Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempt to overturn her sex trafficking convictions failed again on Tuesday, as a federal judge rejected her “meritless” and “frivolous” claims that new evidence from the Epstein Files Transparency Act exonerates her.
“Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote in a 67-page ruling. “The vast majority are procedurally barred—either because Maxwell made and lost the same arguments on direct appeal, or because she could have made such arguments on appeal but elected not to do so. And the purported ‘new’ evidence to which Maxwell points, principally materials released under the [Epstein Files Transparency Act], is largely irrelevant to the charges against Maxwell and does not support her claims of error. On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges.”
In late 2021, Maxwell’s trial brought to light her reputation as Jeffrey Epstein’s “No. 2” and the “lady of the house” who participated in the grooming and abuse of minors and young women. Four of Epstein’s survivors testified against her, and multiple witnesses said that Maxwell touched their breasts in normalizing Epstein’s abuse. A federal jury quickly convicted her on five of the six counts against her, and a trial judge sentenced her to 20 years imprisonment.
Although her appeals failed all the way up to the Supreme Court, Maxwell won a transfer to a more lenient prison last year after speaking with Attorney General Todd Blanche. Once her appeals were exhausted, Maxwell ditched her legal team and filed a pro se petition challenging her verdict in the Southern District of New York.
It didn’t fare any better, but some of her allegations raised eyebrows.
For the first time, Maxwell alleged to have been selectively prosecuted because the government never indicted the four alleged Epstein co-conspirators and “25 men” she said had entered settlements with victims.
Engelmayer called this point “patently frivolous.”
“Maxwell served for years as Epstein’s indispensable recruiter and groomer in chief,” the judge noted. “She does not point to any other person who abetted Epstein in this manner or to this degree. That is fatal to Maxwell’s claim of selective prosecution, because she has not identified, and cannot identify, any offense participant ‘similarly situated’ to her. […] On the contrary, Maxwell has not implicated any other person in the child sex abuse scheme.”
In fact, the judge noted that Maxwell did “not even concede Epstein’s culpability” for the sex trafficking scheme.
As for the supposedly exculpatory Epstein files released by Congress, Judge Engelmayer found that they weren’t worth mentioning beyond stating that they are “at best irrelevant to—and many undermine” Maxwell’s claims.
Read the ruling in full here.
Trump: Kennedy Center might need to be ‘taken down’
Nice cultural landmark that you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.
In one of its most brazen court filings to date, the Trump Justice Department suggested that losing its latest legal battle over the Kennedy Center might lead to the historic building’s demolition.
The Kennedy Center board has hinged plans for a $250 million renovation on honoring Trump as its patron.
“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” the government’s latest filing states. “Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”
Before Trump’s second term, there was never any allegation that the Kennedy Center was on the brink of financial or structural collapse.
On the contrary, nonprofit tax records showed that the cherished cultural landmark was in fine financial health: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts reported more than $306 million in revenue and $266 million in expenses in 2024, the filing shows.
Far from single-handedly rescuing the Kennedy Center from oblivion, the Trump administration has driven ticket sales off a cliff. The Washington Post reported that sales dropped by half the week after Trump’s takeover of the board and kept cratering as artists and audience members alike left in droves. The Kennedy Center’s internal projections reportedly anticipate roughly $124 million in revenue for the 2026 fiscal year, less than half the amount pulled in during the last full year of the Biden administration.
Stacking the Kennedy Center’s board with his loyalists, Trump relentlessly pushed to turn the institution into a monument in his own honor and hitch its continued existence to his glorification.
In previous court filings, the Kennedy Center Board indicated that it revised the nonprofit’s bylaws to require clawing back all donations if the building weren’t renamed “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Multiple federal courts made clear that this poison pill provision doesn’t change federal law, which created the Kennedy Center as a memorial to the assassinated 35th president of the United States, not a shrine to a living one.
After delaying the removal of Trump’s name from the building, the Board plotted an alternative way to put it back up by writing that the building was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper will hear arguments on whether to block that plan.
The Trump Justice Department has been setting the stage for that hearing by pushing the dubious narrative that the Kennedy Center is in “crisis,” “critical condition” and “terminal decline” — and whose sole possible savior, Trump, is being stymied by a “nakedly partisan” lawsuit by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio board member.
Although the Kennedy Center board argues that it wants to pay tribute to Trump’s “extraordinary contributions,” Beatty responded that Trump is simply trying to take credit for signing legislation appropriating taxpayer money.
The New York Times quoted an attorney for preservation groups stating: “no one concerned about America’s historic landmarks can afford to treat this as idle speculation,” particularly after the Trump administration razed the East Wing of the White House to the ground — so far, with the Supreme Court’s blessing.
Ex-SPLC officer pleads not guilty
The only former Southern Poverty Law Center employee to be charged to date in the Trump Justice Department’s crusade against the storied civil rights group pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.
Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s former chief financial officer, waived her appearance in court to enter her plea during her virtual arraignment, which was transmitted via Zoom teleconference.
In her absence, her attorney Michael Proctor indicated that she pleads not guilty to allegations that she engaged in wire fraud and money laundering in connection with the SPLC’s now-shuttered informant program.
Earlier this summer, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post provided an early glimpse into the salacious allegations against Beirich in an article titled “SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account.”
The prosecution’s claims against Beirich closely mirror that report — down to the allegation that she had a “romantic relationship” with an informant inside the National Alliance. But a more complicated image emerges beneath the tawdry headline.
There is no indication in the indictment that Beirich personally “funneled” that amount of money to the informant, who received money from the SPLC over the course of “over 20 years” — at a rate of roughly $60,000 a year or less. Beirich left the SPLC in 2019, indicating that she didn’t have control over his payments for at least four of the years at issue.
What the SPLC received in return from the informant is a separate story. In 2014, the informant broke into the headquarters of the National Alliance and stole 25 boxes of the neo-Nazi group’s sensitive secrets. Beirich then used that information to publish an exposé titled “Chaos at the Compound,” implicating the extremist groups in alleged tax fraud.
The Trump Justice Department’s theory of the case holds that the SPLC defrauded donors by claiming that they were trying to “dismantle” hate groups when they actually “manufactured ” the racism that they opposed. If that were the case, it would make little sense to implicate a neo-Nazi group in what the SPLC’s post described as a “prosecutable pattern of embezzlement and income tax fraud going back at least 15 years.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Pate temporarily scheduled Beirich and the SPLC institutionally to stand trial on the same date: Oct. 5, 2026.
Revisit my video interview from earlier this summer with investigative journalist Phil Williams about the allegations against Beirich by clicking here.
The judge needs to eliminate the board for negligence and appoint the old board and remove trump from ANY role
Maxwell received a sweetheart deal yet not one judge has called this out!