One of the most prominent appeals for leniency from the Trump administration hit a wall on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court denied Ghislaine Maxwell’s request to walk free after decades of enabling Jeffrey Epstein’s predatory abuse of young girls.
The onetime friend and associate of Epstein has been imprisoned since 2022 after being convicted on charges related to recruiting and grooming young girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. Maxwell’s appeal hinged on her argument that a 2007 non-prosecution agreement handed to Epstein should apply to her as well.
But in a brief memo, the high court simply declined to hear Maxwell’s case, leaving her with one alternative for clemency: direct intervention by President Donald Trump.
Doing so would almost immediately send political shockwaves through the White House, where officials spent months trying to extricate the president from his past association with Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial. A steady drip of revelations gave Democrats the opening they needed to call for the Trump administration to release all files related to the government’s investigation of Epstein.
The pressure campaign resulted in a visit to Maxwell, who was incarcerated at a maximum security prison in Florida, by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
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Over the course of two days, Blanche pressed Maxwell for additional details about Epstein’s associates, resulting in a list of 100 names in the late financier’s orbit. Days later, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum security facility in Texas.
Still, federal prosecutors opposed her release, arguing that a non-prosecution agreement between Epstein and the U.S. attorney of southern Florida applied only to that jurisdiction. Maxwell was charged and convicted in New York.
The agreement was later referred to as a “sweetheart deal” for Epstein, who pleaded guilty to underage prostitution charges in exchange for federal prosecutors bringing no further charges against him.
Maxwell, who was by Epstein’s side at the time, was not charged until his second arrest in 2018.
In her court filings, Maxwell argued that a person accused of a crime “should be able to rely on a promise that the United States will not prosecute again, without being subject to a gotcha” in another part of the country where prosecutors choose “to interpret that plain-language promise in some other way,” the NYT reported.
Maxwell further claimed that the 2007 agreement promising not to prosecute Epstein’s associates had “no geographic limitation.” She added that the “default rule” should be “a promise made on behalf of the United States binds the entire United States unless it says so affirmatively.”
In his own response to Maxwell’s argument, Solicitor General D. John Sauer called her analysis of the agreement “incorrect” and stated she had failed to “show that it would succeed in any court of appeals.”
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