Jeffrey Epstein cohort Ghislaine Maxwell claims in new Manhattan court papers that she wrapped her cellphone in tinfoil to try to dodge detection by the press — not law enforcement.
Making another pitch to get out of jail while awaiting trial, the accused sex-trafficker denied federal prosecutors’ previous claims that the cellphone they’d found in her New Hampshire hideout was cloaked in tinfoil because she thought it would create signal interference and prevent them from tracking her down.
“Ms. Maxwell was protecting herself from the press, not trying to avoid arrest,’’ the fallen British socialite’s lawyers wrote in the documents unsealed by a Manhattan federal judge Monday.
“We explained to the Court at the initial bail hearing that Ms. Maxwell took this step to prevent the press from accessing her phone after the Second Circuit inadvertently unsealed certain court records with the phone number unredacted.
“It is clear that Ms. Maxwell was not at all the ‘master spy’ the government makes her out to be and was not wrapping the phone in order to evade detection by law enforcement,’’ the lawyers said.
They noted that the tinfoil-wrapped phone was taken out in the name of her environmental nonprofit, the Terramar Project.
NY Post illustration“Ms. Maxwell had another phone subscribed in the name of ‘G Max’ that she was using as her primary phone, which was not covered [in tinfoil],’’ the lawyers wrote.
“It would make no sense for her to try to wrap one phone in tin foil to avoid detection and not the other.”
The tinfoil-cloaked phone was found on top of a desk in the home where Maxwell was busted in July.
Soon after, prosecutors wrote in court papers that she had configured the contraption in a “seemingly misguided effort to evade detection.”
Experts have said tinfoil around a phone can create signal interference — although not enough to make it untraceable.
Still, Maxwell made the effort clearly to thwart law enforcement, not “the press or the public, which of course would have no ability to trace her phone or intercept her communications,” the feds had written.
Maxwell, a former close pal of Britain’s Prince Andrew, is accused of grooming underage girls and young women to be sexually abused by Epstein, her former lover.
Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting prosecution.
Maxwell is being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn while awaiting trial. She previously lost a bid for bail shortly after her arrest.
