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Document 20-13133-RWS

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Case 1:20-cv-03315-RWS Document 236 Filed 06/30/21 Page 9 of 12 Defendant Ghislaine Maxwell ("Ms. Maxwell") files this Response in Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion to Exceed Presumptive Ten Deposition Limit, and states as follows: INTRODUCTION Despite having taken only three depositions to date, Plaintiff prematurely requests permission to exceed the presumptive ten deposition limit imposed by Fed. R. Civ. P. 30(a)(2)(A)(i) and to conduct 17 separate depositions, almost twice the limit. Without legal support, Plaintiff attempts to conflate the presumptive time limitation for each deposition of seven hours with a right to take a total of 70 hours of depositions. This is an absurd reading of the Federal Rules. The presumptive ten deposition limitation is an independent limitation, and speaks to the number of separate deponents, not deposition time. Indeed, the two independent limitations do not even appear in the same section of the rules. The heart of Plaintiff's argument is that Ms. Maxwell inconveniently testified and denied Plaintiff's claims, rather than invoking the Fifth Amendment. This dashed Plaintiff's apparent hope to obtain an adverse inference, rather than actually having to prove her case against Ms. Maxwell. Instead, Ms. Maxwell fully testified for the entire 7 hours, responded to all questions posed to her,1 and testified based on her actual knowledge. Ms. Maxwell's testimony simply bears no relevance to Plaintiff's request to take more than 10 depositions of non-party witnesses. Conspicuously absent from Plaintiff's motion are (a) any actual information she believes these witnesses may provide which is neither cumulative nor duplicative of other information already disclosed in this case, (b) the fact the information can be obtained from other sources, 1 Plaintiff flatly mis-represents to the Court that Ms. Maxwell "refused" to answer the questions posed to her, as the actual transcript amply demonstrates. Ms. Maxwell did not avoid any questions and answered all questions to the best of her recollection relating to alleged events 15 years ago. The majority of the bullet point "summary" of the matters about which Ms. Maxwell could not testify were based either on a lack of any personal knowledge or the fact that the events claimed by Plaintiff did not actually happen. 1 DOJ-OGR-00004204