A federal judge has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell's attempt to overturn her sex trafficking convictions, dismissing her claims as "meritless" and mostly "frivolous."

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer denied the petition in a 67-page opinion dated Tuesday, leaving Maxwell's 20-year sentence intact. The ruling came in a post-conviction challenge filed in the Manhattan federal court where a jury convicted Maxwell in December 2021 of conspiracy and sex trafficking charges tied to Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of four girls, some as young as 14, between 1994 and 2004; Engelmayer, who presided over that trial, imposed the 20-year sentence in June 2022. Maxwell had built the petition around Epstein records that the Justice Department released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law directing the department to make its Epstein-related files public, the ruling said.

"Maxwell's claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous," Engelmayer wrote, noting that she had already lost the same arguments on appeal or had chosen not to raise them at all. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld her convictions and sentence in 2024.

"In a lengthy and rambling petition which Maxwell twice supplemented with similarly discursive addenda, she claims that her constitutional rights at trial and sentencing were violated in multiple respects," the judge wrote.

The released files did not help her case. Where the material was relevant, the ruling found, "far from exculpating her, it incriminates her." Engelmayer wrote that Maxwell "distorts those materials," including by attaching a single page of a Justice Department interview while omitting the next page, which undercut her reading of it.

The judge also cited an interview Maxwell gave in prison on July 24, 2025, to Todd Blanche, who served as President Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer before joining the Justice Department and whom the Senate confirmed as attorney general on Aug. 8 by a vote of 50-49.

"I ran all the properties, the staff in the properties, the management of the properties[,] and all the construction," Maxwell told Blanche, according to the transcript quoted in the ruling. Engelmayer wrote that those answers undercut her own claim that she had largely left Jeffrey Epstein's household by 2002.

A week after that interview, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison camp, a transfer Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said was made without explanation.

Maxwell has since sought clemency from Trump. She told House investigators in February that she would testify he did nothing wrong if he ended her sentence. Any pardon or commutation in her case would rest solely with the president.

The judge called her claim that she was singled out for prosecution "patently frivolous," writing that she never identified anyone comparable to herself. Maxwell "served for years as Epstein's indispensable recruiter and groomer in chief," Engelmayer wrote.

"Far from being discriminatory or unjust, this was the epitome of a virtuous prosecution," the judge wrote. "The Government and the jury justly held Maxwell accountable for gravely serious federal offenses."

Engelmayer also blocked Maxwell from appealing without paying court fees, certifying that any appeal "would not be taken in good faith." That certification denies her in forma pauperis status, meaning she would have to pay appellate filing fees up front to ask a higher court to review Tuesday's ruling.

Source: Raw Story