Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Audrey Strauss speaks during a news conference in July 2020 to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, a federal judge turned down an request by Maxwell to overturn her conviction and prison sentence. File photo by Jason Szenes/EPA-EFE
Aug. 25 (UPI) — A federal judge on Tuesday denied Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempt to overturn her conviction and prison sentence, slamming the petition as “demonstrably meritless.”
In the the ruling, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said the petition by Maxwell, a co-conspirator of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was “generally based on speculation, distortions and/or outright falsehoods.”
“There is no fact that Maxwell fairly puts in dispute that has any potential to disturb the outcome of her trial,” Engelmayer wrote.
Maxwell sought to overturn her five felony convictions on the stance that her due process rights were violated, claiming the documents released by the Department of Justice this year supported this. She also made claims of juror misconduct, inaccurate evidence and “selective prosecution” on the part of the Justice Department.
Engelmayer wrote that Maxwell’s claim “incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges.”
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022. She had been found guilty of conspiring to lure underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. She is serving time in a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas.
Epstein, already a convicted sex offender, was awaiting trial in 2019 when he died by suicide while in jail. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice released many documents related to Epstein’s activities under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress in November 2025.
The U.S. government has been criticized for the limited release of some of the files, in which names of alleged perpetrators were heavily redacted while many victim names were not.
