WASHINGTON: A total of 19 sealed documents from a lawsuit connected to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile who died in a US jail before he could face trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, have been publicly released, CNN reported.
The Epstein list included in the unsealed papers are the names of about 150 Epstein associates. The documents were filed as part of Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator in his sexual abuse scheme.
On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on sex trafficking charges. He was jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
This is the second batch stemming from a December 18 court order from the judge overseeing the lawsuit, a response to media’s legal efforts to publicly release the documents. The documents released on Thursday night total more than 300 pages.
The documents are part of a 2015 civil defamation suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an American woman who claimed that Epstein sexually abused her as a minor and that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, aided in the abuse.
Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges.
Hundreds of pages of unsealed documents from a lawsuit connected to accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were publicly released on Wednesday which revealed the names of some prominent businesspeople and politicians, CNN reported on Thursday.
The second batch of documents were released following hundreds of pages of documents unsealed on Wednesday, with more expected in the coming weeks. The documents in total, including material yet to be unsealed, are expected to include nearly 200 names, including some of Epstein’s accusers, prominent businesspeople, politicians and potentially more.
Being named in the unsealed documents does not necessarily mean someone was accused of or committed wrongdoing, though. The documents range from technical legal arguments and exhibits to depositions recounting allegations and descriptions of alleged crimes, many or all of which appear to have been previously known through other releases, media interviews and other avenues.
One document, a deposition from Palm Beach Detective Joseph Recarey, lays out a process he says Epstein and Maxwell used to find and recruit girls “to perform massages and work at Epstein’s home”. Recarey was the lead detective on a previous case against Epstein in the mid-2000s.
In the document, when asked by an attorney how many girls Recarey had spoken to about being recruited by Maxwell, Recarey answered, “I would say approximately 30; 30, 33”. The attorney asked Recarey, “And, at the end of that massage, if that victim brought other friends, she would get paid for the recruitment of those friends?” “Correct,” Recarey responded.
The documents unsealed on Wednesday have revealed sexual assault allegations against the British royal Prince Andrew, Al Jazeera reported. Johanna Sjoberg, who is one of the many women who have accused Epstein of sexual abuse, said Andrew put his hand on her breast in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2001.
The incident, which has been previously reported by other media outlets and which Andrew has denied, was in an initial trove of previously redacted documents that otherwise revealed few new details about the extent of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking activities.
Al Jazeera said in its report that Sjoberg was recruited to work for Epstein by Maxwell, who had been his girlfriend in the early 1990s before they became professional collaborators and accomplices in sex crimes for almost three decades.
While Sjoberg was hired as an assistant when she was a 20-year-old college student, she was quickly turned into a massage therapist and was sexually coerced while she worked for Maxwell and Epstein from 2001 to 2006.
Giuffre, now 38, accused Andrew of sexually abusing her two decades ago when she was 17, an allegation the prince called baseless. The case was settled in 2022. (ANI)