Alison Moe

Background

Alison Moe has served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) in the Southern District of New York. The SDNY is widely regarded as the premier federal prosecutors’ office in the United States, handling complex financial crime, terrorism, organized crime, and high-profile civil rights cases. AUSAs at the SDNY represent a highly competitive subset of the federal prosecution community.

Moe’s prosecutorial work at SDNY has included significant sex crimes and human trafficking matters. Prior to the Maxwell case, she worked on a range of federal criminal matters that built her expertise in the kinds of complex multi-victim cases the Maxwell prosecution represented.

Connection to Epstein

Moe was part of the SDNY prosecution team assembled to try Ghislaine Maxwell on charges of sex trafficking, enticement of minors, and related offenses. The trial began in late November 2021 in federal court in Manhattan before Judge Alison J. Nathan.

Moe delivered the prosecution’s opening statement, a high-profile assignment that placed her as the public face of the government’s opening argument. Her opening described Maxwell as a calculating predator who preyed on vulnerable young girls alongside Jeffrey Epstein, using her social access and apparent trustworthiness to recruit victims.

The opening statement was detailed, methodical, and strategically focused on establishing Maxwell’s independent agency — that she was not simply an Epstein subordinate but an active, enthusiastic participant in the recruitment, grooming, and abuse of victims. This framing was central to the prosecution’s theory of the case.

Moe and her fellow prosecutors — including Lara Pomerantz and Andrew Rohrbach — conducted the trial over several weeks, presenting victim testimony, documentary evidence, and expert testimony. The jury convicted Maxwell on five of six counts on December 29, 2021, after just under four days of deliberations.

Aftermath

The Maxwell conviction was widely seen as a significant prosecutorial achievement given the complexity of the case, the decades-old conduct involved, and the resources of Maxwell’s defense team. Moe and her colleagues received recognition within the Department of Justice for the prosecution.

Moe has continued her work at the SDNY. She has not given media interviews about the case. As is typical for AUSAs, she has not sought a public profile beyond the work itself.

The opening statement she delivered has been excerpted and analyzed in accounts of the trial as a model of how to frame a complex trafficking case for a jury.