Bill Sheridan

Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s procurer Ghislaine Maxwell will be facing not one but two separate criminal trials in Manhattan.

Last week a Manhattan Federal Court Judge ruled to separate the perjury charges against her from her sexual misconduct case. Judge Alison Nathan issued an order saying that if the perjury charges against Maxwell were tried alongside her sexual abuse allegations, it “would risk an unfair trial on each set of counts.”

The perjury charges would bring “unrelated allegations of sexual abuse, which would potentially expose the jury to evidence that might otherwise not be admissible,” Nathan wrote in her order.

Maxwell is accused of procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In the indictment, Maxwell, federal prosecutors also charged her with lying under oath in a civil suit deposition unrelated to the sexual abuse charges. The deposition dealt with allegations of sexual misconduct but not those charged by prosecutors.

If both indictments were addressed in a single trial, a jury that would be asked to weigh all of those factors together might conflate the evidence against the defendant, Judge Nathan said in her order. Confusing which sex charges related to which crime could lead to a mistaken conviction mistrial.

“A joint trial would potentially expose the jury to a wider swath of information regarding civil litigation against Epstein that is remote from Maxwell’s charged conduct,” Nathan’s order states. This presents a significant risk that the jury will cumulate the evidence of the various crimes charged and find guilt when, if considered separately, it would not do so,” it adds.

Maxwell is being held without bail in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and has maintained she is innocent of all charges.

Jeffery Epstein was charged with sex trafficking in 2019. He is alleged to have committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2020 while awaiting trial on those charges. However, the controversy surrounding his death remains.