without Ghislaine, Jeffrey Epstein would not have been able to fulfill his sick desires. Ghislaine preyed on me when I was a child. As with every other of her and Jeffrey Epstein's victims, I will have to live with what she did to me for the rest of my life. The rest of her life should be spent behind bars.
In a 2015 lawsuit, Giuffre alleged that Maxwell and Epstein directed her to have sex with numerous famous men, including British Prince Andrew, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and Hyatt Hotels magnate Tom Pritzker, among others. A picture of a young Giuffre with Prince Andrew and Maxwell has been seared into the public consciousness as an emblem of the reach of Epstein's social _ and allegedly exploitative _ network. The men have denied her accusations. The suit was settled in 2017.
Spencer Kuvin, a South Florida lawyer who represents six alleged victims of Epstein, said that the denial of bail to Maxwell represented a continuing rebalancing of the scales of justice.
"The arraignment of these disturbing sexual assault crimes against minors and the subsequent denial of bail for Ghislaine Maxwell is a continued tip of the scales of justice in favor of the victims after all these years," said Spencer Kuvin. "While Epstein cowardly evaded his charges, Ms. Maxwell will not."
Federal prosecutors offered new details Tuesday about Maxwell's whereabouts in the year since Epstein was arrested last July. She was picked up last week on a 156-acre estate in New Hampshire that she had toured last November under the pseudonym Jen Marshall, telling a real estate agent that she was a journalist looking for privacy. The property was purchased with cash last December through a shell company and someone with knowledge of the sale told the Miami Herald that Maxwell's name didn't appear on any of the documents for the transaction.
"There really can be no question that the defendant is willing to lie to hide who she is," said Alison Moe, an assistant U.S. attorney, at Tuesday's hearing.
Prior filings by federal prosecutors said that Maxwell was guarded on the property by former British soldiers, who had been hired by her brother. She sent one of the guards into town to run errands for her using a credit card bearing the same name as the shell company that had been used to purchase the home. She used pseudonyms when receiving packages and changed her phone number and email address.
Federal prosecutors said Maxwell initially tried to flee agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation when agents came to arrest her and they discovered a cellphone in the house that had been wrapped in foil to avoid detection.
Prosecutors had argued that Maxwell posed a risk of flight because she holds foreign passports to the United Kingdom and France in addition to her U.S. passport and has access to seemingly limitless wealth. At the hearing Tuesday, Moe said that Maxwell had proposed that she would stay at a New York luxury hotel if released on bail.
Maxwell's lawyers argued that she was unfairly being targeted for Epstein's alleged crimes and that she should be released on bail because COVID-19 posed risks to her health and her chances for an effective defense.
"Our client is not Epstein, she's not the monster that has been portrayed by the media and now the government," Cohen said.
He argued that government prosecutors were throwing "dirt" on his client in detailing concerns about her finances and the circumstances of Maxwell's arrest, and her life in the past year.
They proposed that she be released on $5 million bail to be co-signed by six family members and friends and secured by a $3.75 million property in the UK. Further, they proposed that she be confined to New York and required to wear an electronic GPS monitoring device.
Tuesday's hearing also offered additional details about the scope and timing of the trial. Moe said federal prosecutors don't anticipate filing additional charges in the case at this point and that the team of New York prosecutors had met with FBI officers in South Florida who had investigated Epstein's crimes more than a decade earlier and would be relying on documents from that investigation in this case. Maxwell's case is expected to go to trial in July of 2021 and prosecutors anticipated the trial will take roughly two to three weeks.
While the hearing was lengthy, the decision rendered by Nathan came quickly.
"It was clear from the speed at which the Judge issued her order, that her mind was primarily made up prior to the hearing," said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor.
