(Bloomberg) -- Ghislaine Maxwell asked a judge to throw out her sex-trafficking conviction and 20-year prison sentence on the eve of a deadline for the Justice Department to turn over a trove of documents relating to her ex-boyfriend, the disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell filed a long-shot petition for a judge to upend the guilty verdict based on what she claims is “substantial new evidence” that has emerged since her 2021 trial. The 63-year-old filed the request pro se, or without a lawyer, from the Bryan, Texas, federal prison where she is serving her sentence.
The new evidence “shows that exculpatory information was withheld, false testimony presented, and material facts misrepresented to the jury and the court,” she wrote in the 51-page filing, the upshot of which is “a complete miscarriage of justice, rendering petitioner’s conviction invalid, unsafe and infirm.”
Material related to her case could be released by the Department of Justice ahead of a Friday deadline as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. President Donald Trump had opposed the release of the data for months, but reversed course in the face of public pressure to disclose more information about Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019.
The new filing comes after Maxwell has lost previous appeals of the 2021 verdict, where she was convicted of participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking of women and girls. The US Supreme Court rejected her bid to overturn the conviction in October.
Maxwell said that new evidence has come from related civil lawsuits, government disclosures, press reports and other sources.
The case is Maxwell v. US, 25-cv-10464, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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