NEW YORK, NY - JULY 08: US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman announces charges against Jeffery Epstein on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Whew! Jeffrey Epstein is all over social platforms this week as court documents related to the deceased financier are pending release. However, what users are calling the #EpsteinClientList isn’t actually a list at all, per the Associated Press.
In fact, the outlet reports that “there is no such list.” The truth is that previously sealed court records will be made public. However, the “majority of the people whose names appear in those documents are not accused of any wrongdoing,” per AP.
Still, as mentioned, social media is going IN about the pending docs.
The reason the documents are coming now is because they’re part of a lawsuit Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, filed against Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015.
Maxwell, accused of helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit underaged girls, was convicted in 2021 in New York. She is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Virginia Giuffre is one of the dozens of women who sued Epstein. She alleged that he abused them at his homes in Florida, New York, the U.S. 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. The job allegedly involved performing sexual acts.
Giuffre also claimed she was pressured into having sex with men in Epstein’s social orbit, most famously with Britain’s Prince Andrew. All of those men said her accounts were fabricated. She settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022.
Virginia settled her lawsuit against Maxwell in 2017. However, the Miami Herald went to court to access papers initially filed under seal, including transcripts of interviews the lawyers did with potential witnesses.
A court unsealed about 2,000 pages in 2019. Additional documents came in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
This next batch of records had remained sealed because of concerns about the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names had come up during the legal battle but weren’t complicit in his crimes.
U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska said in her December order that she was releasing the records because much of the information within them is already public.
The people named in the records include many of Jeffrey 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 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 modeling 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. Virginia Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse.
The judge has ordered for a handful of names to remain blacked out. This is because they would identify people who were sexually abused.
On Dec. 18, the judge gave the people whose names appear in the records 14 days to appeal, then directed the lawyers to confer, prepare the documents for unsealing, and post them on the docket.
According to AP, the court has already granted one woman an extra 30 days to argue why her name should remain redacted.
District court exec Edward Friedland said some records are expected to be public as early as today.
However, according to RadarOnline, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has confirmed that the documents will not be made public until around January 22.
Associated Press reporter David B. Caruso contributed to this report.
