December 14, 2020 | 9:41pm | Updated December 14, 2020 | 10:46pm
Jeffrey Epstein’s accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell has proposed a $28.5 million bail package — that represents all of her and her husband’s assets — in a desperate bid to spring her from federal lockup, according to a new motion unsealed Monday.
The suggested package is “exceptional in its scope and puts at risk everything that Ms. Maxwell has — all of her and her spouse’s assets, her family’s livelihood, and the financial security of her closest friends and family — if she were to flee, which she has no intention of doing,” wrote her lawyer Mark Cohen.
Although her spouse’s name is redacted from the documents, his identity has been widely reported as tech CEO Scott Borgerson.
The package is composed of a $22.5 million bond co-signed by her and her husband, according to the motion that was filed under seal on Dec. 4.
Five additional bonds totaling $5 million will be co-signed by seven of Maxwell’s closest friends and family members whose names were redacted.
She would be released to home confinement with a GPS ankle monitor — although the name of the person with whom she’d reside was withheld.
The British socialite would also sign waivers of her right to contest extradition from two countries where she holds passports: France and the United Kingdom.
A team of private security guards would tail her 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure her safety after she received threats against her and her family, the filing says.
At a bail hearing shortly after her arrest in July, US District Judge Alison Nathan refused to release her to home confinement on a $5 million bond over concerns she had been evasive about her finances and was a serious flight risk.
The British heiress wouldn’t disclose her husband’s name to pretrial services, prosecutors had said.
In the motion, Maxwell describes living a “quiet family life” in an oceanfront mansion in Manchester-by-the-sea, Mass. with her spouse for four years prior to her indictment in Manhattan federal court.
She fled to a New Hampshire compound, not to evade authorities as prosecutors contended at her first bail hearing, but due to an “intense media frenzy and threats” that endangered the “safety and wellbeing of herself and her family,” wrote Cohen.
Her husband did not initially come forward to co-sign her bail package for these reasons, the filing says.
But the restrictive jail conditions, which have amounted to solitary confinement, have been unbearable, and the 58-year-old daughter of disgraced media titan Robert Maxwell has been relentlessly skewered in the press, according to her lawyers.
In the first three months she was locked up, she was pilloried in more than 6,500 national media articles.
“That exceeds the number of articles that mentioned such high-profile defendants as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, and Keith Raniere in the 90-day period following their arrests, combined,” her attorney wrote.
She has denied the allegations and is eager to defend herself against a case that lacks corroboration and “boils down to witness testimony about events that took place over 25 years ago,” the papers say.
She’s charged with recruiting and grooming girls and young women to be sexually abused by her and Epstein and lying about it.