Keyword quibbling had Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team working to protect their client’s emails with some notable terms and names.
The unsealing of documents related to Virginia Giuffre’s civil lawsuit against sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend, Maxwell, as ordered by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, came to a close Tuesday. With it came a review of considerable effort from the since-convicted sex trafficker’s lawyers to shrink the net cast by the plaintiff’s counselors regarding emails.
A July correspondence between Giuffre’s lawyer Meredith Schultz and Maxwell’s lawyer Laura Menninger featured 368 search terms presented as part of a Request for Production (RFP) that included seeking documents that contained “nipple*,” “Lingerie,” and “Bed*.”
“Massage” was another key term as an Epstein accuser had claimed in the case that it was his code word for sex with the girls and young women under his employ as massage therapists.
However, in light of high profile figures who’ve been associated with the since-deceased sex offender, (like Prince Andrew and former President Bill Clinton), Maxwell’s attorneys argued against over a hundred requested names Giuffre’s lawyers hoped to search for, particularly a list of first names, they argued were “incredibly common names.”
Using the example of the name “Bill” the legal team argued it would bring forth “every bill that our client has ever received, sent or discussed.” Another example was “‘max’…likely to yield every single email sent or received by our client, or her family members, or any other document in her possession with her own name on the document or in the metadata, in other words, hundreds of thousands of non-responsive documents.”
They further challenged “common words” out of 368 search terms presented claiming “Most are not tied to any Request for Production (RFP) served on Ms. Maxwell, nor the Court’s Orders limiting those requests.”
Noting the argument was a “very typical” point of contention for a lawsuit, digital forensics expert Frank Thornton told Fox News Digital, “You derive things like these lists from talking to these witnesses who say, ‘Well, I have an email and used this term, this name was used. The judge may have decided that, after reviewing it, a lot of it really doesn’t pertain to the case at all, no basis to turn it over to the other party.”
“No. 104 jumps out at me: ‘joint* w/3 defend*.’ They’d be looking for something that begins with ‘joint’ and within 3 words of something that begins with ‘defend,'” he explained.
The list of terms also included “high* w/3 school*,” “sex w/3 toy*,” and “school* w/3 girl*,” as well as sex-related items and the names of Epstein accusers.
The argument over terms was not the only snare Giuffre’s lawyers had in the case that was ultimately settled, as it had also come to their attention that Maxwell had accounts capable of sharing messages and files of which the judge denied the motion to compel additional data, including a Tumblr account.
Ghislaine Maxwell had secret account on website known for explicit content https://t.co/DdmXLR7biQ via @BIZPACReview
— BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) January 9, 2024
In court, an attorney for Maxwell had said with reference to the list of 368 terms in arguing against Giuffre’s lawyers, “This is a long and involved process because, first of all, it was done once and that wasn’t good enough. And then it was done again with a giant set of search terms which apparently wasn’t good enough. And then it was done a third time with more expansive search terms. The third time resulted in the production of thousands of pages because there were words in there like ‘passport’ and so on…”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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