DOJ Releases Ghislaine Maxwell’s Interviews with Federal Prosecutor, Details Her Claims and Denials

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has released hours of prison interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell, the only person convicted in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case. These interviews, conducted with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, were part of a federal prison interview in Tallahassee, where Maxwell was held until recently. The terms of the interview granted her limited immunity from further prosecution unless she lied. She denied that Epstein had a ‘client list’ and claimed he never maintained a stockpile of blackmail material against prominent associates. Maxwell also reiterated past statements that she does not believe Epstein committed suicide and that he had a heart condition preventing normal sexual activity.

In one exchange, she told Blanche that she had grown to believe that Epstein wasn’t very into her. ‘There was some indications that he would actively tell other people to lie to me or conceal things from me, and that he never loved me, and I wasn’t his type,’ she said. In the mid-to-late ‘9, she said, Epstein began traveling increasingly with ‘masseuses.’ According to Epstein’s accusers, he used massages as cover for sex. ‘In the early ’90s, I don’t remember traveling so much with other people,’ she said. ‘There would be a masseuse or a yoga person, but now he started to travel with more, always a masseuse.’ Also around that time, he began a testosterone dosage, she said. ‘He started doing testosterone, and that altered his character,’ she told Blanche. ‘And I believe that started in the late ’90s. And I believe that the FBI has his medical records and you may see that on his medical records.’

In a statement on Twitter, Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus alleged that she had only been convicted because the DOJ needed a scapegoat after Epstein died in jail before his case went to trial. ‘Ghislaine Maxwell is innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted, in this case,’ Markus wrote. ‘She never committed or participated in sexual abuse against minors, or anyone else for that matter.’

Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted at trial in 2021 of helping Epstein traffic teen girls. She has an ongoing appeal and has signaled that she is willing to sit for interviews with both federal prosecutors and Congress. Epstein died in a federal jail cell in 2019 before he faced trial himself. His official cause of death has been ruled a suicide, a conclusion rejected by his brother.