A Manhattan exec accused of grooming a child model to be his sex slave wants her to drop legal claims that he has ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer Ghislaine Maxwell, according to new court papers.
Douglas Graham — who was sued last month by Nikki Henry for allegedly starting a sexual relationship with her when she was 14 — says that despite the fact that he knew Maxwell’s media mogul father, Robert, he doesn’t know Ghislaine or Epstein, according to new papers filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“Graham has not communicated with Mr. Maxwell since 1978. Graham has never met, nor has he ever communicated with Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Plaintiff knows this. Yet, she and her attorneys included the following scandalous and totally immaterial allegation in the sham Verified Complaint,” Graham’s lawyer, Peter Smith, alleged in the court documents.
Graham, 69, says that “in 2019, there is no more certain and effective way to gravely [injure] a man’s reputation [than] to accuse him of being friends with Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged ‘madam,’ Ghislaine Maxwell,” the court papers say.
Further, Graham — a former managing director of KPMG — says he didn’t meet Henry until she was 21 years old in 2003.
Graham says the pair had a healthy relationship and lived together until they split in 2016, at which point Henry “vowed to destroy Graham,” including threatening to kill him and physically abusing him, the court papers allege.
Henry’s lawyer, Paul D’Emilia, said Graham’s motion seeking to have Henry amend her complaint to take out mentions of the Maxwell family ties misses the point.
“I’m kind of taken aback that that’s the part that Mr. Graham is scandalized about, not the part about the rape of a child. It’s an incidental but very true fact that included in Graham’s circle was Mr. Maxwell,” D’Emilia said.
“Ms. Ghislaine was in [Graham’s] circle of friends and Nikki noticed and observed her and we haven’t really said anything more than that at this point,” D’Emilia said.
And as for Epstein, “It sounds more like a guilty conscience on the part of Mr. Graham … we didn’t even mention [Epstein],” D’Emilia added.
D’Emilia said the claim that Graham and Henry met when she was 21 rather than 14 is “utter nonsense,” since Henry says the pair met when she was still in high school.