Newly Released Documents Reveal More About Ghislaine Maxwell's Role In Alleged Abuse

Another batch of court records involving British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and numerous other powerful people was unsealed Thursday night, revealing the clearest picture yet of Maxwell’s alleged participation in an international sex trafficking scheme.

The documents were part of a 2015 defamation case involving Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, who has alleged that she was sexually abused by Epstein, Maxwell and many of their friends in the early 2000s at properties in New York City, Florida, London, New Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and in private planes all over the world. The case was settled in 2017.

Last August, New York judge Loretta Preska ordered the release of more than 2,000 pages of case records , which provided testimony from Epstein’s staff in support of Giuffre’s accusations, along with the names of wealthy individuals she says she was ordered to have sex with. 

The day after the first batch of documents was released, Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide in the Manhattan jail cell where he was being held awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. The newly public trove is the second part of the bundle of records Preska ordered released.

Investigators then shifted focus to Maxwell, 58, and arrested her at a secluded mansion in New Hampshire on July 2. She pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to six felony counts over her alleged participation in the abuse of several underage girls between 1994 and 1997, and is being held without bond at a facility in Brooklyn, New York.

While much of the information contained in the newly released documents has been previously reported, the records illustrate the alarming extent to which Maxwell allegedly participated in the Epstein scandal. 

Giuffre testified that Maxwell sexually abused underaged girls “virtually every day.”

In her deposition, Giuffre said that Maxwell abused girls nearly every day she was around the British heiress. When asked for descriptions of the girls Maxwell allegedly abused, Giuffre replied, “Well, there’s a lot of girls that were involved. We weren’t on a first name basis with each other.”

Giuffre says she had been reading a book on massage therapy at Mar-a-Lago the Florida club owned by President Donald Trump where she worked in 2000 when Maxwell first approached her. Maxwell then brought Giuffre to Epstein’s Florida home on the pretense of giving him a regular “massage.” However, Giuffre says in the records that the term always meant “erotic massage” to Maxwell and Epstein.

In addition to allegedly procuring young girls herself, Maxwell is accused of manipulating the girls she recruited including Giuffre to go out and recruit others. In previously released records, Epstein’s former house manager testified that his employer kept the names and numbers of dozens of young so-called massage therapists in a Rolodex.

“It’s very hard to tell how many girls were under the age of 18,” Giuffre said in her deposition. “My instruction from them was the younger the better.” 

Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew were alleged participants.

One document asserts that Giuffre was forced to have sex with the British prince in three locations while she was a minor: Maxwell’s London apartment, an unspecified location in New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Buckingham Palace has denied all rape accusations against Prince Andrew, who has said he does not recall ever meeting Giuffre, despite the existence of a damning photo showing him with his arm around Giuffre’s waist and Maxwell in the background which Giuffre testified was taken by Epstein.

Giuffre said she was told to give Prince Andrew “whatever he demanded” and to then report details of the abuse to Epstein.

Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who Giuffre says also abused her, is described as having played “a significant role” in negotiating Epstein’s 2008 plea bargain . Epstein received a shockingly light sentence for sexually abusing a minor in Florida: He was held in a private wing of a local jail and allowed to leave for up to 12 hours a day, six days per week. He was released after serving a little more than a year.

Dershowitz denies the abuse accusations against him.

Giuffre testified that she was also instructed to “pleas[e]” businessman Glenn Dubin, model recruiter Jean Luc Brunel, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, another unnamed prince, the unnamed owner of a “large hotel chain,” and a “foreign president” with dark hair whom Giuffre believed to be Spanish.

“[C]an I remember everybody’s name? No,” she said. The men were often introduced to her informally.

“These allegations and inferences are completely false. Governor Richardson has never even been contacted by any party regarding this lawsuit. To be clear, in Governor Richardson’s limited interactions with Mr. Epstein, he never saw him in the presence of young or underage girls. Governor Richardson has never met Ms. Giuffre,” a spokesperson for Richardson said in a statement.

Some of the other girls brought to Epstein’s private island seemed to Giuffre to be from Eastern Europe.

In graphic testimony, Giuffre described Maxwell engaging in group sex with “lots” of other young girls on Epstein’s private island. She could not answer confidently when asked where the others were from because they did not speak English, but Giuffre estimated that they may have been from Russia or the Czech Republic.

Giuffre said she was brought to the island more than 20 times, but probably less than 50.

She also testified that Maxwell regularly abused her on Epstein’s properties, in countries around the world and on private planes. 

Giuffre said she also saw former President Bill Clinton on the island with young girls.

Giuffre testified that Epstein once told her “that everyone owes him favors.”

She recalled an incident in which she saw Clinton on the island at a time when “two young girls” whom she did not know anything about — other than that they were from New York — were also present. Clinton has not been accused of participating in the abuse, but his alleged presence on the island has drawn sharp criticism.

Giuffre also recalled that Maxwell had said she personally flew Clinton to the island on a helicopter, but Giuffre was not sure whether that was true because Maxwell liked to tell “fantastical” stories.

In a 2015 email, Epstein encouraged Maxwell to hold her “head high” — despite Maxwell’s claim that she cut off contact with the financier years before.

A few weeks after a story about Giuffre’s accusations ran in a British newspaper, Epstein sent Maxwell a typo-filled email.

He wrote on Jan. 25, 2015: “You have done nothing wrong and i woudl urge you to start acting like it. go outside, head high, not as an esacping convict. go to parties. deal with it.”

In another email, Epstein appears to help Maxwell compose a public statement denying Giuffre’s accusations and distancing herself from the financier.

Maxwell and Epstein would regularly imply that it was dangerous to upset them, Giuffre said.

Maxwell and Epstein never explicitly threatened Giuffre, she said in her testimony, but they made it clear that she should not cross them because they were very wealthy and knew many powerful people.

“It was on a constant basis,” she said. “I mean, there was no just one time that she said it. It was like a reminder, you know. And Jeffrey did a lot more of that than she did. But she definitely made [me] aware that we shouldn’t cross boundaries with them.”

More documents from the defamation case between Giuffre and Maxwell are expected to be made public next week.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story stated that Giuffre had testified that she was abused by Dubin, Brunel, Richardson, and several others. Rather, Giuffre testified that Maxwell had instructed her to visit those individuals in response to a question about “powerful people that Ghislaine Maxwell told [her] to go have sex with.”