Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate and former girlfriend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is slated to appear virtually for her closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., announced last month that a date for Maxwell's testimony had finally been set after several months of negotiations with Maxwell’s attorneys.
“Her lawyers have made it clear that she is going to plead the Fifth,” Comer said at the time, referring to the amendment that protects criminal defendants from having to testify if they may incriminate themselves through the testimony. “I hope she changes her mind because I want to hear from her.”
Authorities believe Epstein, who died by suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, abused more than 1,000 young women and girls.
Maxwell, 64, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting, grooming and ultimately participating in Epstein’s abuse of victims as young as 14 over the course of a decade. She was moved in August to Federal Prison Camp, Bryan, a minimum-security facility in Texas, from a federal prison in Florida.
In a letter sent in July to Comer, Maxwell’s attorney David Markus expressed concern that congressional testimony could endanger his client’s habeas petition seeking to void her 2021 conviction on sex trafficking charges.
“Accordingly, our initial reaction was that Ms. Maxwell would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights and decline to testify at this time,” Markus wrote to Comer last summer.
On Wednesday, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., suggested that a refusal by Maxwell to answer questions may also constitute “not wanting to cross the rich and powerful people she trafficked these children to.”
Much of the speculation surrounding Epstein and Maxwell has been questions over potential involvement of others in the abuse.
A 2019 email chain made public last month by the Justice Department appeared to indicate that authorities were investigating 10 unnamed “co-conspirators” of Epstein, and Maxwell herself referenced “4 named co-conspirators” and “25 men with secret settlements” in her habeas petition.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said during an interview with CNN last week that Justice Department officials had not found evidence in the Epstein files to charge others.
Blanche noted the volume of correspondence, emails and “horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or people around him,” but said that the materials were not enough for prosecution.
Mace was among a handful of Republicans to join forces with their Democratic colleagues to force a vote in the House of Representatives over requiring the Justice Department to make the materials in its investigations into Epstein and Maxwell public in November.
The law stipulated that Attorney General Pam Bondi release files in a downloadable format by Dec. 19, 2025, and also redact any identifying information about Epstein’s accusers.
Since December, officials have posted several tranches of files with the most recent batch containing some 3 million pages, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images made public last week.
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton wrote in an update to the judge in Maxwell’s case that prosecutors had subsequently removed and were reviewing thousands of files previously made public as part of its DOJ Epstein Library.
“As noted above, in recent days, victims and victim counsel have identified new names and identifiers for redaction that were not identified prior to publication,” the Justice Department officials wrote, contending that in these and others circumstances, “it would not have been reasonable to expect a reviewer to classify the information as victim identifying.”
But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have criticized what they described as the DOJ’s “botched release of the Epstein files” and called on Bondi in a letter Friday to provide information about what steps prosecutors have taken since Jan. 30 –– the most recent disclosure –– to protect the identities of women and girls who have accused the late financier of abuse.
In addition to Maxwell, the House Oversight Committee has also subpoenaed several high-profile individuals to testify about any involvement they had with Epstein as part of the committee's own probe.
Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are scheduled to appear later this month after a standoff that included a threat of a contempt of Congress vote against them.
On Thursday evening, Hillary Clinton took to social media to call for the proceedings involving her and her husband to be public.
“You love to talk about transparency,” she wrote in a message to Comer. “There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”
Comer responded in an interview with Fox News, saying that Hillary Clinton was seeking to “move the goal posts” of her closed-door deposition, for which he said the transcript and video would be made public afterward. The Kentucky lawmaker also said that he expected Microsoft co-founded Bill Gates will “likely be called in” to testify as well, and that the committee was not accusing Gates, nor the Clintons, of any wrongdoing.