The Supreme Court declined to review Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal, in a rejection that could keep the sex trafficker locked up for another decade if President Donald Trump doesn’t grant her clemency.
Monday’s denial, which was the most likely outcome of Maxwell’s petition, follows an appeals court ruling that upheld her 2021 conviction in New York for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
It takes four justices to grant review of a petition. The denial came in an order list containing actions in pending appeals as the justices start the 2025-26 term.
The federal Bureau of Prisons lists Maxwell’s release date as July 17, 2037. The 63-year-old was moved to a minimum-security facility after she had an unusual meeting this summer with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (a former Trump personal lawyer), during which she said she never saw Trump do anything “inappropriate.” Her conviction followed Epstein’s 2019 death in custody while he was being held on his own related charges.
Monday’s denial comes amid political fallout from the Trump administration’s attempts to fend off intense backlash to its refusal to release all the information it has on the late disgraced financier.
The legal argument in Maxwell’s petition centered on Epstein’s notorious non-prosecution agreement in Florida that said, in part, that “the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.” She argued that the agreement should have applied to her New York case. The Trump Justice Department opposed high court review, arguing, among other things, that the agreement wasn’t intended to bind districts outside of Florida. Maxwell had urged the justices to take her case not only to resolve her appeal but also to settle a split among the nation’s courts about how to interpret such agreements. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers backed her appeal, asking the justices to grant review and “resolve the split among the circuits and ensure that defendants and their counsel can rely on the promises made by the United States in its written agreements.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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