On Thursday, nineteen unsealed documents from a lawsuit involving Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who died in jail before facing federal sex trafficking charges, were made public.
This is the second batch to result from a court order issued by the judge overseeing the lawsuit on December 18, in response to the media’s legal efforts to publicly release the documents. On Thursday night, the documents totaled more than 300 pages.
Thursday’s release follows the unsealing of hundreds of pages of documents on Wednesday, with more to come in the coming weeks.
Second set of Jeffrey Epstein documents describes the recruitment of several girls for Epstein
The documents, including previously unsealed material, are expected to contain nearly 200 names, including some of Epstein’s accusers, prominent business people, politicians, and possibly others.
Being named in the unsealed documents, however, does not necessarily imply that someone was accused of or committed wrongdoing.
The documents range from technical legal arguments and exhibits to depositions recounting allegations and descriptions of alleged crimes, many of which appear to have previously been known through other releases, media interviews, and other channels.
One document, a deposition from Palm Beach Detective Joseph Recarey, describes how Epstein and Maxwell found and recruited girls “to perform massages and work at Epstein’s home.” In the mid-2000s, Recarey was the lead detective in a previous case against Epstein.
When asked by an attorney in the document how many girls Recarey had spoken to about being recruited by Maxwell, Recarey replied, “I would say approximately 30; 30, 33.”
The first batch of documents, which were made public on Wednesday, mostly contained names and information that had previously been reported in various media outlets and made public through other court proceedings. This is, however, the first time these specific documents have been made public. More documents could be made public in the coming days.
The documents are part of a 2015 civil defamation suit filed by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an American woman who claimed Epstein sexually abused her as a minor and that Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, assisted in the abuse.
Giuffre and Maxwell’s civil suit was settled in 2017, but the court filings had previously been redacted to protect individuals’ privacy. In the unsealed documents, some names and information are still blacked out.
The majority of the suit’s documents were unsealed in 2019, one day before Epstein committed suicide in jail.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal prison sentence after being convicted of sex trafficking in 2021.