Alleged Epstein Victims Accuse Justice Department of Legal Violations Over State of Released Files

A group of alleged victims of Jeffrey Epstein accused the Justice Department of errors, including violations of the law, in its partial release of files related to the disgraced financier’s abuse of young women and girls.

The Justice Department on Friday faced a congressionally imposed deadline to release a massive cache of records collected during government investigations into the sex offender, who died in prison in 2019.

Justice officials released thousands of files, ranging from investigative documents to grand jury testimony to photographs taken by Epstein and his friends, but said they would not release all the files in their entirety before the deadline.

“Instead, the public received a fraction of the files, and what we received was rife with unexplained abnormal and extreme redactions,” a group of 19 women, including two Jane Does, said in a statement released Monday. “At the same time, numerous victim identities were left unredacted, causing real and immediate harm.”

The statement, which was released early Monday by attorneys representing the women, also pointed out what they said was missing from the files. They said that omissions by editorial staff or unpublished pages were equivalent to failure.

“No financial documents were published,” the statement said. “The grand jury minutes, although approved by a federal judge for release, were completely blacked out; not the scattered redactions you might expect to protect the victims’ names, but 119 full pages blacked out. We are told there are hundreds of thousands of pages of documents still unreleased.”

“These are clear violations of an unequivocal law,” the statement added.

Some documents revealed Friday with significant redactions were republished early Saturday with some or all of the redactions removed, according to a review of the files by ABC News.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media on Friday, as the initial files were released, which “[a]Additional response materials will be produced as our review continues, consistent with the law and to protect victims.” DOJ on Sunday released a similar statement, adding that reviews of the material would continue “as we receive additional information.”

In November, President Donald Trump had signed a bill giving the Justice Department 30 days to release the materials.

The alleged victims’ statement noted that Justice Department officials had structured the release of documents in a way that made it “difficult or impossible” for Epstein’s alleged victims to find information that could be important to their cases. And they said they had not been contacted about possible censorships or withholdings before the documents were released.

“It is alarming that the United States Department of Justice, the very agency charged with law enforcement, has violated the law, both by withholding massive amounts of documents and by failing to redact the identities of survivors,” the women’s statement said.

The women called for “immediate” congressional oversight “to ensure that the Justice Department meets its legal obligations.”

Separately on Sunday, Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards, attorneys representing more than 200 survivors of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, told ABC News that since Epstein’s files were released on Friday, they had been hearing from clients who had seen their names or other identifying information in documents not redacted in the Justice Department disclosure.

Henderson and Edwards said they had been working over the weekend with federal officials in New York and D.C. to remove documents containing personal information of alleged victims, many of whom have never revealed their names in any context related to Epstein.

In one case, Henderson and Edwards said, a sealed document from a settled civil lawsuit containing the names of more than two dozen alleged victims was released unredacted. That document was among those removed from the Justice Department site, the lawyers said.

The lawyers said that as of Sunday about 15 documents had been removed from the site, at least temporarily, as a result of their consultations with the government.

Justice Department officials said in a statement on social media Sunday afternoon that they had “received messages from individuals claiming to be victims and their attorneys, requesting that certain information be removed. Out of an abundance of caution, the material is temporarily removed for review and will be republished with appropriate edits, if legally required.”

Blanche said earlier Sunday in an interview on NBC News that the Justice Department would respond to concerns raised by victims about the potential exposure of identifying information and insisted, despite the slow release of the materials, that the Justice Department is following the law.

“We are also required by statute to protect victims and so the reason we are still reviewing documents and continuing our process is simply to protect victims,” ​​he said. “So the same people who are complaining about the lack of documents that were presented on Friday are the same people who apparently don’t want us to protect victims.”

“The reality is that anyone, any victim, any victim’s attorneys, any victims’ rights group, can contact us and say, ‘Hey, Department of Justice, there’s a document, there’s a photograph, there’s something within Epstein’s files that identifies me,'” he added. “And then, of course, we’ll get it done and investigate.”