In addition to the terrible memory of the hundreds of victims of his crimes, Jeffrey Epstein left behind his death in 2019 – suicide, according to the medical examiner – an enormous amount of documentary material and a political and judicial scandal that, more than six years later, does not cease for what was once his friend: Donald Trump.
The billionaire pedophile’s name also survives in the phrases “the Epstein documents” and “the Epstein Listtwo of those expressions that are used a lot but are less defined and limited.
The first refers to a sum of, among others, court documents, emails, bank records, daily diary entries, transcripts of communications and personal materials that form a monumental archive whose publication is requested these days by Democrats and a good group of Republicans in the House of Representatives. Congress is expected to vote together next Tuesday in favor of its disclosure.
The second speaks of an alleged list of names of rich and famous friends that the shady financier allegedly kept written down, perhaps for blackmail purposes, of those who participated in the sex trafficking network he spun with impunity for years and in which hundreds of minors remained trapped.
He often recruited them with the help of his ex-partner Ghislaine Maxwell, now sentenced to 20 years in prison, to give him massages in exchange for money which ended in sexual violence in his numerous homes: from Palm Beach (Florida), to New York, Paris, Ohio or New Mexico. Furthermore, in his two jets or on their private islands in the Caribbean, sinister environments that the locals knew as “pedophile islands”.
There he regularly had orgies, according to witnesses, in the company of men whose identities have given rise to conspiracy theories. Every time, like this week, new roles become known, a varied sample of names comes to light in contexts that are damaging to their reputation but almost always do not constitute a crime in themselves.
Epstein was an extraordinarily well-connected man in New York society, thanks to his business affairs and, above all, initially, to Maxwell, socialite British with proverbial human skills―, but also in different worlds such as politics, finance or science. Coming out in those roles does not in principle mean you are guilty. At this moment, together with the pedophile’s agent, a great name has fallen: that of the then Prince Andrew, brought down by the tenacity and evidence of the accusations of perhaps the most famous victim, Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide in April after a car accident in Australia, where she lived. In October, Charles III stripped his brother of his titles.
On Wednesday, the US Congress released around 20,000 documents – mostly private emails – that served to prove what Attorney General Pam Bondi had already told Trump: that his name is all over the Epstein documents. In this lot we talk about it hundreds of times, but above all two: one in which the financier says in 2011 that the then real estate magnate “spent hours” at his house with one of the victims and another, in which in 2019 he tells a journalist that Trump “knew about the girls”.
This delivery of documents, like the latest batches to see the light, are being provided to the House Oversight Committee, by court order and reluctantly, by the financier’s heirs, who manage the $600 million estate he protected before his death to prevent, in a final stroke of sadism, from compensating the victims. The Republicans on that committee released them by depositing them without filters in a digital archive that seems inexhaustible, but it is only the tip of the iceberg of the Epstein papers held by the Department of Justice. How much material remains to be known? This is another of the unknowns of the case.
A few months ago, Bondi declared, figuratively and with a pride that ended up becoming a trap for her, that this unmanageable file was on her desk and that the department she headed was investigating it for its next publication. In a statement signed with FBI Director Kash Patel, the attorney general said in July that he no longer intended to shed light on a puzzle they promised to solve on behalf of the American people. The irony is that Patel was one of the people who likes it podcastersdid more to inflate conspiracy theories about the case.
The “first phase” of declassification
Already in February Bondi had gotten into trouble on behalf of the financier with the announcement of the “first phase of declassification of Epstein’s papers”. He wanted to do it in a theatrical way, through a group of influencers of the far right, who, like Patel, joined the conspiracies. They went to the White House looking for a 341-page folder and were disappointed.
A total of 118 pages were repeated, and almost all the material was already known previously, thanks to the publication of parts of the summaries of the criminal or civil trials against Epstein and Maxwell. Among them was a heavily censored version of the famous “black notebook” with contact details and a seven-page list of mostly redacted names of “masseuses.”
That lot also included a three-page index prepared by the FBI. It contains detailed material yet to be published: 40 computers and electronic devices, 26 hard drives, more than 70 CDs and six tape recorders. The total, according to the Department of Justice, is 300 gigabytes of data. Additionally, among many other things, it listed photographs, travel journals, sex toys, employee pay stubs, more than $17,000 in cash, five massage tables, floor plans of Epstein’s island and his Manhattan home, four busts of female body parts, a pair of women’s cowboy boots, or a stuffed dog.
Disseminating all this material would mean, for Ro Khanna, Democratic representative of California, “unraveling the skein of a mystery”. “We cannot continue to live with the suspicion that this case involves influential people in both parties; because this cannot be something partisan,” the representative said Friday after Trump asked Bondi to send a prosecutor — “and the patriots of the FBI” — to investigate Democrats whose names have been repeatedly associated with the Epstein List. The president named three: former President Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, former Harvard chancellor, and mega-donor Reid Hoffman, as well as the bank where the financier had had money for years: JP Morgan Chase.
The materials of the 2015 trial
In subsequent file dropper releases, Clinton is a regular. His name appeared, for example, in the February 2024 ruling of Loretta Preska, the judge who handled the defamation lawsuit that Giuffre filed against Maxwell in 2015. They were published in two parts, and contain materials such as a 179-page statement from another victim, Johanna Sjoberg, non-incriminating references to figures such as Stephen Hawking or Michael Jackson, or the 2005 Palm Beach (Florida) police report on first arrest of the pedophile, after a mother discovered that a rich man from the exclusive neighborhood had paid her 14-year-old daughter for sexual relations.
This resulted in a 2008 sentence of 13 months in prison after a controversial agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, which gave the man who in one of the trials was defined as “the most dangerous sexual predator in the history of the United States” another decade to continue acting. Finally, he was detained in 2019 at a private jet airport in New Jersey, and was tried for the same facts as the first trial, which occurred between 2002 and 2005.
In July this year, along with the document in which Patel and Bondi claimed that authorities had no evidence that Epstein had blackmailed powerful people, that he had maintained a “client list” or that he had been murdered, two videos, one “enhanced” and the other crude, were released to prove that no one had entered Epstein’s cell on the night he died. Both offer little difference from each other in the same material: a nearly 11-hour overhead fixed shot in which the security camera focuses on a cell door that no one opens or walks through. In both there is also a minute missing, around midnight, and this gap has raised new suspicions.
The announcement that the Trump administration was backing away from its plans to release the secrets it had campaigned on sparked an uproar in the MAGA world (Make America great again), an environment conducive to Epstein hoaxes. To quell him, Trump devised a pantomime: requesting the publication of materials relating to the grand jury proceedings in the various trials. The judges in office refused to participate in that exercise. One of them, with the following argument: “This petition appears to be nothing more than a distraction from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files held by the government.”
The roles of the Supervisory Body
After that disappointment, the House Oversight Committee sprang into action. So far its members have had access to 33,000 documents, many already known, which they published in August; to a book that Maxwell put together with the help of Epstein’s friends (including the president, who contributed a vulgar drawing that he claims was fake) to congratulate him on his fiftieth birthday; and to the will of the pedophile.
They also published a handful of pages from their daily diaries, which name Elon Musk, as a possible traveler to their island, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and close ally of Vice President JD Vance, who had lunch with Epstein in 2017, and Trumpist ideologue Steve Bannon, who had breakfast with him two years later. Once again, these revelations alone serve no purpose other than to demonstrate the financier’s robust and dense ties to power.
The library of horror
To all these materials we must add the thousands of pages of the growing library on the case, which includes books by survivors, lawyers or law enforcement officers, investigative work by journalists essential to uncovering Epstein’s crimes, and biographies on Maxwell or the former Prince Andrew.
The latest to be added to the list are Giuffré’s posthumous memoirs, published in October. In them he writes: “Despite all that has been done to expose the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell, more action is needed. Because some still believe that Epstein was an anomaly, an isolated case. And they are wrong. (…) (Also) do not be fooled by those within Epstein’s circle who say they did not know what he was doing. Epstein not only did not hide what was happening, but he enjoyed letting people see it. And the people saw it: the scientists, the collectors of funds from the Ivy League and other prestigious institutions, the industry tycoons saw it and didn’t care.
Only the dissemination of the still unpublished papers that Trump has been blocking for months will serve to verify whether Giuffré’s words translate into new beliefs. Perhaps from these documents the complete picture of Epstein’s network of sexual abuse and power relations will also emerge six years later.
