How long has Ghislaine Maxwell been in prison since her arrest?
Executive summary
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested by the FBI in July 2020 and has been in federal custody continuously since that arrest, which means she has been incarcerated for roughly five and a half years as of January 28, 2026 (arrest in July 2020) [1]. She was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years (240 months) in federal prison in June 2022, and remains serving that sentence while pursuing appeals and other legal maneuvers [2] [3].
1. Arrest and the baseline timeframe: how the clock starts
Public reporting establishes July 2020 as Maxwell’s arrest month, which is the anchor point for any calculation of how long she’s been in custody; People magazine and other outlets explicitly state she was arrested by the FBI in July 2020 [1]. Because the available sources provide the month but not a single universally cited arrest day in the documents supplied here, the duration is best expressed as an approximate interval from July 2020 to the present date — about five years and six to seven months — rather than an exact day count [1].
2. Conviction, sentence and custody status: what happened after arrest
Maxwell was found guilty at trial in December 2021 and on June 28, 2022 was sentenced in Manhattan federal court to 240 months — 20 years — in prison, plus five years of supervised release and a $750,000 fine, a judgment that formalized her continuing incarceration under federal sentence computation rules [2]. Appeals courts have rejected key challenges to her conviction, and reporting indicates she has continued to press legal challenges upward toward the Supreme Court even while serving the sentence [3].
3. Transfers and location changes while serving time
While Maxwell has remained in custody since her 2020 arrest, she has been moved between facilities: she served time at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and a low‑security facility in Tallahassee before being transferred in August 2025 to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, a minimum‑security facility — moves officially confirmed by the Bureau of Prisons and widely reported [2] [4] [5]. Those transfers do not interrupt the continuous period of custody that began with her July 2020 arrest; they are administrative redesignations within the federal system [4].
4. Why the exact count matters — and the limits of the record
Calculating exact “time served” can matter for parole, good‑time credit, or other administrative adjustments, but the articles and press releases provided give month‑level anchors rather than a day‑by‑day ledger: a July 2020 arrest date [1], a December 2021 conviction [2], and a June 2022 sentencing date [2]. Public sources here do not publish an official Bureau of Prisons ledger showing the precise entry date for every designation or any daily accrual of good‑time credits, so the best publicly supportable statement is that Maxwell has been in federal custody continuously since July 2020 — roughly 5.5 years as of January 28, 2026 — while serving a 20‑year court sentence imposed in June 2022 [1] [2].
5. Context and competing emphases in coverage
News coverage since her arrest has split focus between the length and conditions of Maxwell’s confinement and the legal status of her conviction and appeals: justice‑department releases describe the sentence and charges; later press reports and congressional inquiries emphasize transfers to minimum‑security camps and allegations of preferential treatment after a July 2025 Justice Department interview, which shape public debate about the nature of her incarceration but do not change the start date of custody in July 2020 [2] [4] [6] [7]. Reporting also documents ongoing legal filings seeking to vacate or modify the sentence, underscoring that “time served” is only one dimension of a case still active in court [8] [9].