New York: The Justice Department can publicly release investigative materials from a sex trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, a federal judge said Tuesday.
Judge Paul A Engelmayer ruled after the Justice Department in November asked two judges in New York to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits from Maxwell and Epstein’s cases, along with investigative materials that could amount to hundreds or thousands of previously unreleased documents.
The ruling, in the wake of the passage last month of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, means the records could be made public within 10 days. The law requires the Justice Department provide Epstein-related records to the public in a searchable format by Dec 19.
Engelmayer is the second judge to allow the Justice Department to publicly disclose previously secret Epstein court records. Last week, a judge in Florida granted the department’s request to release transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into Epstein in the 2000s.
A request to release records from Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case is still pending.
The Justice Department said Congress intended the unsealing when it passed the transparency act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month.
Three judges — two in New York and one in Florida — had previously refused an unusual department request to unseal grand jury transcripts.
The latest request, though, dramatically enlarged the files that the department said it planned to release to encompass 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe.
Epstein, a financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, a month before he was found dead in a federal jail cell. The death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking charges in December 2021. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
In response to a request by the New York judges for more specifics on what it would release, the department said in recent submissions in Manhattan federal court that the materials would include 18 categories, including search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida.
The government said it was conferring with survivors and their lawyers and planned to redact records to ensure protection of survivors’ identities and prevent the dissemination of sexualised images.
After the request to unseal investigative files last month, two judges in New York invited Maxwell, the Epstein estate and accusers to provide opinions about the request.
Maxwell’s lawyer said his client took no position about the requested unsealing, except to note that her plans to file a habeas petition could be spoiled because the public release of materials “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial” if the habeas request succeeded.
Lawyers for the Epstein estate took no position. At least one outspoken Epstein accuser, Annie Farmer, said through her lawyer, Sigrid S McCawley, that Farmer “is wary of the possibility that any denial of the motions may be used by others as a pretext or excuse for continuing to withhold crucial information concerning Epstein’s crimes”.
In August, Judges Richard M Berman and Paul A Engelmayer in Manhattan denied the department’s requests to unseal grand jury transcripts and other material from Epstein and Maxwell’s cases, ruling that such disclosures are rarely, if ever, allowed.
Tens of thousands of pages of records pertaining to Epstein and Maxwell have already been released through lawsuits, public disclosures, and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Many of the materials the Justice Department plans to release stem from reports, photographs, videos and other materials gathered by police in Palm Beach, Florida, and the US attorney’s office there, both of which investigated Epstein in the mid-2000s.
Last year, a Florida judge ordered the release of about 150 pages of transcripts from a state grand jury that investigated Epstein in 2006. On Dec 5, at the Justice Department’s request, a Florida judge ordered the unsealing of transcripts from a federal grand jury there that also investigated Epstein.
That investigation ended in 2008 with a then-secret arrangement that allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to a state prostitution charge.
