Ghislaine Maxwell, who grew up in Oxford, is facing Christmas in prison in New York.
The 58-year-old socialite has lodged a $28.5m (£21.4m) bid to get bail.
She is being detained at the Metropolitan detention centre in Brooklyn on charges that she helped to procure girls as young as 14 for the late finance boss Jeffrey Epstein to abuse in the mid-1990s, and of perjury.
Maxwell has denied the charges.
Her trial is scheduled for July 2021 and if convicted she faces up to 35 years behind bars.
Read again: Ghislaine Maxwell was an Oxford United director
Ghislaine Maxwell at an Oxford United game
Maxwell got married in 2016 and to support the bail application lawyers have included a letter from her husband.
Life started out very differently when she was growing up in Oxford as the daughter of tycoon Robert Maxwell.
She was born in France and spent her first years of schooling at Oxford High School for Girls in North Oxford.
At the age of nine, she went to Edgarley Hall boarding school in Somerset, but she was back in Oxford at 13 to attend Headington Girls’ School, where she was “very sporty at tennis, hockey and athletics”.
Read again: Socialite who counted rich as friends
After her A-Levels at Marlborough, she joined her father’s Pergamon Press at Headington, “doing anything from typing to managing congresses”.
But after nine months, her father sent her alone to Spain – to fend for herself and sell books.
Her father made another important decision – encouraging her to apply to Oxford University – and her life looked promising as she collected her degree in 1985 and later moved to New York.
Aged 22, she became a director of Oxford United in 1984.
She became a familiar figure at matches sitting alongside her father, club chairman Robert Maxwell, in the directors’ box, sporting a yellow and blue United scarf and cheering on the team.
But the Maxwell empire crumbled when it was revealed after Robert’s death in 1991 that he had plundered pension funds to stay afloat.
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