NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. 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.
Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who reviewed the transcripts of the witness testimony heard by the grand jury and other evidence the panel saw, wrote that 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 that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new,” Engelmayer 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.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)