Giuffre v. Maxwell

Giuffre v. Maxwell (No. 1:15-cv-07433) is a defamation suit filed on September 21, 2015 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell, after Maxwell, through a representative, publicly called Giuffre's account of recruitment and trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein lies. The claim settled on May 24, 2017. The discovery it produced, including Maxwell's own 2016 deposition, the basis of two perjury counts later brought against her, stayed under seal and was fought over by the press, by Alan Dershowitz, by pseudonymous non-parties, and finally by the Department of Justice for more than nine years after the settlement. In 2026 the court authorized the government to release, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, material it had taken from Giuffre's law firm by grand jury subpoena in 2019.¹²³

Filing and Discovery

The case was assigned to Judge Robert W. Sweet. Giuffre was represented by Sigrid S. McCawley and other lawyers of Boies Schiller Flexner, the firm of David Boies; Maxwell by Laura A. Menninger and Jeffrey S. Pagliuca of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman in Denver. Maxwell moved to dismiss and to stay discovery on December 1, 2015; Sweet denied the motion to dismiss in February 2016, and Maxwell answered with a jury demand on March 14, 2016. On March 17, 2016 Sweet signed the protective order (ECF No. 62) under which the parties designated deposition transcripts and exhibits confidential and filed them under seal.¹

Among the witnesses deposed was Johanna Sjoberg, who testified in 2016 to an incident with Prince Andrew and a caricature puppet at Epstein's Manhattan house in 2001, and Maxwell herself, whose 2016 answers under oath became Counts Seven and Eight of the 2021 superseding indictment in United States v. Maxwell; those counts were severed and dismissed at her sentencing.⁴⁵

On January 6, 2017 Maxwell moved for summary judgment. The briefs were filed under seal, and on March 22, 2017 Sweet denied the motion in a heavily redacted 76-page opinion. The parties settled on May 24, 2017, on undisclosed terms, and the court's docket records the case as terminated the next day. The summary judgment record remained sealed.²

The First Unsealing Fight

Three outsiders sought the sealed record. Alan Dershowitz, whom Giuffre had accused and who denied her account, moved to intervene on August 11, 2016; the writer Michael Cernovich moved on January 19, 2017 to unseal the summary judgment record; and the Miami Herald and its reporter Julie K. Brown moved on April 6, 2018, after the settlement, to unseal the entire docket. Sweet denied the requests. On July 3, 2019, three days before Epstein's arrest in New York, the Second Circuit ruled in Brown v. Maxwell that the summary judgment materials had to be unsealed and that the remaining sealed filings required individualized review, with a partial dissent that would have unsealed only Sweet's decision. About 2,000 pages of the record were unsealed on August 9, 2019, including a 2016 deposition in which Epstein repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege and sworn statements in which Giuffre named men to whom she said she had been trafficked, who denied it. Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center the next morning. Prison officials later cited the unsealing, "combined with a lack of significant interpersonal connections," among the factors contributing to his death.²⁶

The case passed to Judge Loretta Preska after Sweet's death in 2019. On remand she held that "only motions actually decided by Judge Sweet," together with the documents relevant to his decisions on them, were judicial documents carrying a presumption of public access, and she issued orders in December 2019 and January 2020 setting an unsealing protocol on that basis.⁷⁸ On July 23, 2020, three weeks after Maxwell's arrest, Preska ordered the unsealing of materials including Maxwell's April 2016 deposition transcript. Maxwell appealed and asked that the appeal be consolidated with her criminal appeal; a panel of Judges Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler, and Raggi denied consolidation and affirmed on October 19, 2020, calling her arguments that her interests superseded the presumption of access "meritless." Boies argued the appeal for Giuffre.⁹

The Doe Appeals and the January 2024 Release

Preska conducted further hearings on the protocol in January 2021, July 2021, and April 2022. On August 9, 2022 she ruled on a request by TGP Communications to unseal, and the Second Circuit affirmed in July 2023. On November 18, 2022 she ordered a broad unsealing in an oral ruling. A non-party designated "John Doe 107" and a non-party designated "Jane Doe 171" appealed. Jane Doe 171 moved to re-seal transcript material in December 2022, the Herald opposed, and Preska denied the motion on December 11, 2022. Between December 2022 and January 2024 the parties filed a series of notices listing the original sealed docket entries now ordered unsealed. The Second Circuit remanded the Doe 107 appeal on August 2, 2023 and affirmed as to Doe 171 on August 23, 2023.⁸

On December 18, 2023 Preska issued her findings after a "particularized review" (ECF No. 1315), stayed for fourteen days to allow appeals. The resulting release began on January 3, 2024. The same day she struck five attachments to a notice of unsealed documents because they "contain personally identifiable information, the disclosure of which could threaten the safety and privacy of named individuals" (ECF No. 1324). On January 4 the Herald and Dershowitz, each through counsel, separately asked the court to unseal ECF No. 1026-3 to disclose the identities of the Jane and John Does. Further filings were struck on January 8 and 10 for "inadvertently disclosed images that should have been redacted" and for material covered by the April 19, 2022 ruling; on January 12 Preska responded to press reports that confidential material had leaked during the release; and on January 15 she stated in an order that a woman identified in domestic and international press as "Doe 102" was not Doe 102. On January 17, 2024 both Giuffre and the Herald appealed a set of Preska's orders, among them the December 2019 memorandum and the December 2023 findings. In February and April 2024 a third party twice mailed what the court called "salacious and defamatory" material to Preska's chambers, and she ordered it sealed rather than docketed.⁸

The 2025 Vacatur

On July 23, 2025, three months after Giuffre's death in Western Australia, a Second Circuit panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Reena Raggi, and Myrna Pérez decided the consolidated appeals of Giuffre and the Herald per curiam. It held that "a judicial document determination is properly made by evaluating the relevant materials at the time of their filing with the court," so that "the subsequent mooting of the motion is irrelevant to that determination," and that documents do not "receive different weights of presumption based on the extent to which they were relied upon." It vacated "the district court's December 2019 and January 2020 Orders in their entirety," vacated the November 18, 2022 ruling in part, including its treatment of Giuffre's Florida deposition transcript as carrying only a "barely cognizable" presumption of access, and remanded "for individualized review of materials." The mandate issued on January 8, 2026, and on January 13 Preska directed the parties and the Herald to propose how to proceed.⁷⁸

The Grand Jury Subpoena and the Transparency Act

On January 30, 2026, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Buckley filed a motion for disclosure on behalf of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (ECF No. 1353). A Florida resident, George W. Poncy Jr., moved to intervene in February 2026. Maxwell, through Pagliuca, opposed the government's motion on February 20, 2026 (ECF No. 1360), attaching an affidavit and application of an Assistant U.S. Attorney, the transcripts of hearings held on March 26 and April 9, 2019, orders and a memorandum granting an application in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, No. 19-MC-149 (CM), an order and a prosecutor's letter to Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in No. 19-MC-179, and a February 14, 2026 letter from the Justice Department on its final Epstein Files Transparency Act production. The exhibits record that in the spring of 2019, months before Epstein's arrest, federal prosecutors used a grand jury subpoena and a court order of April 9, 2019 to obtain from Boies Schiller Flexner the confidential discovery produced in Giuffre's civil case.³¹⁰

On August 11, 2026 Preska granted the government's motion (ECF No. 1367) and added a paragraph 15 to the 2016 protective order authorizing the government to produce "documents that it received from Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP, in response to a grand jury subpoena and pursuant to the April 9, 2019, order issued in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, No. 19MC149 (CM) (S.D.N.Y.), in accordance with the Government's obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. 119-38, 139 Stat. 656 (Nov. 19, 2025)," subject to the Act's withholding and redaction provisions. Maxwell's arguments for continued sealing were rejected. Poncy's motion to intervene was denied without prejudice.³

On September 3, 2026 Preska amended the caption to substitute Ian Torrington Blatchford, the lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court of Western Australia as interim administrator of Giuffre's intestate estate, as plaintiff (ECF No. 1370). The case continued as Blatchford v. Maxwell.⁶¹¹