Laura Menninger

Laura A. Menninger is an American trial lawyer, a shareholder of the Denver firm Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, who with her partner Jeffrey S. Pagliuca represented Ghislaine Maxwell in Virginia Giuffre's 2015 defamation suit, Giuffre v. Maxwell, and in the 2020 criminal prosecution United States v. Maxwell in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Before law school she was a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs; after it she clerked for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the same court. In 2022 her firm sued Maxwell, her brother Kevin Maxwell and her husband Scott Borgerson for more than 878,000 dollars in unpaid fees.¹²³

Education and Career

Menninger graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1991 and worked as a financial analyst in the Corporate Finance Department of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. She took her J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School in 1997, where she was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review, and clerked for Kaplan in 1997 and 1998. She was a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York from 1998 to 2002, then moved to Colorado, where she spent five years as a trial lawyer with the Colorado State Public Defender before joining Holland & Hart. She joined Haddon, Morgan and Foreman as a shareholder in 2012. She is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and has chaired the Criminal Justice Act Standing Committee of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.¹

Giuffre v. Maxwell

Giuffre filed her defamation complaint on September 21, 2015 before Judge Robert W. Sweet, represented by Sigrid S. McCawley and other lawyers of Boies Schiller Flexner; Maxwell was represented by Menninger and Pagliuca. Maxwell moved to dismiss and to stay discovery on December 1, 2015; Sweet denied the motion in February 2016, and on March 17, 2016 signed the protective order under which deposition transcripts and exhibits were filed under seal.²

In Giuffre's deposition of May 3, 2016, unsealed in part in December 2022, Menninger summarized her testimony and asked, over an objection to form by Giuffre's lawyer Bradley Edwards: "another prince, the large hotel chain owner and Marvin Minsky, is there anyone else that Ghislaine Maxwell directed you to go have sex with?" Giuffre answered: "I am definitely sure there is. But can I remember everybody's name? No." She testified that she had kept notes of the men's names and had burned them "in a bonfire when I lived at Titusville." The parties settled on May 24, 2017.⁴⁵

United States v. Maxwell

A grand jury in the Southern District of New York indicted Maxwell under seal on June 29, 2020, and she was arrested on July 2, 2020.⁶ On August 24, 2020 Pagliuca told Judge Alison Nathan that the government had obtained by grand jury subpoena, from Giuffre's lawyers, nearly 90,000 pages of civil discovery still under the Giuffre v. Maxwell protective order, more than half of the 165,000 pages of criminal discovery, while the Second Circuit and Judge Loretta Preska were deciding whether to unseal the same material; if they ordered Maxwell's deposition unsealed "without the benefit of this information," he wrote, "the cat will be out of the bag."⁷

Maxwell's lead pretrial motion, filed over the signatures of Mark S. Cohen of Cohen & Gresser, Pagliuca and Menninger, and Bobbi C. Sternheim, sought dismissal for breach of the 2007 Epstein non-prosecution agreement, whose co-conspirator clause provided that "the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein." Nathan denied the motion with the other pretrial motions on April 16, 2021 (ECF No. 207). On November 1, 2021 Haddon, Morgan and Foreman served a defense expert disclosure concerning the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. Maxwell was convicted on December 29, 2021 and sentenced to twenty years; the Second Circuit affirmed on September 17, 2024, rejecting the non-prosecution agreement argument.⁶⁸⁹

The Fee Suit

On August 22, 2022 Haddon, Morgan and Foreman sued Maxwell, Kevin Maxwell and Borgerson in Denver, alleging that it had not been paid more than 878,000 dollars for defending her at trial and on appeal. The complaint alleged that Maxwell had put her brother in charge of paying her legal fees after her 2020 arrest, that he paid "a fraction" of what was billed through trial while urging the firm to keep working on appeal issues, that he blamed Borgerson for obstructing payment, and that Borgerson formed a limited liability company to buy real estate in order to shield his wife's assets from creditors. Menninger and Pagliuca were named as members of the trial team. Ian Maxwell said that no family member, including Ghislaine, would comment on the litigation.³