Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from NY to Florida prison in 2022, not 2025

At the end of July 2025, a rumor spread on X (archived) that Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who was serving a sentence for assisting his sexual abuse of minors, was moved to a low-security prison in Florida. One post (archived) spreading the rumor was liked more than 28,000 times. 

The rumor spread in the context of Maxwell's attorneys pushing for her pardon and amid U.S. President Donald Trump's statements about being allowed to pardon her. Trump's comments came under scrutiny at a time his administration was under fire for not releasing more documents related to the investigation of Epstein's abuse of underage girls and after recent reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appeared in the documents.

However, the rumor about Maxwell was based on an outdated news article. The Guardian article that was linked to in the X posts was from 2022.

Maxwell, according to The Guardian, had been moved from the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn in New York City to the low-security FCI Tallahassee in Florida about a month after her sentencing. Maxwell had been in the Brooklyn prison for about two years before she was moved, according to The Associated Press.

In the years since, regular media reports about Maxwell's life in prison confirmed that she remained in FCI Tallahassee. A local Tallahassee newspaper reported on her life in prison in January 2023, March 2024 and July 2025, just days before the rumor that Maxwell had been moved spread on X.

U.S. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., issued a subpoena to Maxwell for a deposition to occur at FCI Tallahassee, according to a July 23, 2025, news release, further indicating that she continued to remain in the prison at that time.

However, all that changed on Aug. 1 when NBC News and other venues reported that Maxwell had quietly been moved from the Tallahassee low-security prison to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

This rumor was far from the only one that spread about Maxwell in July 2025. Snopes covered several different claims regarding her over the month, including a rumor that she offered to testify about Epstein's client list. Epstein died in his jail cell by suicide in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges.