On Thursday, a court order revealed hundreds of pages of testimony from convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell. The FBI arrested Maxwell on charges of conspiracy, sex trafficking of minor children, and perjury in July. She is alleged to have been involved in Epstein giving “sexualized massages” to minors that led to rape. Yet the newly uncovered testimony came from a separate defamation lawsuit that Virginia Giuffre, one of Maxwell’s accusers, filed against her. A New York federal judge ordered the documents made public earlier this year, and an appeals court upheld that ruling on Monday.
Under fierce questioning from Giuffre’s lawyers in an April 2016 deposition, Maxwell repeatedly denied having recruited girls for Epstein, Bloomberg News reported.
In the 465-page deposition transcript, Maxwell denied a host of salacious claims, including accusations that she recruited a woman to carry Epstein’s child, that she brought girls to Epstein’s home to give them massages, and that she’d threatened others if they exposed Epstein’s secrets.
“Have you ever observed Mr. Epstein having a massage given by an individual, a female, who was under the age of 18?” Giuffre’s lawyer asked.
“No,” Maxwell insisted. “I never saw any inappropriate underage activities with Jeffrey ever.”
The deposition includes several pages about men allegedly connected to Epstein, but the court redacted their names.
Giuffre claimed that Maxwell and Epstein made her a sex slave at age 16. The alleged victim sued Maxwell in 2015 for dismissing her allegations as “obvious lies.” Maxwell later settled the case for an undisclosed account.
“Just for the record, I have never at any time, at any place, in any moment, ever asked Virginia Roberts or whatever she is called now to have sex with anybody,” Maxwell testified, using Giuffre’s maiden name.
It seems likely prosecutors in the sex trafficking case will seek to present this testimony to jurors in Maxwell’s criminal trial. Prosecutors claim that Maxwell lied nine times in the deposition when she denied knowledge of Epstein’s activities.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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