By JENNIFER PELTZ, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, wants to keep grand jury records secret in the sex trafficking case that sent her to prison, her lawyers said Tuesday as prosecutors continued urging a court to release some of those records in the criminal case-turned-political fireball.
Maxwell hasn’t seen the material herself, her attorneys said — the grand jury process is conducted behind closed doors. But she opposes unsealing what her lawyers described as potentially “hearsay-laden” transcripts of grand jury testimony, which was given in secret and without her lawyers there to challenge it.
“Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable and her due process rights remain,” attorneys David O. Markus and Melissa Madrigal wrote.
A message seeking comment from prosecutors was not immediately returned. Government attorneys have been trying to quell a clamor for transparency by seeking the transcripts’ release — though the government also says the public already knows much of what’s in the documents.
Most of the information “was made publicly available at trial or has otherwise been publicly reported through the public statements of victims and witnesses,” prosecutors wrote in court papers Monday. They noted that the disclosures excluded some victims’ and witnesses’ names.
Prosecutors had also said last week that some of what the grand jurors heard eventually came out at Maxwell’s 2021 trial and in various victims’ lawsuits. There were only two grand jury witnesses, both of them law enforcement officials, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors made clear Monday that they’re seeking to unseal only the transcripts of grand jury witnesses’ testimony, not the exhibits that accompanied it. But they are also working to parse how much of the exhibits also became public record over the years.
While prosecutors have sought to temper expectations about any new revelations from the grand jury proceedings, they aren’t proposing to release a cache of other information the government collected while looking into Epstein.
The filing aimed to support their request to release the usually secret records amid a public clamor for more transparency about the investigation into Epstein, six years after the financier died in prison. Maxwell, his former girlfriend, was later convicted of helping him prey on underage girls.
The transcript face-off comes six years after authorities said Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges and four years after Maxwell was convicted.
Some of President Donald Trump’s allies spent years suggesting there was more to the Epstein saga than met the eye and calling for more disclosures. A few got powerful positions in Trump’s Justice Department — and then faced backlash after it abruptly announced that nothing more would be released and that a long-rumored Epstein “client list” doesn’t exist.
After trying unsuccessfully to change the subject and denigrating his own supporters for staying interested in Epstein, the Republican president told Attorney General Pam Bondi to ask courts to unseal the grand jury transcripts in the case.
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