Epstein Survivors Demand DOJ Take Down Files After Botched Release

Attorneys representing victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are appealing to federal court to get the federal government to take down millions of documents related to Epstein, saying that the government failed to properly redact victims’ information.

In a letter to New York federal judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, who are overseeing the cases of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards requested an “immediate judicial intervention” over victims’ personal information being included in the newly released files.

“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” the letter states.

Henderson and Edwards, who represent over 200 alleged victims of Epstein, blasted the Justice Department for its failure, considering that protecting victims of Epstein is required by law.

“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred—particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” Henderson and Edwards wrote.

“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear,” the letter states. “When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided.”

The lawyers mention multiple instances where victims’ names were left unredacted, including one minor’s name allegedly “revealed 20 times in a single document.” When those mistakes were flagged and told to the DOJ, the lawyers said, only three of the mentions were redacted, with the other 17 left untouched. In another instance, one email mentions 32 underage victims with only one of them redacted, while some FBI forms included in the file release left full names unredacted.

Some of the victims testified anonymously in the letter that they received death threats and harassment from the media since the files publicly identified them.

“The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk,” one victim said.

The latest Epstein file release on Friday appears to be full of errors and negligent redacting. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released unredacted, while an innocuous photo of President Trump speaking somehow was redacted. And the full batch of files has yet to be released, despite a legal deadline set six weeks ago. Is the DOJ taking the release of the Epstein files seriously?