A tranche of mostly unredacted court documents from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein compatriot Ghislaine Maxwell have been released, following a court order saying there was no further reason to keep them secret.
The documents do not constitute a “client list” for convicted pedophile Epstein. Instead they are motions and transcripts from Giuffre’s lengthy legal case alleging that Maxwell lured her away from a job at Mar-a-Lago to become a sexual masseuse for Epstein. The lawsuit was settled in 2017.
Giuffre claimed she was pressured into having sex with multiple men connected with Epstein, and famously sued Prince Andrew, claiming he had sex with her when she was still a minor. The royal said he was not guilty, but the lawsuit was settled in 2022.
Many of the names found within the documents have long been public knowledge and most of those that are not are victims and witnesses who had previously kept their names out of the public eye and are not accused of wrongdoing.
For example, in the deposition given by Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg, attorneys asked if she’s ever met a list of people reportedly linked with Epstein, including former President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. She answers “no” to most but admits she met Jean Luc Brunel, a model scout who committed suicide in 2020 after French prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking young girls.
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Sjoberg said she had met Brunel but never saw him with underage girls and never gave him a massage.
After Giuffre’s lawsuit settled, the Miami Herald sued access documents initially filed under seal. A first group of about 2,000 documents was released in 2019, with more documents released in each of the next three years.
US District Judge Loretta A. Preska went over the documents to determine which should be unsealed. She said in her December order that most of the information in these documents is already public.
Some names remain redacted in the documents.
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Epstein was first arrested in 2005 and accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex. Dozens of other girls accused of him of sexual abuse, but prosecutors let the millioniar plead guilty in 2008 to one charge involving one victim. He served 13 months in a work-release program.
As victims began filing suit against him, however, the Miami Herald dug in. Federal prosecutors in New York ultimated charged him with sex trafficking in 2019. He killed himself in jail rather than face a trial he was almost certain to lose, although conspiracy theorists have kept alive accusations that he may have been killed in jail to prevent the release of his so-called “client list.”
Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, was also charged by federal prosecutors with helping recruit the admitted pedophile’s victims. She was convicted in 2021 and is serving 20 years in prison.
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[FILE – In this July 2, 2020, file photo, Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell during a news conference in New York. Maxwell, criminally charged with aiding Jeffrey Epstein in his sexual abuse of teenage girls, testified in 2016 that she had no memory of anything amiss on his properties in the 2000s despite the accusations from dozens of women and girls that they were sexually abused by Epstein. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)]
