Unsealed Epstein documents: Here’s what we know so far

New York: Dozens of previously sealed court documents related to the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein have been made public, as a court unsealed more records from a years-old lawsuit connected to the financier.

They’re likely to disappoint sleuths online, where the plan to release documents prompted rumours of a list of “clients” or “co-conspirators”. In fact, the judge who made the call wrote in December that she was ordering the records released because much of the information within them was already public.

Jeffrey Epstein appears in court in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2008.Credit: AP

The first 40 documents, of about 250 expected to eventually be unsealed, largely mention figures whose names were already known, including high-profile friends of Epstein’s and victims who have spoken publicly.

Ahead of the documents’ release, misinformation about their contents ran rampant on social media. Users wrongly claimed that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s name might appear, spurred by a joke New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made Tuesday on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show.

Kimmel said in a response on X that he had never met Epstein and that Rodgers’ “reckless words put my family in danger”.

Here’s what we know about the documents released so far:

What happened to Jeffrey Epstein?

A millionaire known for associating with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and academic stars, Epstein was initially arrested in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2005 after he was accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.

Some famous acquaintances abandoned Epstein after his conviction, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, but many did not. Epstein continued to mingle with the rich and famous for another decade, often through philanthropic work.

Reporting by the Miami Herald renewed interest in the scandal, and federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking in 2019. He killed himself in jail the same year while awaiting trial.

The US attorney in Manhattan then prosecuted Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, for helping recruit his underage victims. She was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison term.

What are these records about?

The unsealed documents are part of a 2105 lawsuit filed against Maxwell by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. She is one of the dozens of women who sued Epstein saying he had abused them at his homes in Florida, New York, the US Virgin Islands and New Mexico.

Giuffre said the summer she turned 17, she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to become a “masseuse” for Epstein — a job that involved performing sexual acts.

Giuffre also claimed she was pressured into having sex with men in Epstein’s social orbit, including Prince Andrew, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former US senator George Mitchell and the billionaire Glenn Dubin, among others. All of those men said her accounts were fabricated.

Prince Andrew settled a multimillion-pound lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre.Credit: AP, BBC

Giuffre settled a lawsuit against Andrew in 2022. That same year, Giuffre withdrew an accusation she had made against Epstein’s former attorney, the law professor Alan Dershowitz, saying she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him as an abuser.

Giuffre’s lawsuit against Maxwell was settled in 2017, but the Miami Herald went to court to access court papers initially filed under seal, including transcripts of interviews the lawyers did with potential witnesses.

About 2000 pages were unsealed by a court in 2019. Additional documents were released in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

The batch currently being released contains around 250 records containing sections that were blacked out, or were sealed entirely, because of concerns about the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names came during the legal battle, but weren’t complicit in his crimes.

Only about 40 of those documents were made public on Thursday (AEDT). More will be released in the coming days.

What can we expect to see?

US District Judge Loretta Preska, who evaluated the documents to decide what should be unsealed, said in December she was ordering the records released because much of the information within them was already public.

Some records have been released, either in part or in full, in other court cases.

The people named include many of Epstein’s accusers, members of his staff who told their stories to tabloid newspapers, people who served as witnesses at Maxwell’s trial, people who were mentioned in passing during depositions but aren’t accused of anything salacious, and people who investigated Epstein, including prosecutors, a journalist and a police detective.

There are also boldface names of public figures known to have associated with Epstein over the years, but whose relationships with him have already been well documented elsewhere, the judge said.

One of them is Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modelling agent close to Epstein who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022. Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse.

His name was peppered throughout the documents released this time.

Clinton and Trump both factor in the court file, partly because Giuffre was questioned by Maxwell’s lawyers about inaccuracies in newspaper stories about her time with Epstein. One story quoted her as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump. Giuffre said neither of those things actually happened. She hasn’t accused either former president of wrongdoing.

Accuser Johanna Sjoberg testified in a newly released deposition that she once met Michael Jackson at Epstein’s Palm Beach, Florida, home, but that nothing untoward happened with the late pop icon.

“I met Michael Jackson,” Sjoberg said as part of the deposition. She did not give Jackson a massage.

The judge said a handful of names should remain blacked out in the documents because they would identify people who were sexually abused. The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they decide to tell their stories publicly, as Giuffre has done.

When will the rest of the documents be made public?

The judge hasn’t set a target for when all the documents should be made public, but more documents are expected to come in the next few days.

AP

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