Epstein victims denounce latest file release discloses their personal information

The release last Friday of a new batch of Jeffrey Epstein documents—the largest to date: 3.5 million files that can be viewed here, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images—brought further disappointment to the victims of the financier and sex offender, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and of his accomplice and fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison.

Within hours of the file release, 18 victims who were all underage when the financier sexually assaulted them published a joint statement: “Once again, survivors are having their names and identifying information exposed, while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected. That is outrageous,” the statement read. “This is not over. We will not stop until the truth is fully revealed and every perpetrator is finally held accountable.”

On Monday, it emerged that victim lawyers sent a letter to the judges in the Epstein cases in New York asking them to force the Justice Department to remove the millions of documents published online, citing the need for an “urgent” response.

The letter is signed by Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards, well-known advocates for dozens of Epstein’s victims. “In the last 48 hours, the undersigned have reported thousands of failures to preserve the identity of nearly 100 survivors whose lives have been drastically affected by the recent Justice Department release,” the letter states. “No conceivable degree of institutional incompetence is sufficient to explain the scale, consistency and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task was simple: redact known victim names before publication.”

The lawyers listed numerous errors, including one affecting the name of an underage victim, which they claim showed up 20 times in a single document. Once these errors were reported, the Department of Justice only corrected three of them, according to the lawyers.

On Sunday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—who has become the face of the Justice Department on this and other issues, given the unpopularity of his boss, Pam Bondi—stated in a television interview that the Justice Department “immediately rectified the errors,” and that “the cases being discussed affect 0.001% of the materials.”

Blanche also said that his department’s work on the Epstein papers “has concluded,” a year after President Donald Trump, who was a friend of the convicted sex offender for 15 years, returned to power promising that his administration would shed light on his crimes, his connections to power, and the circumstances of his death, which the coroner ruled a suicide—matters that have fueled various conspiracy theories.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that in the latest declassification, dozens of uncensored nude photos were also leaked. According to the newspaper, the photos showing young women, possibly teenagers, were apparently taken by Epstein. The newspaper alerted the authorities, who removed them from the website where the new materials have been uploaded since last Friday.

The law, which passed in Congress with the support of all but one Republican representative and senator, established a series of rules mandating the censorship of both sexual images and the names or information that could identify the victims. Subsequent releases of documents have revealed several violations of these rules. The Justice Department also failed to comply with its obligation to make all files in its possession public before Christmas. More than a month after that deadline, documents remain unreleased.

Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna (California), who has made the matter a personal crusade, accused the White House on CNN of having released, at best, half the documents. “But even those shocked the conscience of this country,” he added.

In another television appearance, also on Sunday, Blanche acknowledged that the victims want redress. “The attorney general wants that more than anything, but that doesn’t mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that doesn’t—that isn’t there.”

In the latest release, many familiar names show up for anyone who has followed this sordid affair dating back to the 1990s. Trump, who claims he broke up with Epstein around 2004, two years before the first pedophilia investigation against the financier, is mentioned some 4,500 times, many of them as indirect references; conversations in which Epstein talks to others about him.

Unverified accusations against Trump

The most striking document is one drafted by the FBI. It contains a list of allegations against the U.S. president of sexual assault against minors, received by the agency but not verified. The document dates from last August, when the government was in the midst of a crisis over the handling of the Epstein files. In July, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel issued a joint statement confirming that Epstein committed suicide in the cell where he was found dead, and that authorities did not plan to release any more of the disgraced financier’s documents. This sparked a phenomenal crisis within the MAGA movement, which had been waiting for months for Bondi to fulfill her promise to shed light on Epstein’s murky relationships with his powerful friends. It took Congress to force the White House to declassify the documents.

These allegations, which the government deems false, mysteriously disappeared from the official website over the weekend. They include the story of a whistleblower who reports that she was a victim and witness of a sex trafficking ring at the Trump Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, between 1995 and 1996, as well as that of a woman who claims she was forced to perform oral sex on Trump approximately 35 years ago in New Jersey. The FBI, Blanche said, only investigated some of these allegations, adding that his department is not in a position to investigate the rest because they come from anonymous sources or are based on secondhand information.

Among the other powerful figures who have come to light in recent days is Elon Musk, who exchanged messages with Epstein between 2012 and 2014 regarding a visit to the financier’s private island, where many of his sexual assaults took place. There is no indication that this invitation materialized (although there is evidence that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, did visit). By then, Epstein was already a registered sex offender, having received a lenient sentence in Florida in 2009 at the first of his trials.

Musk’s name isn’t the only one from Trump’s orbit to show up in the documents. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had maintained until now that he severed ties with Epstein in 2005, although evidence suggests they spoke in 2012 and met in the Caribbean. Another revelation implicates Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His ties to the financier, already known, ran deeper than previously thought: they continued until shortly before Epstein’s death, long after he was convicted of sex trafficking.

Bill Gates, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, Steve Tisch, owner of the New York Giants, and Brett Ratner, director of the recently released documentary about Melania Trump, are some of the influential figures who were linked to Epstein and who have resurfaced in the documents. The existence of these relationships does not, in itself, prove that they were aware of the financier’s crimes or that they participated in them.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition