Ghislaine Maxwell asks for case to be dismissed because jurors weren’t diverse enough

Ghislaine Maxwell asks judge to dismiss her case, claiming jurors who indicted her didn’t include enough blacks or Hispanics.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Picture: Getty Images.

Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been charged with recruiting teenaged girls for sex, has asked a judge to dismiss her case because the pool of jurors who indicted her was not diverse enough.

Lawyers representing British socialite argued there weren’t enough black and Hispanic jurors included in the pool.

Ms Maxwell, 59, is charged with recruiting and grooming three teenage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein between 1994 and 1997, and partaking in some of the abuse herself.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, prosecutors opted to use a grand jury empaneled in White Plains to indict Maxwell, instead of jurors from New York City, Ms Maxwells lawyers said in court papers.

“In doing so, the government procured Ms. Maxwell’s indictment using a grand jury pool that excluded residents of the community in which Ms. Maxwell allegedly committed the offences with which she is charged, and in which she will be tried, in favour of a grand jury drawn from a community in which Black and Hispanic residents are significantly under-represented by comparison,” the filing said.

“The fact that Ms Maxwell herself is neither Black nor Hispanic does not deprive of her of standing to raise this challenge,” the lawyers added. They argued that the US constitution “entitles every defendant to object to a [pool] that is not designed to represent a fair cross section of the community, whether or not the systematically excluded groups are groups to which he himself belongs”.

The lawyers also claimed Ms Maxwell was protected by a non-prosecution deal convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein reached with federal prosecutors in 2007.

The terms of that agreement sought to protect Epstein and his closest associates, but Ms Maxwell was not identified by name in the document which was signed as Mr Epstein agreed to plead guilty to state charges in 2008.

The arguments are among a dozen motions Ms Maxwell’s lawyers filed on Monday seeking to dismiss or reduce the federal charges she faces.

Epstein’s lawyers planned to use the non-prosecution agreement in his defence against federal charges filed against him in 2019, before he took his life in his Manhattan jail cell a month after his arrest.