US judge denies Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘frivolous’ bid to throw out conviction

A US federal judge rejects Maxwell’s claims that newly released Epstein files could help overturn her conviction.

A United States federal judge has rejected the bid from Ghislaine Maxwell, former girlfriend and longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, to throw out her five felony convictions, calling the claims “meritless” and “frivolous”.

In a 67-page opinion made public on Tuesday, Judge Paul Engelmayer denied Maxwell’s post-conviction challenge to her five felony convictions.

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Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year sentence for helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls for over a decade. She is eligible for release in 2037.

She was convicted by a jury in December 2021 on five felony counts. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in 2024, and the Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal last October.

Maxwell, representing herself, submitted her petition under Section 2255, the federal statute allowing convicted defendants to challenge their sentences. Engelmayer, who did not preside over Maxwell’s original 2021 trial, called her filing a “lengthy and rambling petition”.

Much of Maxwell’s petition leaned on records released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), a law passed with near-unanimous congressional support in November 2025 that forced the US Department of Justice to make the files public.

Maxwell claims her constitutional rights at trial and sentencing were violated, and that the materials released as part of the EFTA support this claim.

Engelmayer found that the material worked against Maxwell rather than for her. “To the extent it is relevant,” he wrote, “far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges.”

The judge also highlighted an apparent contradiction in Maxwell’s own account. On claims related to a sentencing enhancement, which increased her prison term because prosecutors argued she had a leadership role in Epstein’s scheme, her petition argued she had “largely exited” Epstein’s household by 2002.

But in a July 2025 interview with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell described continuing to manage Epstein’s properties and staff years later.

On claims that Maxwell was unfairly singled out while other associates of Epstein went uncharged, Engelmayer noted she had not implicated any other person in the child sex abuse scheme and does not even concede Epstein’s culpability in her own filing.

Engelmayer described the case against her as “the epitome of a virtuous prosecution” and certified that any appeal of his ruling “would not be taken in good faith”.