US v. Maxwell

United States v. Ghislaine Maxwell was a federal criminal prosecution brought in the Southern District of New York. The indictment, returned by a grand jury and unsealed on June 29, 2020 (Dkt. 1), charged Maxwell with conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to entice and transport minors for illegal sex acts and with perjury arising from her 2016 civil deposition in Giuffre v. Maxwell. A superseding indictment later added a sex-trafficking count covering a fourth accuser. Maxwell was arrested in Bradford, New Hampshire on July 2, 2020 and the government moved successfully to detain her pending trial; the perjury counts were ultimately severed for separate trial.

The trial was held before Judge Alison J. Nathan in late 2021. After roughly five days of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict on December 29, 2021 finding Maxwell guilty on five of the six counts submitted to it, including sex trafficking of a minor, transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and related conspiracy counts; she was acquitted on one count. Four accusers testified about conduct dating from the 1990s and early 2000s, three under pseudonyms ('Jane,' 'Kate,' and 'Carolyn'); the fourth, Annie Farmer, testified under her real name. Following Judge Nathan's elevation to the Second Circuit, the case was administratively reassigned to Judge Paul A. Engelmayer; Judge Nathan returned by designation to handle sentencing.

Maxwell's post-trial motion for a new trial, based on a juror's failure to disclose his own history of sexual abuse during voir dire, was denied. On June 28, 2022 Judge Nathan, sitting by designation, sentenced Maxwell to 240 months (20 years) in federal prison. The Second Circuit affirmed her conviction on September 17, 2024, and rehearing was denied that November. Maxwell filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court on April 10, 2025; certiorari was denied on October 6, 2025, ending direct review. The case is closed.

The corpus contains 3,810 EFTA pages and 1,830 emails linked to this docket, drawn from DOJ's production and House Oversight materials. The sample reviewed includes the original sealed indictment (Dkt. 1), the government's detention memorandum (Dkt. 4), defense motions to dismiss and motions in limine, sealed exhibits filed under seal, government letter-briefs to the court, a Bureau of Prisons letter regarding Maxwell's MDC conditions, official trial and post-trial hearing transcripts, the defense notice of appeal, and Maxwell's later petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court. The email portion of the corpus consists largely of routine litigation correspondence among AUSAs, defense counsel (Cohen, Everdell, Sternheim, Pagliuca, Menninger, and Markus/Moss), chambers staff, and the SDNY Victim/Witness Unit, plus a fact-witness travel request.

A handful of items in the sample are exhibits or background investigative material rather than docket filings — for example, a 2002 JPMorgan Chase private-bank statement in Epstein's name and a scanned inventory of toiletries that appear to be government trial exhibits or Rule 16 discovery. One document in the sample (a 2025 S.D. Fla. grand-jury matter) is a docket-body match rather than a filing in 20-cr-00330 itself; readers should treat medium-confidence linkages with that caveat. The corpus does not include grand jury transcripts, the full trial record, or sealed victim materials, and it is not a substitute for the PACER docket.