Ghislaine Maxwell had a secret Tumblr account, according to newly unsealed court records

• Ghislaine Maxwell had a secret Tumblr account, an attorney said in a newly unsealed court hearing.
• Maxwell allegedly refused to turn over emails associated with the Tumblr account in a civil suit.

Convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell had a secret Tumblr account, according to a newly unsealed court document.

The account came up in the context of a sealed court hearing — the transcript of which has now been unsealed — over whether Maxwell should be forced to provide more documents to Virginia Roberts Giuffre during the discovery phase of a lawsuit. Giuffre accused Maxwell of trafficking her to Epstein for sex and defaming her when she denied it.

According to Meredith Schultz, one of Giuffre's lawyers, Maxwell had failed to turn over certain email records during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which was settled in 2017.

Maxwell had claimed that an email address — gmax1@mindspring.com — was used as a spam account when signing up at retail stores. But Schultz, in the sealed hearing, said Maxwell used it to sign up for Tumblr, as well as LinkedIn and Dropbox. She also pointed out Tumblr's reputation for hosting pornography.

"We also found evidence that she used it for her Tumblr account," Schultz said. "That is a social media website that also has inbox and messaging where over 22 percent of the content on this social website is pornographic and over 16 percent of the accounts created therein contain exclusively pornographic material."

The transcript was unsealed Monday to comply with US District Judge Loretta Preska's ruling to unseal thousands of documents related to the civil lawsuit between Giuffre and Maxwell.

Starting last week, the documents have been posted to the public docket in batches. The final batch is scheduled to be published later today, a source familiar with the rollout process told Business Insider.

Business Insider could not locate the Tumblr account using the Mindspring email address, which appeared to be part of a communication system Epstein used to manage his household.

Representatives for Tumblr didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys in the civil lawsuit held the hearing, in November 2016, to discuss the ongoing discovery process. Lawyers for both Giuffre and Maxwell wanted to depose Epstein, believing his testimony would bolster their arguments in the litigation.

But a lawyer for Epstein stepped in and argued that doing so would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Epstein had already served a brief prison sentence on prostitution solicitation charges in 2008 and had a controversial non-prosection agreement with federal prosecutors in Florida. Still, his lawyer Martin G. Weinberg pointed out that Giuffre was litigating a separate case to invalidate the agreement and said the Fifth Amendment should protect him.

Epstein ultimately never sat for a deposition in the case. An appeals court ultimately upheld the non-prosecution agreement, but federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought sex-trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, arguing it didn't apply to their jurisdiction. Epstein hanged himself in jail before going to trial. Maxwell was arrested later and found guilty of trafficking girls to Epstein for sex in 2021. She's currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The apparent Tumblr account hasn't been mentioned in other court documents reviewed by Business Insider.

Maxwell has also been rumored to run one of the most popular Reddit accounts of all time, but the theory has not been substantiated.