{"id":30168,"date":"2025-12-18T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T10:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=30168"},"modified":"2025-12-18T05:00:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T10:00:13","slug":"ghislaine-maxwell-asks-court-to-vacate-her-20-year-prison-sentence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2025\/12\/18\/ghislaine-maxwell-asks-court-to-vacate-her-20-year-prison-sentence\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghislaine Maxwell asks court to vacate her 20-year prison sentence"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"ssrcss-suhx0k-RichTextComponentWrapper ep2nwvo0\" data-component=\"text-block\">\n<div class=\"ssrcss-1o5p6v2-RichTextContainer e5tfeyi1\">\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has asked a federal court to vacate or amend her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maxwell, a former British socialite, claims that &#8220;substantial new evidence&#8221; has emerged from civil cases, investigative reports and other documents demonstrating that she did not receive a fair trial, according to a court filing in New York.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The appeal follows several failed attempts from Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021, to try to reduce her prison sentence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It comes as the justice department faces a 19 December deadline to release files related to federal investigations into Epstein.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ssrcss-suhx0k-RichTextComponentWrapper ep2nwvo0\" data-component=\"text-block\">\n<div class=\"ssrcss-1o5p6v2-RichTextContainer e5tfeyi1\">\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maxwell filed the petition pro se &#8211; without an attorney &#8211; on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Southern District of New York, where Maxwell made the request, declined to comment on the petition.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maxwell was convicted for her role in luring underage girls for her former boyfriend, the disgraced financier Epstein, to abuse. Epstein died in prison in 2019.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In the new court filing, Maxwell argues that several new pieces of evidence mean that &#8220;no reasonable juror would have convicted her&#8221;. In one example she cites, a juror supposedly hid a history of sexual abuse during the jury selection process that could have hurt their ability to be unbiased during her trial.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Federal judges in New York and Florida recently cleared the way for grand jury material related to investigations into Maxwell and Epstein to be publicly released so that the justice department can meet the deadline that Congress has set in the Epstein Transparency Act, passed last month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maxwell was moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum-security facility in Texas in August, after she was interviewed by Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche about her ties to Epstein.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She has appealed her case numerous times and lost. In October, the US Supreme Court said it would not hear an appeal from Maxwell.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c9qedpnw0w0o\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\">Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has asked a federal court to vacate or amend her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell, a former British socialite, claims that &#8220;substantial new evidence&#8221; <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2025\/12\/18\/ghislaine-maxwell-asks-court-to-vacate-her-20-year-prison-sentence\/\" title=\"Ghislaine Maxwell asks court to vacate her 20-year prison sentence\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109,2,3],"tags":[11929,417,6865,316,521,5238,9993],"class_list":{"0":"post-30168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headline","8":"category-news","9":"category-usa","10":"tag-epstein-transparency-act","11":"tag-florida","12":"tag-ghislaine-maxwell","13":"tag-jeffrey-epstein","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-sex-trafficking","16":"tag-southern-district-of-new-york","17":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30169,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30168\/revisions\/30169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}