A judge has ruled that dozens of more documents about Ghislaine Maxwell’s personal affairs should be made public, including some that could reveal more about her finances and her relationship to the Clintons.
Judge Loretta Preska ruled to unseal the court documents that are from a defamation lawsuit brought against Maxwell by alleged Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre that was initiated in 2015. Giuffre brought the lawsuit after Maxwell accused her of lying about being exploited and abused by Maxwell and Epstein.
Among the documents which will be made public in two weeks will be Maxwell’s efforts to quash requests from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who sued Maxwell for defamation, to obtain her financial records.
Giuffre’s lawyers demanded a vast array of documents from Maxwell including ‘funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation,’ according to court filings.
Giuffre alleges that Maxwell recruited her to train as a masseuse when she was 16 years old and was later turned into Epstein’s “sex slave” from about 1999 to 2002, which included having sex with acquaintances of the convicted pedophile. Giuffre’s defamation case against the former British socialite was settled in May 2017.
“Having taken a particularized view of the documents, the court concludes that each document reasonably had a tendency to affect the court’s ruling and is thus a judicial document,” Preska said during a telephone conference Thursday.
Among the documents to be unsealed from the defamation case is information about Maxwell’s finances. During the case, the Daily Mail reported, “Giuffre’s lawyers demanded a vast array of documents from Maxwell including ‘funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation,’ according to court filings.”
Below is one of the contents of the section:
From January 2012 to the present, produce all documents concerning any source of funding for the TarraMar Project (Maxwell’s nonprofit) or any other not-for-profit entities with which you are associated, including but not limited to, funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Foundation (a/k/a William J. Clinton Foundation, a/k/a/ the Bill, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), and the Clinton Foundation Climate Change Initiative.
During a hearing at New York’s federal court, Judge Preska said she was not persuaded by Maxwell’s argument that ‘continued unsealing of these materials implicates her right to a fair trial in her pending criminal case’, which is due to start in November.
Among the documents made public will be a motion for a protective order filed by Maxwell’s lawyers to limit the amount of information about her finances, they had to hand over.
Giuffre’s lawyers sought such information so they would be better informed if the case went to a settlement, which it did.
Giuffre’s lawyers sought Maxwell’s tax returns, balance sheets for companies Maxwell controlled, and financial statements for companies she controlled among other materials.
One section reads: ‘From January 2012 to the present, produce all documents concerning any source of funding for the TarraMar Project (Maxwell’s nonprofit) or any other not-for-profit entities with which you are associated, including but not limited to, funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Foundation (a/k/a William J. Clinton Foundation, a/k/a/ the Bill, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), and the Clinton Foundation Climate Change Initiative’.
While it is unclear if the Clintons will come up in the documents which will be made public, there is considerable back and forth and dozens of documents on this subject that will be unsealed.
Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell came under intense scrutiny when the financier was arrested in July 2019.
Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane dozens of times and photographs have shown him receiving a neck massage from Chauntae Davies, one of Epstein’s victims who worked as a flight attendant on his private jet, known as the ‘Lolita Express.
Preska is the same judge who ordered a previous tranche of “extremely personal” documents from Giuffre’s civil suit against Maxwell could be released last July. The documents include a seven-hour, 418-page deposition that Maxwell provided in 2016.
The batch of previously unseen files, which included 47 documents and more than 600 pages from the now-settled defamation case, was unsealed on July 30, 2020. The documents contain allegations that former President Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.
Giuffre told her lawyers that Clinton visited Epstein’s island, Little Saint James, a private 70-acre Caribbean island off the coast of St. Thomas.
“You know, I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here [on Epstein’s island] kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me favors,” Giuffre told lawyer Jack Scarola in 2015.
“He never told me what favors they were,” Giuffre added. “I never knew. I didn’t know if he was serious. It was just a joke. … He told me a long time ago that everyone owes him favors. They’re all in each other’s pockets.”
Clinton flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” at least 26 times, according to a 2016 Fox News report.
In April, the Sun published photos said to be dated September 1993, when then-President Bill Clinton welcomed Epstein and Maxwell as “VIP guests” to the White House. “They toured Clinton’s residence and the East Room during a reception after Epstein gave £7,280 to the refurbishment of the Oval Office,” The Sun reported.
After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction earlier this week and released the comedian from prison, Maxwell’s legal team is arguing that their client should also be released from prison. Maxwell’s appellate lawyer, David Oscar Markus, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News on Wednesday arguing for Maxwell to be released from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where she has been in confinement since her arrest last July over charges of running a sex trafficking network.
“The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did the right thing when it threw out Bill Cosby’s convictions because prosecutors cheated: They promised Cosby that they would not prosecute him if he would testify in the civil cases against him; based on that promise, Cosby testified and did not invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent,” Markus wrote in the op-ed.
“Prosecutors then broke their promise and used Cosby’s statements in those depositions to win a conviction against him. The state Supreme Court not only acquitted him but barred the prosecutors from retrying him.”
Maxwell’s trial is slated for November. He pleaded not guilty. Epstein’s alleged madam has appealed five times to be freed from jail on bail but has been rejected every time, the latest rejection arrived in June.
Sources: The Blaze, Daily Mail