Culture

Report: Ghislaine Maxwell’s emails have been hacked

Her lawyers are blaming the court’s poor redaction for the breach.

Mathieu Polak/Sygma/Getty Images

British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s private emails have reportedly been hacked after her email was shared as part of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s death. Maxwell’s lawyers said hackers “breached” her computer because her personal email address was never scrubbed from publicly available legal documents.

Alleged mistakes all over — A letter from Maxwell’s lawyer to a Manhattan federal judge alleges that the documents presented in Epstein’s case were not properly redacted. It cites other cases where the documents weren’t scrutinized quite enough: “For example, it redacted a non-party’s name in one location but not another; so the media gained access to that name.”

If blame falls on New York’s court system for the hack — especially if the emails leak more widely — this could have larger implications for the redaction process in the future.

The emails could leak — According to The Telegraph’s initial report on the hack, some officials have suggested the possibility that Maxwell’s emails may have been targeted with the intention to leak them to the public. Maxwell has been accused of assisting Jeffrey Epstein in illegal maneuvers, which makes the information more valuable to hackers.

Maxwell had reportedly set up her own private email server with a pseudonym. The website through which Maxwell created her email server has not been disclosed.