If she can’t have them, no one can.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the notorious sex trafficker linked to Jeffrey Epstein, on Tuesday opposed the Justice Department’s bid to unseal grand jury transcripts from her case, after trying and failing to view the records herself.
“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not,” her lawyers wrote in a Manhattan federal court filing.
“Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable, and her due process rights remain.”
The disgraced British socialite — who is serving a 20-year prison sentence — is lobbying the US Supreme Court to review her December 2021 conviction on numerous sex crimes for grooming young girls for abuse by her on-and-off lover Epstein.
“Given that she is actively litigating her case and does not know what is in the grand jury record, she has no choice but to respectfully oppose the government’s motion to unseal it,” Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus wrote.
Maxwell’s push to keep the transcripts hidden comes weeks after a federal judge denied her attempt to see them as pursues her appeal.
US District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer noted in his ruling that “black-letter law,” or fundamental legal principle, dictates that defendants cannot review grand jury transcripts, which are by definition secret.
DOJ officials have cited the “public interest” in urging Engelmayer and a separate judge to unseal transcripts of testimony from an FBI agent and NYPD detective heard by grand juries in Epstein’s case in 2019, and in Maxwell’s case in 2020 and 2021.
But the feds admitted in a 12:04 a.m. court filing early Tuesday that “much of the information” included in the Maxwell testimony was already made public during her headline-grabbing trial.
The Epstein grand jury testimony may yield more new details as he never made it to trial after dying in federal custody, in what was ruled a suicide.
But the testimony the government is seeking in both cases represents a tiny fraction of the 300 gigabytes of files it says it has about Epstein but has declined to release — sparking an uproar among many of President Trump’s supporters.
An attorney for Epstein victim Maria Farmer, who testified at Maxwell’s trial, wrote a letter to the court late Tuesday urging the judge to unseal both grand jury transcripts.
“Unsealing the grand jury transcripts will illuminate the scope of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s abuse, provide additional insight into those who enabled his abuse, and bring light to how these crimes were investigated and prosecuted,” lawyer Sigrid McCawley wrote.
Lawyers for Epstein’s estate separately wrote to the court Tuesday that they take “no position” on the government’s move to unseal grand jury transcripts in his case.
Maxwell, 63, meanwhile was moved to a cushy Texas prison known as a “Club Fed” last week, days after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer.
DOJ officials have not explained why the convicted sex trafficker was transferred to a lockup typically reserved for convicts spending far less time behind bars.
