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The disgraced financier’s former companion said disclosure would harm her legal rights. “Jeffrey Epstein is dead,” her lawyers wrote. “Ghislaine Maxwell is not.”
Aug. 5, 2025Updated 2:00 p.m. ET
Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, asked a Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday to deny the government’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts from its investigation of the two.
“Jeffrey Epstein is dead,” her lawyers wrote. “Ghislaine Maxwell is not. 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 court filing came as two judges are considering requests by the Trump Justice Department to release the grand jury transcripts in the Epstein and Maxwell cases. The judges had set Tuesday as the deadline for victims of the scheme and Ms. Maxwell to offer their views on the proposed disclosure.
The judges set the same deadline for a representative of Mr. Epstein to provide an opinion. Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in August 2019 as he was awaiting trial; his death was ruled a suicide.
In their letter, Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers argue that after Mr. Epstein’s death, federal prosecutors “pivoted and made Maxwell the face of his crimes.”
“She became the scapegoat and the only person the government could put on trial,” her lawyers, David O. Markus and Melissa Madrigal, wrote.
The unsealing request came as Mr. Trump has tried to quell criticism and conspiracy theories from many of his supporters about Mr. Epstein and his circle of associates. Some of those theories were put forth by top aides to Mr. Trump before they entered government service, leading Mr. Trump’s followers to assume U.S. files still held secrets about powerful people connected to Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
The backlash intensified last month after the Justice Department released a memo in which it said its review of files regarding Mr. Epstein had “revealed no incriminating ‘client list’” or credible evidence that “Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the department wrote.
The department said in the memo that Mr. Epstein “harmed over 1,000 victims.”
Ms. Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking and other charges in December 2021 in a federal trial in Manhattan. With her conviction affirmed on appeal, she has asked the Supreme Court to review her case, a request that is still pending.
Recently, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, interviewed her over two days in Florida, part of the administration’s effort to curtail criticism that the Justice Department is hiding what it knows about Mr. Epstein.
Ms. Maxwell has since been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas.
In a government court filing last week, arguing for unsealing the transcripts, which are shielded by grand jury secrecy, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Mr. Blanche and Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said “the passage of time has not dulled the public’s interest in these cases.”
“Beyond that,” they wrote, “there is abundant public interest in the investigative work conducted by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into those crimes.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
