Ghislaine Maxwell’s last chance appeal to overturn her sex trafficking conviction has been rejected by the Supreme Court.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence in a minimum security prison in Texas for trafficking underage women to Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender.
Supreme Court judges on Monday rejected Maxwell’s appeal. They did not give a reason for refusing to hear the appeal.
Maxwell can only now be freed if she is granted a presidential pardon or clemency.
Maxwell’s lawyers argued that her conviction was invalid because a plea agreement made with Epstein in Florida in 2007 also shielded his associates and should have barred her criminal prosecution in New York.
The 63-year-old was arrested in 2020 and convicted the following year after being accused of recruiting and grooming girls for sexual encounters with Epstein between 1994 and 2004.
The Epstein case has long been the subject of conspiracy theories, with many believing the disgraced financier sex trafficked underage women to a circle of high-profile associates.
Conspiracy theorists think the financier, died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, was murdered to stop his so-called “client list” becoming public.
In July, Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general and a former personal lawyer of Donald Trump, met with Maxwell as the US president sought to quell criticism over his government’s failure to publish all of the documentation it holds on Epstein.
Maxwell told Blanche that she was not aware of any “client list” belonging to Epstein and never saw Mr Trump behave inappropriately.
A week after the interview, Maxwell was moved from a low-security prison facility in Florida to a less-restrictive prison camp in Texas.
The US Justice Department closed the case on Epstein in July, ruling there was “no incriminating client list” or any evidence that Epstein may have blackmailed prominent people.
Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, said in congressional testimony on Sept 16 that there was no credible information that Epstein trafficked women and underage girls to anyone but himself.