Federal Judge Loretta Preska Releases Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s Deposition As Ghislaine Maxwell Moves To Exempt Her Own

Ghislaine Maxwell and her attorneys have this week opened two battlefronts in the discovery phase of her trial before Judge Loretta Preska. Most urgently, her lawyers filed a request on Wednesday evening, July 29, requesting reconsideration from Judge Preska of her July 23 ruling to release the 400-plus-page transcript of Maxwell’s seven-hour deposition in the 2015 defamation suit brought by alleged Epstein victim Virginia Robert Giuffre, among other documents from that civil action. Judge Preska exempted the Maxwell transcript and another deposition transcript from an unnamed “Doe 1” from the release, which affords Maxwell’s lawyers time to appeal with the Second Circuit. The first tranche of documents, including the Maxwell deposition, was to have been made public on July 30, hence the urgency of the late filing on July 29.

The formidable Judge Preska was not especially happy about it. She wrote in response to Maxwell’s lawyers that: “The Court is troubled — but not surprised — that Ms. Maxwell has yet again sought to muddy the water as the clock clicks closer to midnight.”

In turn, Judge Preska began releasing on Thursday night, June 30, some of the originally-planned documents, one of which, named “Document 16” according to the Miami Herald, was a 24-page transcript of a deposition of Virginia Roberts Giuffre. In it, Ms. Giuffre reportedly names some of the people who traveled with Epstein, which include names known to have flown with Epstein, such as former president Bill Clinton, model Naomi Campbell, former Sony Records president Tommy Mottola, and magician David Copperfield. Socially, anyway, as everything was with Epstein, the shortlist from this deposition has a rushed, wholesale, celebrity-collection-by-the-yard atmosphere. Not that all of them were on the plane for the same flights.

In this deposition, Giuffre does reserve special analysis for Bill Clinton, whom, she reports under oath, did visit Little Saint James, Epstein’s private island. Giuffre states that Maxwell, along with two girls from New York, were on the island at the same time.

Maxwell’s deposition is not the only document from that 2015 civil suit to have its release protested by the defense, but it does contain intimate personal detail and was, technically, under a protection order and classified as confidential, all of which does bear a certain legal weight. Judge Preska’s July 23 ruling to release that and the rest of the documents to the public overrode that protection order. The exempted documents are as likely now as they were last week, upon release by Judge Preska, to go public. If the Second Circuit turns the Maxwell attorneys down, those two exempted transcripts will go public next week.

This sort of jousting in discovery is ordinary, but extraordinarily telling: It means that Ghislaine Maxwell is, rightly, worried about what she said to Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawyers under oath in 2016, and she’s fighting not to have those 400 possibly-incriminating pages of intimate personal detail minutely dissected in the press before she comes to trial.

Simultaneously, Maxwell’s lawyers are highly aware that the federal prosecutors hold her 2015 deposition. How and when they got it is unclear. What is clear is that the perjury charges under which Maxwell now labors in detention stem from the prosecution’s reading of her deposition, of which there are two transcripts, both of which, her lawyers say in the letter to Judge Preska, are in the hands of the government. Maxwell’s lawyers state explicitly that the use of the transcripts in this way by the government “…is a serious violation of the Protection Order and merits the commencement of contempt proceedings.”

Contempt might seem a heavy charge to level against the prosecution in pre-trial jousting, and it will be sporting to see whether Judge Preska will rule that the prosecution is now in contempt, but then again, Maxwell faces a possible 35 years inside under the charges brought against her. The takeaway from this early sword-rattling is that next year’s trial is going to be no-holds-barred.