NEW YORK — Jennifer Araoz sued Ghislaine Maxwell under New York’s Child Victims Act. She said an Epstein associate recruited her outside Talent Unlimited High School at 14, groomed her for more than a year, and that Epstein raped her in the Manhattan mansion when she was 15. The complaint accused Maxwell of “preying on their personal, psychological, financial, and related vulnerabilities” and of providing “organizational support to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.” An amended filing named estate entities, Lesley Groff, and Cimberly Espinosa.
It was among the first post-death filings against the estate and one of the first under the one-year lookback that let adult survivors sue no matter how old the abuse. Araoz had already sued the estate in July 2019; that case was tossed after Epstein was found dead. After Maxwell was denied bail, Araoz said, “Knowing that she is incarcerated for the foreseeable future allows me, and my fellow survivors, to have faith that we are on the right path.”
Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 on five of six counts and sentenced on June 28, 2022 to 20 years. The Second Circuit affirmed in 2024. The Supreme Court refused her case on October 6, 2025. Shortly after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed her in July 2025, the Bureau of Prisons moved her from FCI Tallahassee to a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas — a transfer victims’ lawyers called a gift. In February 2026 she appeared by video before the House Oversight Committee and took the Fifth. On August 25, 2026 Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected her habeas bid as meritless and frivolous. She remains eligible in 2037. The Justice Department’s Epstein dump of more than 3.5 million pages in January 2026 did not erase what Araoz put in a New York complaint: Maxwell was not a bystander.
Related from The AEGIS Alliance: Maxwell’s arrest, the Maxwell documents, the Andrew filings, the victims’ fund, and the document motherlode.
