Names of Jeffrey Epstein associates and others unsealed in lawsuit documents

The first batch of documents in a settled lawsuit involving the late financier and accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released Wednesday evening, court records show.

The release of the court documents that would make public the names of more than 150 people tied to the settled lawsuit had been expected on a rolling basis, a spokesman for the federal court in New York said.

Forty exhibits were released Wednesday evening in the first group, and they encompass hundreds of pages of filings in the case. 

Some of the documents have been previously released, and most of the high-profile names in the first batch have previously been reported.

The latest documents to be unsealed are part of the defamation lawsuit first filed in 2015 against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell by Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

According to a transcript of her deposition, Giuffre said at different times she was directed to have sex with Prince Andrew; another prince; the unnamed owner of a large hotel chain, which she believed happened once in France. A request for a response was not immediately returned Wednesday night, but Andrew has strenuously denied the claim previously.

In a 2016 deposition from another woman who said she was hired by Maxwell and took a photo with Prince Andrew in which he placed his hand on her chest, Johanna Sjoberg, Sjoberg said Epstein once spoke about former President Bill Clinton, who is not accused of wrongdoing.

“He said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls,” the deposition reads. There is no mention of wrongdoing in that document, and the questioning moves on. Sjoberg said she had never met Clinton and never saw him on Epstein’s island.

A spokesman for Clinton said in 2019 that the former president had not spoken to Epstein in over a decade and was unaware of any criminal activity at that time.

Former President Donald Trump also appears in the deposition by Sjoberg, but it contains no allegations of wrongdoing.

Sjoberg recounted that when Epstein’s plane would have to land in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “Jeffrey said, Great, we’ll call up Trump” and go to a casino, she said in her deposition. Sjoberg also said she never gave Trump a massage.

Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday but has previously said he hadn’t been in touch with Epstein for 15 years before his death.

The names are part of a civil suit and had been sealed. No one else has been criminally charged in connection with Epstein, except for one: Epstein’s confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a sentence of 20 years in prison after being convicted of grooming victims.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska last month ordered the materials to be released after Jan. 1. However, the judge delayed whether to release documents associated with those who have objected to the disclosure of their names until a later date, the spokesman said.

In one case, an attorney for J. Doe 107 asked Preska for clarification on Dec. 20 of whether the name of his client would be unsealed. The attorney said his client lives in a “culturally conservative country” outside of the United States and is “in fear of her name being released.” Preska asked for information supporting her claim.

But Preska has said that the names of minor victims who have not testified in the case or were not previously known to the public will remain sealed.

Epstein was facing multiple sex trafficking charges when he hanged himself in a federal jail in New York in August 2019, as a trove of incriminating material had just been unsealed in court.

A Department of Justice report last June uncovered a cascade of misconduct, negligence and errors by Metropolitan Correctional Center employees that created the conditions allowing Epstein, 66, to take his own life, and found no evidence to contradict the official conclusion that he died by suicide.

The circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death had propelled a slew of online conspiracy theories, some amplified by conservative commentators and prominent Republican officials, including former President Donald Trump.

In a motion for joinder in action released Wednesday, it claims Epstein trafficked a victim identified only as Jane Doe #3 “for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

“Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to describe the events that she had with these men so that he could potentially blackmail them, that exhibit, filed by Jane Doe #3 and Jane Doe #4, says.

Epstein was known to have had relationships with well-known figures and politicians, including former President Bill Clinton, who flew on the millionaire financier’s planes numerous times, flight records made public in 2019 show.

Maxwell in a deposition said that Clinton had dined on Epstein’s plane, but Maxwell denied he ever visited Epstein’s Caribbean Island, Little St. James. She said allegations that Clinton had had a meal on Epstein’s island were “100% false.”

Trump was also found to have flown on one of Epstein’s planes at least once, and video emerged in July 2019 of Epstein and Trump partying together at Trump’s Florida mansion in the early 1990s.

A spokesman for Clinton said in 2019 that the former president had not spoken to Epstein in more than 10 years. That same year, Trump also said he hadn’t communicated with Epstein in 15 years and was “not a fan of his.”

Giuffre alleged that Epstein sexually abused her and that Maxwell and Epstein directed her to have sex with other men from 2000 to 2002, starting when she was 17. The case, which Giuffre brought after Maxwell accused her of lying when she said Maxwell and Epstein had exploited and abused her, was eventually settled out of court in 2017.

In 2022, Giuffre also settled a high-profile lawsuit out of court against Britain’s Prince Andrew, one of the men who had been accused of having sex with her. Andrew has denied the allegations and has said he has no recollection of ever having met Giuffre.

A year after Epstein’s death, Maxwell, the daughter of late British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, was arrested on charges connecting her with the recruitment of teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. At trial, Maxwell’s accusers provided graphic accounts of how they say she “groomed” them to have sex with Epstein or pressured them into massages, in which she sometimes groped them herself. She was convicted of five federal sex trafficking charges and sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years behind bars.

Maxwell, now 62, is in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, and filed an appeal of the verdict, claiming prosecutors used her as a scapegoat.

Giuffre’s attorney, Sigrid McCawley, said Wednesday evening that the public has rightly demanded to know how Epstein was able to operate the sex trafficking ring for decades.

“The public interest must still be served in learning more about the scale and scope of Epstein’s racket to further the important goal of shutting down sex trafficking wherever it exists and holding more to account,” McCawley said. “The unsealing of these documents gets us closer to that goal.”