The Justice Department can publicly release investigative materials from a sex trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, a federal judge said on Tuesday. Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled after the Justice Department in November asked two judges in New York to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits from Maxwell and Epstein's cases, along with investigative materials that could amount to hundreds or thousands of previously unreleased documents. The ruling, in the wake of the passage last month of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, means the records could be made public within 10 days, reports the AP. The law requires the Justice Department to provide Epstein-related records to the public in a searchable format by Dec. 19.
Engelmayer is the second judge to allow the Justice Department to publicly disclose previously secret Epstein court records. Last week, a judge in Florida granted the department's request to release transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into Epstein in the 2000s. A request to release records from Epstein's 2019 sex trafficking case is still pending. The Justice Department said Congress intended the unsealing when it passed the transparency act, which President Trump signed into law last month. Three judges—two in New York and one in Florida—had previously refused an unusual department request to unseal grand jury transcripts.
The latest request, though, dramatically enlarged the files that the department said it planned to release to encompass 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the massive sex trafficking probe. In response to a request by the New York judges for more specifics on what it would release, the department said in recent submissions in Manhattan federal court that the materials would include 18 categories including search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data, and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida.
The government said it was conferring with survivors and their lawyers and planned to redact records to ensure protection of survivors' identities and prevent the dissemination of sexualized images. Maxwell's lawyer said his client took no position about the requested unsealing, except to note that her plans to file a habeas petition could be spoiled because the public release of materials "would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial."
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