A US federal judge has ruled that the justice department can publicly release investigative materials from the sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein. Judge Paul A Engelmayer’s decision on Tuesday means the records could be made public within 10 days, following the passage last month of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The law, signed by President Donald Trump, requires the justice department to provide Epstein-related records to the public in a searchable format by 19 December. The justice department argued that Congress intended the unsealing when it passed the act. This is the second such ruling; last week, a judge in Florida allowed the release of transcripts from a federal grand jury investigation into Epstein in the 2000s.
Epstein, a financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died a month later in a federal jail cell, in what was ruled a suicide. Maxwell, a British socialite, was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 and is serving a 20-year sentence. She was moved from a Florida prison to a Texas camp over the summer amid renewed public attention.
The justice department said the materials to be released encompass 18 categories, including search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data, and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida. It plans to redact survivors’ identities and prevent dissemination of sexualised images, after consulting with survivors and their lawyers.
Tens of thousands of pages of Epstein and Maxwell records have already been released through lawsuits and Freedom of Information requests. Many of the new materials come from police and prosecutor files in Palm Beach, Florida, from the mid-2000s. A request to release records from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case is still pending.
