A U.S. judge has ruled that the Department of Justice is authorized to carry out the public release of case files from the sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer made the decision after the DOJ asked the court in November to make public grand jury records and evidence from the cases of both Maxwell and Epstein. This action could lead to the publication of hundreds or thousands of previously unreleased documents.
The judge's decision, which follows the recent passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, means these materials could be made public within a 10-day period. The new law mandates the Justice Department to provide pertaining to Epstein records in a searchable format by a specified date in December.
Engelmayer is the second judge to permit the Justice Department to publicly disclose previously secret records from the Epstein case. Recently, a judge in Florida granted a similar request to unseal records from an earlier federal probe into Epstein from the early 2000s.
A separate request concerning records from Epstein's 2019 sex-trafficking case is still under consideration.
The DOJ has stated that Congress intended this unsealing when it enacted the transparency act. The latest request vastly expanded the scope of files slated for release to include eighteen distinct types of investigative materials during the extensive probe.
These documents are reported to include items such as:
Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier, was taken into custody in July 2019 on federal charges. He was found dead in a federal jail cell a month later, with his death ruled a suicide. Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
The government has indicated it is consulting survivors and their lawyers and plans to redact records to safeguard victim anonymity and stop the sharing of explicit imagery.
Tens of thousands of pages of records pertaining to Epstein and Maxwell have already been released through various means, including civil cases, public disclosures, and FOIA requests.
Much of the material the DOJ now intends to disclose stems from photos, videos, and reports collected by police in Florida and the local U.S. attorney’s office, both of which looked into Epstein in the mid-2000s.
That investigation ended in 2008 with a confidential deal that allowed Epstein to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty to a state prostitution charge. He completed 13 months in a work-release program.
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