Though
Epstein is the only one named in the new indictment, there are court
documents that could shed light on Maxwell’s alleged involvement: around
2,000 pages from a 2015 defamation case filed by a woman named Virginia
Giuffre, who publicly claimed in a 2009 lawsuit against Epstein that Maxwell had recruited her into Epstein’s sex ring to be a “sex slave” when she was just 16 and working
as changing-room assistant at Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. After
being recruited, she says, she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew
and Alan Dershowitz; she also claimed in the 2009 lawsuit, which was
settled out of court, that Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her,
the Wall Street Journal reports. In response to Giuffre’s claims since 2009, Maxwell has called them “entirely false”
on numerous occasions, compelling the latter to file the 2015 lawsuit.
But the case never went to trial: In May 2017, it was settled the day
before the trial was scheduled to start, and a U.S. District Court judge
ordered a significant portion of the filings to be sealed; the records
that were made public were heavily blacked out.
Furthermore, this past April, Giuffre filed a new defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz,
alleging that he falsely claimed that she made up the allegations
against him; in that suit, another woman, Maria Farmer, said in a sworn
affidavit that Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her in 1996 while
she was working on an art project at the Ohio Mansion of L Brands CEO Les Wexner.
