Ghislaine Maxwell claims prosecutors shielded Epstein's friends with 'secret settlements'
The convicted sex trafficker, 64, is seeking to overturn her sentence and argues Epstein's associates were shielded through "secret settlements"
Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed prosecutors cut deals with 29 of Jeffrey Epstein's friends so they could avoid being revealed to the public.
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The convicted sex trafficker, 64, is seeking to overturn her sentence and argues Epstein's associates were shielded through "secret settlements".
She alleges in the court filing that 25 men reached undisclosed deals, while four alleged co-conspirators were known to investigators but never charged.
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This, she claims, violated the terms of Epstein's 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida, which allegedly extended immunity to co-conspirators.
No individuals are named, but Maxwell claims these agreements were kept under wraps and therefore undermined the fairness of her trial and violated her constitutional rights.
"New evidence reveals that there were 25 men with which the plaintiff lawyers reached secret settlements - that could equally be considered as co-conspirators," the legal document states.
"None of these men have been prosecuted and none has been revealed to Petitioner; she would have called them as witnesses had she known."
Maxwell also alleges there was juror misconduct and suppression of evidence in her case, which form part of her overall habeas corpus argument.
The disgraced socialite asserts she was prosecuted for political reasons while other individuals escaped justice.
She is serving a 20-year sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security federal women's prison in Bryan, Texas.
Maxwell was convicted in New York in December 2021 of sex trafficking over her role in recruiting and grooming underage girls for abuse by Epstein between 1994 and 2004.
Her appeal was declined by the Supreme Court last year and she has now seeking to 'vacate, set aside, or correct' her sentence through the abeas corpus petition filed in the Southern District of New York.
This petition is permitted only after appeals fail and requires proof of new evidence or fundamental flaws.
They very rarely succeed, as judges are keen to avoid endless relitigation.
The Justice Department said it expected to finish its review of the Epstein files and publicly release them "in the near term".
Attorney General Pam Bondi said that her lawyers are redacting several million pages of documents from the files of the DOJ, FBI and US attorney's offices.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed off by Donald Trump in November, required the DOJ to release the files by December 19.