Feds call BS on Ghislaine Maxwell’s claim Jeffrey Epstein sweetheart deal protects her from prosecution

Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers revived their longstanding argument that she should never have been put on trial for grooming young girls to be sexually abused at a hearing to get her 20-year sentence overturned on Tuesday.

Lawyers for the infamous madame told a federal appeals court she should be covered by the same sweetheart plea deal struck by her former boss and lover Jeffrey Epstein in Florida in 2007.

But a Manhattan federal prosecutor fired back that Epstein’s agreement struck with Florida feds — who allowed him to spend only a measly few hours a week in jail under the terms of a 13-month work-release program — does nothing to stop Maxwell, 62, from being charged in New York.

“This was a document entered into by the Southern District of Florida, and intended to bind the Southern District of Florida alone,” prosecutor Andrew Rohrbach said at a hearing at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rohrbach added his office was unaware of a single plea deal made in a similar case that would prevent a federal prosecutor in another jurisdiction from bringing charges.

Judge Raymond Lohier, one of the three appeals court judges hearing the case, was skeptical of Maxwell’s claim — saying Florida prosecutors being allowed to block the feds in New York from bringing cases would be “the opposite” of how the Justice Department typically handles the issue.

Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 for recruiting and grooming underage girls, capping a stunning fall from grace for the British socialite.

She’s now serving out her sentence in a Florida federal prison, where she was recently photographed wearing a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants and jogging in the lockup’s official half-marathon.

Maxwell was not at Tuesday’s hearing in person but had planned to listen in on a live audio feed of the arguments from her digs at the Tallahassee FCI, her lawyer Arthur Aidala said outside court.

Another of Maxwell’s lawyers, Diana Fabi Samson, claimed the disgraced daughter of media baron Robert Maxwell was protected by the broad clause in Epstein’s 2007 deal calling for the “United States” not to prosecute “co-conspirators.”

“Denying the viability of this plea agreement strikes a dagger in the heart of the trust between government and its citizens regarding plea agreements,” Samson argued.

But judges on the appeals panel noted the plea deal didn’t mention Maxwell by name — but did specify other alleged Epstein accomplices Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff, Adriana Ross and Nada Marcinkova.

The “United States” mentioned in the deal clearly refers to the Florida federal prosecutors, rather than all prosecutors around the country, Rohrbach argued.

Maxwell was portrayed during her trial as a “sophisticated predator” who served as Epstein’s right hand and abused young girls with him from at least 1994 to 2004.

Epstein was found dead in a lower Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while he awaiting trial on his sex-trafficking charges, and the death was ruled a suicide.

Maxwell’s attorneys have also argued as part of their appeal that the feds prosecuted her as a “proxy” for Epstein to “satisfy public outrage” over the case in the aftermath of his death, and that a juror should have disclosed before the trial began that he had been sexually abused as a child.

The juror’s admission briefly threw Maxwell’s conviction into doubt, but it was ultimately upheld by the trial judge.

The appeals panel did not set a date Tuesday for when they planned to issue a ruling.