A US judge denied on Monday the justice department's bid to unseal records from the grand jury that indicted the late financier Jeffrey Epstein's partner Ghislaine Maxwell on sex trafficking charges, writing that the records did not answer lingering questions from the public about their crimes or Epstein's death.
Manhattan-based US district judge Paul Engelmayer, who reviewed the transcripts of the witness testimony heard by the grand jury and other evidence the panel saw, wrote the government's assertion that the materials would reveal meaningful new information about Epstein's and Maxwell's crimes was demonstrably false.
A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials the government proposes to unseal would learn next to nothing new, Engelmayer wrote.
Insofar as the motion to unseal implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they are definitely not that, the judge wrote.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction on sex-trafficking charges. Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty.