Judge Paul Engelmayer threw out Ghislaine Maxwell's habeas bid to be freed from her 20-year sentence — and used her interview with Donald Trump's Justice Department to do it. His 67-page opinion, entered on the docket Monday and made public Tuesday, also refused her a certificate of appealability and pauper status. She can still ask the Second Circuit for it. Maxwell is not out of appeals, just out of good ones.
Engelmayer cites Maxwell's July 24, 2025 proffer with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and turns it on her: "admissions in an interview with the Deputy Attorney General." Narativ called those nine hours quid pro quo theater the week they happened. Blanche had read her the carve-out: "if you say something today that's not true... we can bring a prosecution against you for what's called false statements." Maxwell repeated the denials that carried two perjury counts. No prosecutor has charged her.
Maxwell filed pro se on December 17, 2025, under § 2255, and supplemented it twice. Engelmayer called her claims "all meritless and all or almost all... frivolous." A jury convicted her on five felonies in 2021; the Supreme Court refused her case in October 2025. She sits at FPC Bryan, Texas, as inmate 02879-509, the minimum-security camp she reached a week after Blanche. Release: July 17, 2037.
In an email subject-lined "Commutation Application," obtained by a whistleblower at that camp, reviewed by the Miami Herald and NOTUS, Maxwell wrote last October to her attorney Leah Saffian about a brief she was assembling: "it is big and there are so many attachments." House Judiciary Democrats say she was preparing a commutation application, and that its contents are unknown. Saffian denies any application was made. Her lead lawyer, David Oscar Markus, publicly asks for something else: a pardon. Trump has ruled out neither.
Saffian gave a reason on November 14: before any such application, "a Prisoner needs to demonstrate that all possible avenues of appeal have been exhausted." Engelmayer spent Monday taking the last serious one away.
