Ghislaine Maxwell pleads not guilty as she fights for $5M bail

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Ghislaine Maxwell was denied bail on Tuesday as she pleaded not guilty to the sex trafficking charges brought against her. 

U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan denied Maxwell’s proposal of a $5 million bond co-signed by two of her sisters and backed up more than $3.75 million in property in the UK.

Maxwell’s legal team had said she would be confined to a ‘luxury hotel’ in the New York area, surrender all her travel documents and be subject to GPS monitoring.

Judge Nathan ruled the 58-year-old British socialite was a significant flight risk, citing her ‘substantial international’ ties and ‘extraordinary financial resources’, setting an anticipated trial date for July 12, 2021.  

Maxwell is accused of grooming girls as young as 14 for Jeffrey Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 1997, a period when she was his girlfriend. 

She faces up to 35 years in prison if found guilty of the charges, as prosecutors  successfully argued that along with her three passports, connections to some of the world’s most powerful people and her own fortune of more than $10 million – Maxwell has every incentive to try and flee. 

Maxwell will return to the fortress-like Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where she is wearing paper clothes to ensure she doesn’t kill herself. 

She appeared at court via video link dressed in a brown shirt on Tuesday afternoon, with her normally short hair in a bun and not wearing a face mask, according to reports.   

New York prosecutors said Maxwell was ‘skilled at living in hiding’ has ‘few if any’ community ties and therefore should be denied bail because she is the ‘very definition of a flight risk’. 

At the hearing, two victims also argued she was a flight risk, with one writing in a statement: ‘Without Ghislaine, Jeffrey couldn’t have done what he did. She is a predator and a monster.’  

Maxwell is being closely watched as the Department of Justice wants to ensure she does not kill herself like her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself last August while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Prosecutors argued against Maxwell being granted bail, citing that due to holding both French and British passports, she has the ability to ‘live beyond the reach of extradition indefinitely’. 

Prosecutor Allison Moe said when Maxwell bought her $1 million Bradford, New Hampshire home, she toured the home back in November of 2019 using the alias of Janet Marshall and claimed to the real estate agent that she worked as a journalist. 

Moe said: ‘The real estate agent told the FBI agent the buyers for the house introduced themselves as Scott and Janet Marshall. Both had British accents.

‘Scott Marshall told her he was retired from the British military and was currently working on a book. Janet Marshall described herself as a journalist.’

Last summer, DailyMail.com previously tracked down Maxwell in Manchester-by-the-Sea, living at a home owned by her tech CEO lover Scott Borgerson. It is unclear if the man who toured the New Hampshire home with Maxwell was Borgerson.

Moe added: ‘She is good at living under an assumed identity. There really can be no question that she can live in hiding.’  

Moe also read out a victim statement from a woman identified as Jane Doe, who also made the case that Maxwell was a flight risk. 

The victim said she knew Maxwell for 10 years and the socialite intended to ‘deliver’ her to Epstein, knowing the ‘heinous dehumanization that awaited me’. 

She described Maxwell as ‘sociopathic’ and would ‘have done anything to get what she wanted – to satisfy Jeffrey Epstein’.  

The woman claimed that Maxwell ‘was in charge’ and ‘egged’ Epstein on. 

She added that ‘if she is out, I need to be protected’, citing a phone call she received in the middle of the night threatening her two-year-old child. 

Victim Annie Farmer also spoke at the hearing, detailing how she met Maxwell when she was 16 years old. Farmer has previously gone on record with her claims against Maxwell. 

She said Maxwell ‘has never shown any remorse [and] tormented her survivors… She has associates across the globe, some of great means.’ 

Maxwell’s attorney Mark Cohen argued she was not a flight risk, claiming she has community ties and is ‘part of a very large and close family’. 

He said: ‘Our client is not Jeffrey Epstein, and she has been the target of endless media spin’. 

Prosecutor Moe later responded to Cohen’s claim of ‘media spin’, saying: ‘These are the facts. It is not dirt, it is not spin, it is evidence to the court.’ 

Cohen claimed Maxwell had received numerous threats and denied that she had refused to open her front door to the FBI when they raided her home on July 2.

He claimed her front door was unlocked and the windows were open, saying she ‘surrendered’ to the agents.  

Addressing reports that Maxwell had wrapped her mobile phone in tin foil, which prosecutors called a ‘seemingly misguided effort to evade detection’ by law enforcement, Cohen claimed her phone had been hacked and she had to preserve the phone as evidence.

Cohen went above the issue of Maxwell being a flight risk to complain that the charges against her are from 25 years ago, calling the indictment ‘an effort to dance around’ the controversial non-prosecution sweetheart deal Epstein and his associates received in Florida in 2007. 

Officials said her conduct during the 8.30am raid on July 2nd at the property called ‘Tuckedaway’ in the rural town of Bradford, New Hampshire was ‘troubling’.

They wrote that when the FBI arrived they were confronted by a locked gate which they forced their way through.

The filing said: ‘As the agents approached the front door to the main house, they announced themselves as FBI agents and directed the defendant to open the door.

‘Through a window, the agents saw the defendant ignore the direction to open the door and, instead, try to flee to another room in the house, quickly shutting a door behind her. Agents were ultimately forced to breach the door in order to enter the house to arrest the defendant, who was found in an interior room in the house.

‘Moreover, as the agents conducted a security sweep of the house, they also noticed a cell phone wrapped in tin foil on top of a desk, a seemingly misguided effort to evade detection, not by the press or public, which of course would have no ability to trace her phone or intercept her communications, but by law enforcement’.

After Maxwell, the daughter of late newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, was arrested the FBI spoke to a security guard who worked on the property who said that her brother had hired him from a company staffed with former British military soldiers.

The filing states: ‘The guard informed the FBI that the defendant had not left the property during his time working there, and that instead, the guard was sent to make purchases for the property using the credit card. As these facts make plain, there should be no question that the defendant is skilled at living in hiding’.

In their filings to the court Maxwell’s lawyers had argued that she is at increased risk of catching the coronavirus whilst in prison. So far there have only been five cases and no deaths at the prison. 

They claim that the restrictions on access to her lawyers caused by the pandemic would mean it was impossible for her to get a fair trial.

The prosecutors said that in fact the prison had made substantial efforts to accommodate her and keep her safe.

In a 19-page document prosecutors from the Southern District of New York dismissed her offer of a $5 million bail package backed up by $3.75 million in UK properties as ‘little more than an unsecured bond’.

It was not enough that she be subjected to 24 hour monitoring and remain under house arrest because she has ‘not only the motive to flee, but the means to do so swiftly and effectively’. 

The case against her is ‘strong’ and multiple victims have provided ‘detailed, credible evidence of the defendant’s criminal conduct’ – with more women coming forward in the past week.

The victims have made clear they want Maxwell remanded in custody and say they were ‘directly abused as a result of Ghislaine Maxwell’s actions’.

The document states: ‘While that conduct did take place a number of years ago, it is unsurprising that the victims have been unable to forget the defendant’s predatory conduct after all this time, as traumatic childhood experiences often leave indelible marks.

‘The recollections of the victims bear striking resemblances that corroborate each other and provide compelling proof of the defendant’s active participation in a disturbing scheme to groom and sexually abuse minor girls’.

The prosecutors said that it was ‘curious’ that Maxwell claimed to have access to millions of dollars had not offered ‘a single dime’ as collateral for her bond.

They claimed that Maxwell’s finances were ‘completely opaque’ and she had not even indicated which properties she would use for her bond.

Some of the co-signers are ‘themselves so wealthy that it would be no financial burden whatsoever’ if they lost their $5 million by Maxwell skipping bail, the document states.  

Maxwell was arrested on July 2 at her $1 million home called ‘Tuckedaway’ in the rural town of Bradford, New Hampshire.

According to reports she had moved 36 times in the year since Epstein killed himself in jail out of fear for her safety.

The FBI have said they were quietly keeping tabs on her and smashed in her door during an 8.30am raid.

In her filing last Friday, Maxwell’s lawyers Mark Cohen and Jeff Pagliuca wrote that Maxwell ‘vigorously denies the charges, intends to fight them, and is entitled to the presumption of innocence’.

They claimed that after Epstein’s death last August ‘the media focus quickly shifted to our client – wrongly trying to substitute her for Epstein – even though she’d had no contact with Epstein for more than a decade, had never been charged with a crime or been found liable in any civil litigation, and has always denied any allegations of claimed misconduct.’

They wrote that it was ‘open season’ on Maxwell and she had received death threats which led her to hire security guards.

Maxwell’s lawyers also revealed that her family is standing by her and that she remains close to her nephews and nieces.

Epstein’s victims have long demanded Maxwell’s arrest and lawyers for them say that a slew of new accusers have come forward since she was apprehended.

Prosecutors will likely be looking to do a plea deal with Maxwell to lighten some of the six charges against her, two of which are perjury for allegedly lying during depositions.

They will be questioning her about powerful men in Epstein’s orbit including Bill Clinton with whom she flew on Epstein’s private jet, called the ‘Lolita Express’, on a tour of Africa in 2002.

Maxwell was also good friends with Prince Andrew and one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts, claims she was loaned out to the Duke three times for sex when she was 17.