Charging Conference - Ghislaine Maxwell Trial

“She was fully available to the defense - they did not call her.” - Andrew Rohrbach on Virginia Roberts

Though all 6 counts against Ghislaine Maxwell stood this morning, her defense did manage to get some changes to her charges that may help her with the jury.

In many cases in the original charging document, reference is made to “minors.”  This was agreed to be changed to “an individual under 18 years old,” or “an individual under 17 years old.”

This could be relevant because the age of consent in some of the states where illegal sexual activity is alleged to have occurred is under 18.  But it may not help too much—the age of consent for federal sex trafficking charges is still 18.

The defense also successfully got the word “foreign” removed from counts that referenced foreign and interstate commerce.  The government, led by Andrew Rohrbach, tried to argue that “foreign” should be kept, because some of the flight logs introduced into evidence showed Virginia Roberts on flights out of the country with Epstein and Maxwell.  

But Christian Everdell countered that there was no testimony in the trial as to what the purpose of these trips was.  For the jury to infer that Virginia Roberts was enticed would be improper, he argued.  The only testimony related to enticement and Virginia Roberts, Everdell said, was testimony from Carolyn that she herself had been enticed by Roberts (Carolyn testified that when she was 13, Virginia, then 18, told her she could make “a lot” of money by giving a massage to Jeffrey Epstein).

The defense also complained that they weren’t able to call witnesses on an equal level with the government. They said that the government was able to grant their witnesses immunity, while they couldn’t do the same thing themselves.

They wanted to call Sarah Kellen, who was one of the unindicted co-conspirators from Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement. But Kellen would have invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The defense claimed that the government could have called her and granted her immunity. They likely would have advanced an argument that it was Kellen who ran Epstein’s enterprise, with Maxwell unaware and uninvolved in what was going on.

The government said there was one witness who was fully willing to testify, Virginia Roberts, but neither side brought her in for testimony.

“She was fully available to the defense,” Rohrbach said, but “they did not call her.”

The judge seemed eager to get things finished as fast as possible on Monday, asking the government could make their closing argument in two hours. Maurene Comey said that, while they had already streamlined their case, there was evidence they hadn’t had a chance to introduce to the jury yet, and which they needed time to walk them through. With this in mind, Comey asked for two and a half hours. For the rebuttal, Comey also asked for longer than the 30 minutes Nathan proposed.

“Ok, 35 minutes,” Nathan said.

Asked if she got everything she wanted from the charging conference, defense attorney Bobbi Sternheim said “If we got everything we wanted, we wouldn’t still be here.”

“You can’t always get what you want,” Jeff Pagliuca said. “But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Andrew Rohrbach, for his part, “thinks he did a good job too,” said somebody close to him.