Topless photos of girls said taken at Epstein mansion

Ghislaine Maxwell regularly took topless photos of girls who visited Jeffrey Epstein's Palm Beach, Fla., mansion and kept an album of the photos on her desk in Epstein's home.

That's according to excerpts from a June 1, 2016, deposition of Juan Alessi, the former maintenance man and house manager of Epstein's Palm Beach mansion, unsealed Friday from a 2015 defamation lawsuit brought against Maxwell by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has said that she was manipulated and sexually abused by Epstein and that Maxwell and Epstein directed her to have sex with a number of their prominent friends.

Alessi described Maxwell as being very "avid" about photographs.

Alessi added that he would occasionally be asked by Epstein to pick up some of the dozens of girls who came to the house under the guise of providing massages but who were allegedly, in many cases, sexually assaulted by Epstein.

Alessi's full June 2016 deposition is set to be released in a future batch of unsealed documents, but it's unclear when that will be as Maxwell's team has continued to object to their release.

The deposition excerpts were among a tranche of documents from the 2015 lawsuit ordered unsealed in late July, after a records-release lawsuit brought by the Miami Herald, which argued that since the civil matter was settled in 2017 much of it should be public records.

The July unsealing decision by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska came weeks after Maxwell was arrested July 2 on a 156-acre estate in New Hampshire and charged with four counts of sexual trafficking of a minor and two counts of perjury.

The first batch of documents was released in late July, including a 2015 email exchange between Epstein and Maxwell in which Epstein advised Maxwell, "You have done nothing wrong and I would urge you to start acting like it."

But Maxwell fought to block the release of a transcript from her April 2016 deposition and the two excerpts released Friday, arguing that release of the transcripts would jeopardize her chance of a fair criminal trial. She ultimately lost an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which ruled that Maxwell's arguments were without merit.

Giuffre, who said she was recruited by Maxwell in 2000 at the Mar-a-Lago club, where Giuffre was working as a spa attendant at the time, has said that she was directed to have sex with numerous powerful men by Maxwell and Epstein, including Prince Andrew, former Sen. George Mitchell of Maine, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz and hotel magnate Tom Pritzker, among others. All the men have denied her claims and Dershowitz and Giuffre have sued each other for defamation.

Maxwell was asked at length about Prince Andrew in the April 2016 deposition, including Giuffre's claims that she had sex with him at Maxwell's London home in 2001. Maxwell disputed Giuffre's assertions and questioned the authenticity of a widely seen photo of Giuffre, Maxwell and Prince Andrew reportedly taken in Maxwell's London home during the visit.

The two perjury charges Maxwell faces stem from statements she made in an April 2016 deposition and in a later July 2016 deposition, and Maxwell has argued that federal prosecutors obtained the transcripts improperly. She suggested at one point, with no proof, that Giuffre's lawyers had shared the transcripts with federal prosecutors in violation of a protective order that blocked their release. Federal prosecutors later clarified that they had obtained the transcripts after asking two separate courts for access, one of which complied.

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