Lawyers Give Bad News to Ghislaine Maxwell - She Has 60 Days to Find New Counsel: Report
Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers have pulled the plug on their services to the convicted sex trafficker and longtime Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator.
While working to reach a settlement with Epstein’s estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Maxwell’s attorneys ran into a problem, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail: She was not paying them.
The firm representing her — Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer — notified Maxwell on Aug. 1 that unless they received compensation for their services, they would seek to withdraw, the report said.
Two weeks later, having not received the required payments, the attorneys told her they would no longer be serving her, the Daily Mail reported.
Nevertheless, in the firm’s letter to the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands dated Aug. 25, the law firm requested that Maxwell be allowed 60 days to find new representation.
Maxwell filed her lawsuit against Epstein’s Virgin Islands estate in March 2020, claiming it was not honoring Epstein’s alleged financial promises to her.
In the suit, Maxwell said that following Epstein’s 2008 conviction — he pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution — she had been promised “indemnification for and advancement of attorneys’ fees, security costs, costs to find safe accommodation and all other expenses [she] has reasonably incurred and will incur by reason of her prior employment relationship with Jeffrey E. Epstein,” according to the Daily Mail.
The financier died in a federal prison cell in New York on Aug. 10, 2019, while he was awaiting trial on numerous other charges related to sex trafficking.
Maxwell’s lawsuit said that when she filed a claim with Epstein’s estate on Nov. 22, 2019, for the fees and costs she had incurred since his 2008 conviction, the estate did not “honor or even formally respond.”
It is not clear how Maxwell will be able to pay for new representation.
In June, the 60-year-old socialite was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex trafficking and other offenses in connection with Epstein.
She is serving that sentence in a low-security prison in Florida.
Ghislaine Maxwell is FIRED by her lawyers after failing to pay her bills https://t.co/GmvDt1dTQL
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) September 22, 2022
This is not the first time she has been accused of failing to pay her legal fees.
In August, her criminal defense attorneys, Haddon, Morgan, and Foreman, P.C., sued Maxwell for $878,302 in unpaid fees.
They claimed her brother, Kevin Maxwell, who was handling her 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.
“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 said
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