WASHINGTON: Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas as her criminal case generates renewed public attention.
The federal Bureau of Prisons said Friday that Maxwell had been transferred to Bryan, Texas, but did not explain the circumstances. Her attorney, David Oscar Markus, also confirmed the move but declined to discuss the reasons for it.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the disgraced financier, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She had been held at a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, until her transfer to the prison camp in Texas, where other inmates include Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
Minimum-security federal prison camps house inmates the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk. Some don’t even have fences.
The prison camps were originally designed with low security to make operations easier and to allow inmates tasked with performing work at the prison, like landscaping and maintenance, to avoid repeatedly checking in and out of a main prison facility.
Prosecutors have said Epstein’s sex crimes could not have been done without Maxwell, but her lawyers have maintained that she was wrongly prosecuted and denied a fair trial, and have floated the idea of a pardon from President Donald Trump. They have also asked the US Supreme Court to take up her case.
Maxwell’s case has been the subject of heightened public focus since an outcry over the Justice Department’s statement last month saying that it would not be releasing any additional documents from the Epstein sex trafficking investigation. The decision infuriated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and elements of Trump’s base who had hoped to see proof of a government cover-up.
Since then, administration officials have tried to cast themselves as promoting transparency in the case, including by requesting from courts the unsealing of grand jury transcripts.
Maxwell, meanwhile, was interviewed at a Florida courthouse over two days last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and the House Oversight Committee had also said that it wanted to speak with Maxwell. Her lawyers said this week that they would be open to an interview but only if the panel were to ensure immunity from prosecution.
In a letter Friday to Maxwell’s lawyers, Rep. James Comer, the committee chair, wrote that the committee was willing to delay the deposition until after the resolution of Maxwell’s appeal to the Supreme Court. That appeal is expected to be resolved in late September.
Comer wrote that while Maxwell’s testimony was “vital” to the Republican-led investigation into Epstein, the committee would not provide immunity or any questions in advance of her testimony, as was requested by her team.
