Nearly 1,000 pages of court records connected to Jeffrey Epstein have been made available this week.
Many of the names had previously been redacted from the court documents butn now, however, the documents include the names of friends and businesses reportedly associated with the sex offender, revealing an extensive network that extended to places of high influence.
The late Queen Elizabeth II’s son Prince Andrew is among those named in the documents, as are former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Prince Andrew denies any wrongdoing and all allegations made against him.
Many people listed were those named as associates of Epstein and there is no suggestion those listed either knew about his crimes or participated in any criminal behaviour.
Epstein died in prison in 2019 while awaiting federal sex trafficking charges, but the documents shed yet more light on his shadowy world.
Epstein was an American financier who began his professional life by teaching at the Dalton School, despite lacking a college degree.
He is best known for rubbing shoulders with the rich and the famous, regularly snapped on the Hollywood trail with celebrities, billionaires, and academic high-fliers.
In 2005, he was arrested after being accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex. Many other underage girls similarly accused Epstein of sexual abuse, but prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty in 2008 to a charge that only involved one victim.
He served 13 months in a jail work-release program, and some of his famous friends, like Clinton and Trump, cut ties with him after this.
Ultimately, Epstein still managed to live the life he had had before, and mingled with celebrities for another 10 years, often through philanthropic work.
When the Miami Herald looked back into his case, Epstein returned to the fray for all the wrong reasons. The pace quickened when federal prosecutors in New York charged him in 2019 with sex trafficking.
The US attorney involved in Epstein’s case then prosecuted his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, for helping recruit his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison term after being convicted in 2021.
Virginia Giuffre is one the dozens of women who sued Epstein and accused him of abuse in his many homes, including in Florida, New York, the US Virgin Islands and New Mexico. The documents being unsealed are part of a lawsuit filed against Maxwell in 2015 by Ms Giuffre.
According to her, during 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. This job, she says, included performing sexual acts.
Ms Giuffre also claims that she was pressured by Epstein into having sex with men in Epstein’s inner circle, including Prince Andrew. He says her account is fabricated and vehmently denies the allegations.
She and Andrew settled a lawsuit in 2022, without any admission of liability. That same year, Ms Giuffre withdrew an accusation she made against Epstein’s former attorney, the law professor Alan Dershowitz. She said she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him as an abuser.
While Ms Giuffre’s lawsuit against Maxwell was settled in 2017, the Miami Herald accessed court papers previously filed under seal after going to court.
These papers included transcripts of interviews lawyers carried out with potential witnesses. Some 2,000 pages were unsealed by a court in 2019, and similar documents were published in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
The most recent batch of documents had remained sealed because of concerns about the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names had been mentioned in the legal process, though who were not complicit in his crimes.
by Epstein
Loretta A Preska, a US district judge who went over the documents to decide what should be unsealed, said in December she would open the documents because much of the information contained in them was already public.
Some of the records have either been released in full or in part in other court cases.
Most of the others relate to the topics and people covered in nearly 20 years of newspaper stories, TV documentaries, interviews, books and testimony at Maxwell’s criminal trial.
Many of Epstein’s accusers are named, as are his former members of staff who told their stories to tabloid stories.
People who served as witnesses at Maxwell’s trials are also mentioned, so are those who were mentioned in passing during depositions but are not accused of anything salacious, and people who investigated Epstein, including journalists and prosecutors, and a detective.
Names of public figures who associated themselves with Epstein over the years are also mentioned. These people, the judge said, are already publicly known to have had relationships with him.
One is Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modelling agent close to the disgraced financier who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022.
Ms Giuffre was among the women who accused Brunel of sexual abuse. Part of the reason why Clinton and Trump are included in the file is because Ms Giuffre was questioned about them by Maxwell’s lawyers.
She claims that inaccuracies in newspaper stories quoted her as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump, both of which Ms Giuffre says never actually happened. Neither has she accused either ex-President of wrongdoing.
A handful of names will remain blacked out, the judge said, because they would identify people who were sexually abused.
