A fourth set of court documents from recently unsealed court documents related to a defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell suggest the convicted sex trafficker withheld an email and Tumbler account from discovery.
Virginia Giuffre filed the 2015 civil defamation suit against Ms. Maxwell after she accused Ms. Guiffre of lying about the alleged abuse she underwent at the hands of the now-deceased Jeffrey Epstein when she was underage.
The case led to the deposition of dozens of people, which took place over two years before it was settled in 2017.
According to The Independent, that first judge ordered the documents related to the case to be sealed. However, The Miami Herald—the media publication that first reported on Mr. Epstein’s alleged trafficking—sued to have the documents unsealed.
Though Ms. Maxwell’s attorneys fought to keep them sealed, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska— appointed by George H. W. Bush—ordered their public release, which included revealing the names previously known as John and Jane Does.
In this new set of 17 documents, released on Jan. 8, Ms. Guiffre’s attorney, Meredith Schultz, said Ms. Maxwell didn’t disclose her accounts, such as Linkedin, Dropbox, and Tumblr, with which she used the email address [email protected].
According to the transcript beginning on page 37, during a 2016 hearing, Ms. Schultz told the U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet that Ms. Maxwell used the email account to register at retail stores to intercept spam; however, Ms. Schultz said she had information that showed she used it for social media and online sharing of files and photographs.
“We also found evidence that she used it for her Tumbler account,” Ms. Schultz said. “That is a social media website that also has inbox and messaging where over 22 percent of the content on this social website is pornographic and over 16 percent of the accounts created therein contain exclusively pornographic material.”
Though Ms. Maxwell’s attorneys “had plenty of time” to facilitate the disclosure of the account, Ms. Schultz said it remained unavailable.
“Throughout the process, there are still some basic and fundamental questions that have not been answered,” Ms. Schultz said. “What email account did she use in 1999, in 2000, and in 2001? Are they still active? Are they archived somewhere? What communications does she have in her social media accounts? What documents and files does she have in Dropbox? The fact that we don’t have answers to these questions 12 months into this litigation is troubling.”
‘Not True, Period’
Ms. Maxwell’s attorney, Jeffrey Pagliuca, argued that Ms. Maxwell had not been asked about the account.“There has never been a request in a deposition like that,” Mr. Pagliuca said. “And so this motion practice is now seemingly turning into some sort of grand jury query here.”
He said that the legal team “spent many hours and thousands of dollars” searching for all content on Ms. Maxwell’s computers for disclosure.
“Well, what you are in effect saying to me, I think, is that you have answered the inquiry as to what accounts she has because you have searched the computers,” Judge Sweet said, to which Mr. Pagliuca responded by stating that no one had asked.
“I can tell you what we did, and I think that answers the question, but what we did was, we collected the devices, we had them forensically searched,” he said, later adding that “all of these things have been searched and everything that is responsive has been produced.”
He also said Ms. Schultz had not conferred with him about the email account.
“If somebody said to me, oh, we found X, Y and Z, go look at it,” he said. “I would go look at it and be concerned about it, but nobody has ever given me that information, and they tell it to you here without me having any opportunity to look into it and rebut it because I believe that I certainly will be able to because I believe what they’re telling you is not true, period.”
According to the transcript, the judge denied the motion to bring in additional information and ordered the parties to discuss the issue.
In response to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, Tumblr confirmed that [email protected] is an existing Tumblr account but cannot disclose more information about it because of the company’s privacy rules. A spokesperson for Tumblr added that sexually explicit material is no longer allowed on the site based on its community guidelines.
In 2019, Mr. Epstein was facing up to 45 years in prison for sex trafficking when he was found dead in his prison cell of an alleged suicide.
In 2022, Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years for her involvement in child sex trafficking.
Photographs taken by Sarah Ransome found in newly released court documents in a civil suit against Ghislaine Maxwell. Courtesy of United States District Court Southern District of New York
Sarah Ransome
Also found in the Jan. 8 documents are photographs provided by Sarah Ransome, who alleged that Mr. Epstein had abused her on his island, Little St. James.In one transcript citation, Ms. Ransome alleged Ms. Maxwell bullied the girls who didn’t comply with her demands, and at one point, she tried to escape the island.
“I tried to swim off the island,” she said. “I tried to escape from an island during the evening to try and escape from her because if I didn’t lose weight, they would cut me out of their—financially off.”
She later said that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell took girls from underprivileged families, gave them accommodations, then threatened to leave them “homeless and starving” in New York if they didn’t meet his demands.
“And that’s what he held over my head, exactly like he did with [redacted] and the other girls,” she said.
When asked if Ms. Ransome why she was coming forward, she was quoted in the transcript as stating that she wanted Mr. Epstein’s operation to come to a stop.
“Seeing as I’m going to be a parent myself, I can’t really live with myself, knowing that there’s a pedophile with my kids on this planet,” she said. “So, as a responsible human being, I thought that I would come forward.”
