Ghislaine Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to charges of helping associate Jeffrey Epstein recruit and groom underage girls to engage in illegal sexual acts in the mid-1990s
Credit: Getty
Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed her husband is “suffering” without her and that she does not pose a flight risk as she would never abandon him, in a request to be released from prison in time for Christmas.
The British socialite, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of helping associate Jeffrey Epstein recruit and groom underage girls to engage in illegal sexual acts in the mid-1990s, offered $28.5 million (£21m) in a fresh application for bail.
Ms Maxwell’s spouse, whose name has been redacted from the court documents, is understood by The Telegraph to be Scott Borgerson, an American tech CEO she married in 2016.
He describes her in the application filed at the US District Court in Manhattan on Monday as a “wonderful and loving person” and laments that their "family" has been split apart.
Ms Maxwell, 58, is being held at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn awaiting trial, which is scheduled for July.
Ghislaine Maxwell appears via video link during her arraignment hearing in Manhattan Federal Court in New York
Credit: Reuters
Her lawyers presented a substantial proposed bail package — one the largest offered to a US court in history and dwarfing the $10 million bond put forward by Bernard Madoff, the financier accused of one of the biggest frauds in Wall Street history.
More than $22 million of the assets pledged to secure the bond will come from the combined resources of Ms Maxwell and Mr Borgerson, 43, who has two children with a previous wife. The amount represents the couple’s declared combined wealth and assets, the court documents state.
At the time of her first bail hearing, 12 days after her arrest on July 2, the government described Ms Maxwell’s finances as “opaque” and suggested she potentially had “significant undisclosed wealth.”
In the fullest accounting of the heiress’s finances to date, she details $8 million in property, $650,000 in jewelry and $500,000 in cash, among other sources of income. It is claimed she transferred the majority of her assets to a trust controlled by her spouse shortly after their marriage.
Ms Maxwell says the remainder of the bond would be posted by seven close family and friends, whose names have also been redacted. It states some of them are UK residents — thought to be her brothers.
“If Ms Maxwell was to flee, she would be leaving behind the family that has been the center of her life, she would be abandoning her spouse, who is already suffering without her presence,” the filing says.
My Borgerson, in a letter to Judge Alison Nathan, appealed for his wife’s release: "The person described in the criminal charges is not the person we know. I have never witnessed anything inappropriate with Ghislaine; quite the contrary, the Ghislaine I know is a wonderful and loving person."
Her lawyers, Christian Everdell, Mark Cohen, Jeffrey Pagliuca and Laura Menninger, hope that detailing Ms Maxwell’s connections with the US and her relationship with her husband, which she failed to mention in the first application for bail, will help her secure release.
Ms Maxwell’s defence claimed, however, that if the names were made public, they would be “subjected to some of the same relentless and harassing media intrusion and personal threats that Ms Maxwell has experienced for years.”
Her lawyers state that is why her “spouse” was not included in the first request for bail.
“In the three months after her arrest, Ms Maxwell was the subject of over 6,500 national media articles,” they write. “That exceeds the number of articles that mentioned such high-profile defendants as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, and Keith Raniere in the 90-day period following their arrests, combined.”
UK-born Ms Maxwell, a naturalised US citizen who has lived in America for almost 30 years, said she was also prepared to waive her right to contest extradition to the UK and France, where she has citizenship.
She said she would agree to live with her partner at a New York residence under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance until her trial.
"Ms Maxwell wants to stay in New York and have her day in court so that she can clear her name and return to her family," the filing said.
“The notion that Ms Maxwell could somehow flee to a foreign country during a worldwide pandemic, while being supervised and monitored 24 hours a day and with the eyes of the global press corps on her every minute, without being caught, is absurd.”
Ms Maxwell’s lawyers point to the release on bail of high-profile defendants with financial means and foreign citizenship on smaller bonds with less or no security with similar or less restrictive conditions, including Madoff, late Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and Ali Sadr, a banker accused of violating US sanctions by funnelling money to Iranian entities.
They also sought to highlight what they described as weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, claiming the allegations against her are “based on the uncorroborated testimony of a handful of witnesses about events that took place over 25 years ago.”
Judge Nathan will consider the bail application and is expected to make a decision in the coming days.
Свежие комментарии