Convicted Jeffery Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team has suddenly learned what most everyone else already knows: Maxwell is not to be trusted.
Maxwell’s legal team is now suing their former client for nearly a million dollars in unpaid legal fees, according to the New York Daily News.
Court papers filed on Tuesday show that the 60-year-old convict still owes $878,302 to the firm Haddon, Morgan, and Foreman, P.C.
Lawyers Jeffrey Pagliuca and Laura Menninger represented Maxwell during her criminal trial, and Menninger even delivered the closing arguments.
The lawyers are also suing Maxwell’s brother, Kevin Maxwell, and her estranged husband, Scott Borgerson, who the lawyers accuse of trying to conceal her finances from them.
They claim that Maxwell’s brother — who was handling Ghislaine’s finances during her trial and imprisonment — paid a $100,000 retainer but then delayed payments, ignored emails and refused to remit the wire transfers they say he promised to pay.
The problem was vexing enough that in the months before the trial was set to being, Kevin “humbly request[ed]” the lawyers not to abandon the trial, the Daily News added.
The lawsuit against the Maxwells claims that Kevin Maxwell should have had more than enough money on hand to pay their bills.
“Mr. Maxwell spent the weeks and days leading up to trial assuring [the firm] that he was on the verge of obtaining financing on Ms. Maxwell’s properties that would result in more than enough cash to settle the amount owed,” the filing says.
The lawyers added that Kevin and Borgerson have engaged in efforts to shelter Maxwell’s assets from creditors and that Borgerson sold two properties for tens of millions after Ghislaine’s conviction.
Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in June after being convicted in December on five counts of federal sex trafficking.
A federal jury found that Maxwell committed sex crimes as a key member of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Epstein died in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center while awaiting his own trial in an act that authorities have ruled a suicide.
“Maxwell was a sophisticated predator who knew exactly what she was doing,” federal prosecutor Alison Moe said in closing arguments, the New York Times reported.
After ending up in jail, Maxwell spent much of her time filing complaints about her conditions. According to reports, she filed more than 100 complaints claiming that she was suffering during her confinement.
In one of her filings, Maxwell claimed she was subjected to rough handling during daily strip and body-cavity searches. She also stated she was under constant surveillance and alleged she was filmed in the shower.
Maxwell also insisted that her basic needs for food, water and sleep were denied.
Because she is a vegan, she said that the prison food provided to her was “meager, stale, often rancid and inedible.” The tap water in the cell was “foul-smelling and undrinkable,” according to Maxwell.
Maxwell has since been transferred to a “low-security prison in Florida” where she is afforded all sorts of amenities, including yoga classes.
The convicted sex offender will have access to various “recreation, leisure and social programs” designed to “help develop an individual wellness concept.”
Maxwell will also be able to have access to “programs of occupational training, with apprenticeships and courses in horticulture and even cosmetology.”
Maxwell’s legal team got off easy, of course. Compared to her victims, they only lost a few hundred grand in unpaid fees. The many young women who fell pray to Maxwell and Epstein’s criminal actions did not fare as well.
Story cited here.
