Epstein associate pleads not guilty in sex crimes case

NEW YORK — Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend pleads not guilty to charges she recruited girls and women for the financier to sexually abuse more than two decades ago.

British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell appears in a video court hearing in Manhattan.

Maxwell, 58, has been held without bail since her July 2 arrest at her million-dollar New Hampshire estate, where prosecutors say she refused to open the door for FBI agents, who busted through to find that she had retreated to an interior room.

She was charged with recruiting at least three girls, one as young as 14, for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 1997.

An indictment alleges that she helped groom the victims to endure sexual abuse and was sometimes there when Epstein abused them. It also alleges that she lied during a 2016 deposition in a civil case stemming from Epstein’s abuse of girls and women.

Epstein killed himself in August 2019, several weeks after he was confronted by two accusers at a bail hearing who insisted that he should remain in jail while awaiting sex trafficking charges that alleged he abused girls at his Manhattan and Florida mansions in the early 2000s.

In court papers, Maxwell’s lawyers argue that Epstein’s death left the media “wrongly trying to substitute her for Epstein — even though she’d had no contact with Epstein for more than a decade, had never been charged with a crime or been found liable in any civil litigation, and has always denied any allegations of claimed misconduct.”

— AP