Unsealed Jeffrey Epstein Documents Link High-Profile Names Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking To Sex Offender. Top Points

The nearly 950-page document was part of a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend.

Federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking in 2019.

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Numerous court documents revealing the names of some of the associates of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s associates were made public on Wednesday, as reported by The Guardian. According to The Guardian, the court documents contained the names of some high-profile people, including Prince Andrew, former US President Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, David Copperfield, and Stephen Hawking.

Federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking in 2019, and he died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial. The nearly 950-page document was part of a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend.

Here Are Top Points:

• The documents unsealed on Wednesday are part of a lawsuit filed against Maxwell by one of Epstein’s victims, Giuffre, in 2015. According to the Guardian, she is one of the dozens of women who sued Epstein, saying he had abused them at his homes in Florida, New York, the US Virgin Islands, and New Mexico.
• Ghislaine Maxwell was prosecuted by the US attorney in Manhattan for helping recruit Epstein’s underage victims. She was convicted in 2021 and is currently serving a 20-year prison term.
• According to The Independent, the suit was settled in 2017, but the names remained under lock and key until now.
  Giuffre said that when she turned 17, she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to become a “masseuse” for Epstein, as reported by The Guardian. It is a job that involves performing sexual acts.
• Giuffre further claimed that she was put under pressure to have sex with men in Epstein’s social orbit, most famously with Britain’s Prince Andrew. According to The Guardian, all of those men said her accounts were fabricated. 
• The lawsuit by Giuffre against Prince Andrew was settled in 2022. In the same year, she also withdrew an accusation she had made against Epstein’s former attorney, the law professor Alan Dershowitz, saying she “may have made a mistake" in identifying him as an abuser, as reported by The Guardian.
• The documents were evaluated by US District Judge Loretta A. Preska. The evaluation was done to decide what should be unsealed. According to The Guardian, in her December order, she said that she was releasing the records because much of the information within them was already out in public.
• Some records were released, either in part or in full, in other court cases. The records also included many names of people who had accused Epstein and names of members of his staff who told their stories to tabloid newspapers.
• According to The Guardian, the records also included the names of the people who served as witnesses at Maxwell’s trial, people who were mentioned in passing during depositions but are not accused of anything salacious, and people who investigated Epstein, including prosecutors, a journalist, and a detective.
• The judge had said that the documents had the names of public figures who were known to have been associated with Epstein over the years but whose relationships with him have already been well documented elsewhere, according to The Guardian.
• One of the names was of a French modelling agent close to Epstein, Jean-Luc Brunel, who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022. Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse.
• The names of Clinton and Trump are present in the court file, partly because Giuffre was questioned by Maxwell’s lawyers about inaccuracies in newspaper stories about her time with Epstein, as reported by The Guardian.
• According to The Guardian, in one story, she was quoted as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump. Giuffre stated that neither of those things happened. She has not accused either former president of wrongdoing.
• The judge also stated that a few names should remain blacked out in the documents because they would also reveal the names of people who were sexually abused.

What Are These Documents About ?

The documents unsealed on Wednesday are part of a lawsuit filed against Maxwell in 2015 by Giuffre, who is one of many victims of Epstein. The lawsuit was settled in 2017, but the Miami Herald went to court to get access to the papers initially filed under seal. According to The Guardian, the papers included transcripts of interviews the lawyers conducted with potential witnesses.

A court unsealed 2,000 pages in 2019, and additional documents were released in 2020, 2021, and 2022. This next set of records remained sealed due to concerns related to the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names had come up but were not complicit in his crimes.