Loretta Preska

Loretta A. Preska (born 1949, in Albany, New York) is a senior judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1992 and chief judge of the district from 2009 to 2016. She took over Giuffre v. Maxwell, Virginia Giuffre's defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell, after the death of Judge Robert W. Sweet in 2019, and from then until 2026 ruled on the release of its sealed discovery, including Maxwell's 2016 deposition, the January 2024 release of names from the record, and in August 2026 the government's disclosure under the Epstein Files Transparency Act of material it had taken from Giuffre's lawyers by grand jury subpoena in 2019. In 2013, as chief judge, she declined to recuse herself from the prosecution of the hacker Jeremy Hammond, whose leak of Stratfor data, the defense said, had exposed her husband's email address.¹²³

Career

Preska graduated from the College of St. Rose in 1970, received her J.D. from Fordham University School of Law in 1973 and an LL.M. from the New York University School of Law in 1978, and practiced in New York City from 1973 to 1992. Bush nominated her on March 31, 1992 to the seat vacated by Robert J. Ward; she was confirmed on August 11 and commissioned on August 12, 1992. On September 9, 2008 Bush nominated her to the Second Circuit; the Senate did not vote. She sat on the board of the Federal Judicial Center from 2008 to 2012, was chief judge from 2009 to 2016, and took senior status on March 1, 2017.¹

The Hammond Recusal

Hammond was prosecuted in the Southern District for the online infiltration of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, "a self-described 'global intelligence' outfit." His lawyers moved for Preska's recusal because her husband, Thomas Kavaler, a lawyer at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, had, the defense said, his email address disclosed in the Stratfor data. At a hearing on February 21, 2013 she denied the motion. She said the standard was "the views of the well-informed observer, not thousands of blog pages with wrong information," called a news article offered by the defense "rank hearsay," said that recusal on an interest not "arising even to the level of remote, contingent, or speculative would be a misuse," and wrote that "accepting defendant's invitation for recusal in this case would actually undercut the very policy" the defense invoked, and that "[f]inding otherwise on a record as suspect as here would only encourage supporters of this defendant."³

Giuffre v. Maxwell

After Sweet's death on March 24, 2019 and the Second Circuit's July 3, 2019 ruling in Brown v. Maxwell that the summary judgment record be unsealed and the rest reviewed document by document, the case passed to Preska. On remand she held that "only motions actually decided by Judge Sweet," with the documents relevant to his decisions, were judicial documents carrying a presumption of public access, and she set an unsealing protocol on that basis in orders of December 2019 and January 2020.²⁴

On July 23, 2020, three weeks after Maxwell's arrest, Preska ordered the unsealing of materials including Maxwell's April 2016 deposition. A month later Maxwell's lawyer Jeffrey S. Pagliuca told Judge Alison Nathan in the criminal case that the government had already obtained nearly 90,000 pages of the civil discovery by subpoena, and that "Ms. Maxwell is seeking in both the Second Circuit and before Judge Preska that the status quo be maintained until the issue can be litigated. If, for example, without the benefit of this information, the Second Circuit and/or Judge Preska order Ms. Maxwell's deposition unsealed, the cat will be out of the bag." A panel of Judges José A. Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler and Reena Raggi affirmed Preska's order on October 19, 2020, calling Maxwell's arguments "meritless"; David Boies argued for Giuffre.⁵⁶

Preska held further hearings on the protocol in 2021 and 2022, ruled on a request by TGP Communications on August 9, 2022, and on November 18, 2022 ordered a broad unsealing in an oral ruling that two non-parties designated "John Doe 107" and "Jane Doe 171" appealed. On December 18, 2023 she issued findings after a "particularized review" (ECF No. 1315), and the release began on January 3, 2024. The same day she struck five attachments that "contain personally identifiable information, the disclosure of which could threaten the safety and privacy of named individuals"; on January 15 she stated that a woman identified in the press as "Doe 102" was not Doe 102; and in February and April 2024 she ordered sealed rather than docketed material mailed to her chambers that the court called "salacious and defamatory." On January 17, 2024 Giuffre and the Miami Herald appealed her December 2019 memorandum and her December 2023 findings.⁴

On July 23, 2025, three months after Giuffre's death, a panel of Judges Cabranes, Raggi and Myrna Pérez held that "a judicial document determination is properly made by evaluating the relevant materials at the time of their filing with the court," vacated "the district court's December 2019 and January 2020 Orders in their entirety," vacated in part the November 2022 ruling, including its treatment of Giuffre's Florida deposition as carrying only a "barely cognizable" presumption of access, and remanded "for individualized review of materials." The mandate issued on January 8, 2026.⁷

On January 30, 2026 the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York moved for disclosure (ECF No. 1353). Maxwell's opposition attached the record of a grand jury subpoena and an April 9, 2019 order in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, No. 19-MC-149 (CM), under which prosecutors had obtained the civil discovery from Boies Schiller Flexner months before Epstein's arrest. On August 11, 2026 Preska granted the motion (ECF No. 1367), adding to the 2016 protective order a paragraph 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." On September 3, 2026 she substituted Ian Torrington Blatchford, interim administrator of Giuffre's estate, as plaintiff, and the case continued as Blatchford v. Maxwell.⁸