A few documents, which were sealed till now, are being released in the case of millionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. These documents mention names of prominent figures like Britain's Prince Andrew, former US presidents Bill Clinton and Trump and Michael Jackson
Explosive secret court documents mentioning names of bigwigs have been released in the case of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a millionaire known for associating with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and academic stars, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on a sex trafficking charge.
While there was massive hype over the documents with social media buzzing over the past weeks with posts speculating that the records would include a list of rich and powerful men who were Epstein's “clients” or “co-conspirators”, no such list has been released.
The documents, however, name prominent figures like former US presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and singer-dancer Michael Jackson among many others, giving reminders that Epstein surrounded himself with famous and powerful people, including a few who have also been accused of misconduct.
Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier and sex offender who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. A millionaire known for associating with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and the who's who, Epstein was initially arrested from Florida's Palm Beach in 2005 after he was accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.
Tales of sexual abuse then kept emerging with dozens of other underage girls describing similar encounters. Prosecutors, however, ultimately allowed Epstein to plead guilty in 2008 to a charge involving a single victim. Epstein served 13 months in a jail work-release program.
Known to surround himself by "famous" acquaintances such as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Epstein was abandoned after his conviction by some but continued to stay in touch with the rich and famous for another decade, often through philanthropic work.
A news reporting on the case against Epstein renewed interest in the scandal, resulting in federal prosecutors in New York charging Epstein with sex trafficking in 2019, the year he died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial.
Epstein's former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was then in 2021 convicted for helping recruit his victims and is serving a 20-year prison term.
The documents being unsealed are related to a lawsuit filed in 2015 by one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre. She is one of the dozens of women who sued Epstein, alleging that he had abused them at his houses in Florida, New York, US Virgin Islands and New Mexico.
This particular suit was against Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.
Virginia Giuffre's lawsuit against Maxwell was settled in 2017, but the court had kept some court documents sealed because of concerns about the privacy rights of the victims and other people whose names had come up in the legal battle.
Only around 40 of those documents were made public Wednesday, with more slated to be released in the coming days.
Among records released Wednesday were court memos in which lawyers for Giuffre complained that some of the women who had worked for Epstein were proving difficult to serve with subpoenas, as was Epstein himself. Subpeona is a formal written order that requires a person to appear before a court,
In her deposition, mentioned in a report by news agency AP, Giuffre said the summer she turned 17, she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club to become a “masseuse” for Epstein - a job that involved performing sexual acts.
The documents, besides Michael Jackson, also mention a May 2016 deposition of an accuser of Epstein - Johanna Sjoberg - that shed light on an April 2001 trip to New York in which she said Britain's Prince Andrew "touched her breast" while they posed for a photo at Epstein's Manhattan town house.
In the testimony, some of which appeared as excerpts in previous court filings, Sjoberg said she and Giuffre had flown with Epstein to New York on his private jet. Maxwell and Prince Andrew met them there, she said.
At one point, she testified, Maxwell called her to an upstairs closet where they pulled out a puppet of Prince Andrew that had been made for a BBC program. “It looked like him,” the AP report quoted Sjoberg's deposition. “And she brought it down and presented it to him; and that was a great joke, because apparently it was a production from a show on BBC.”
Giuffre settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022 in which she claimed he had sexually abused her during a trip to London. That same year, Giuffre withdrew an accusation she had made against Epstein's former attorney, law professor Alan Dershowitz, saying she “ may have made a mistake ” in identifying him as an abuser.
The documents also mention the same flight to New York, Sjoberg testified, due to bad weather was diverted to Atlantic City, New Jersey where Epstein spent a few hours at one of Donald Trump's casinos, because of bad weather.
“Great, we'll call up Trump and we'll go to the casino," the documents mentioned Sjoberg recalling Epstein's comments. Sjoberg wasn't asked if they'd met up with Trump that night. Later in her testimony, she said she was never asked to give Trump a massage.
Sjoberg also testified that though she never met former US president Bill Clinton, Epstein once remarked to her that “Clinton likes them young,” a remark she took as a reference to young women or girls.
The records released Wednesday included many references to Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent close to Epstein who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022, the AP report mentioned. Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse.
Clinton's name also came up because Maxwell's lawyers questioned Guiffre about contradictions in newspaper reports about her time with Epstein, including a story quoting her as saying she had ridden in a helicopter with Clinton and flirted with Trump. Giuffre said neither of those things actually happened.
The judge said a handful of names should remain blacked out in the documents because they would identify people who were sexually abused.