Jeffrey Epstein Associate Seeks Delay of Hearing About Unsealing Papers

(Bloomberg) -- A longtime associate of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was granted a delay for a conference that had been set for Thursday to consider unsealing as many as 2,000 pages of documents in a related civil suit.

The federal appeals court in New York last week ordered the unsealing of some documents in a defamation case filed by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015. Giuffre had claimed she was an underage victim of Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein was charged Monday with conspiracy and child sex trafficking.

Giuffre alleged that Maxwell, the daughter of the late British publisher Robert Maxwell, defamed her by publicly calling her a liar. The suit was settled in 2017 on confidential terms, with many of the documents in the case filed under seal. The appeals court on July 2 ruled that some of the documents should be unsealed and required a lower-court judge to review the rest and unseal them if appropriate.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska on Wednesday postponed the conference to July 25. The judge had set the conference “to discuss how to proceed.” In a letter to the judge on Wednesday, a lawyer for Maxwell said a conference would be “premature” because the case hasn’t been formally returned to Preska’s court.

Giuffre’s lawyer opposed Maxwell’s request to delay the conference.

The case is Giuffre v. Maxwell, 15-cv-07433, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net;Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.