Updated Aug. 25, 2026, 11:21 a.m. ET
A federal judge rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s request to throw out her five felony convictions from her association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell was convicted of what U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer called “the sexual abuse of young girls over the course of a decade” and that “trial evidence of her guilt that was overwhelming.”
“Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” Engelmayer wrote in denying her request Aug. 24.
Maxwell, 64, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019. She represented herself in challenging her December 2021 conviction.
The Epstein case remains contentious because the Justice Department has refused to release all the documents associated with his investigation, despite Congress approving a law demanding they be made public.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has said all relevant documents have been released, but women who said they were abused by Epstein continue to push for the names of possible accomplices.
Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a lower-security facility in Texas after meeting with Blanche when he was deputy attorney general. Her lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn her conviction while also seeking a pardon or commutation for her from President Donald Trump in exchange for her cooperation in the Epstein investigation and broader sex trafficking issues.
Engelmayer ruled that Maxwell’s purported “new” evidence from the release of 3 million documents related to Epstein were “largely irrelevant” and didn’t “support her claims of error.”
“On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges,” Engelmayer wrote.
The Supreme Court rejected Maxwell’s appeal in October 2025.
Judge finds Maxwell claims ‘meritless’
In asking Engelmayer to reconsider her case, Maxwell made six new claims the judge said she should have raised in her appeal. Maxwell argued that the lawyers of women who accused Epstein of abuse acted like prosecutors, that inaccurate evidence at trial created the impression she profited from her conspiracy, and that Epstein’s contact book should have been excluded from the trial.
Engelmayer said the arguments were barred because she should have raised them in her direct appeals. But he said she also hadn’t shown that the arguments would have yielded a different outcome in her “lengthy and rambling” filing.
“On the contrary, these claims are blatantly meritless,” Engelmayer wrote.
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