Lawyers representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein are asking judges to force the Justice Department to take down the tens of millions of Epstein-related documents it has posted on-line, saying in a letter dated Sunday that the failure to correctly redact victims’ data has triggered an “unfolding emergency.”
The letter, written by distinguished Epstein victims’ lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards and addressed to two federal judges in New York who’re overseeing Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s circumstances, requests an “immediate judicial intervention” to tackle the truth that victims’ data was included within the tens of millions of Epstein-related data that have been released.
Henderson informed NCS that the letter was despatched to the judges. The letter shouldn’t be but obtainable on the general public court docket docket.
“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” Henderson and Edwards wrote to judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer.
“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred —particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” additionally they wrote.
The lawyers checklist quite a few examples of redaction errors that they’ve come throughout, similar to one minor sufferer’s identify allegedly being “revealed 20 times in a single document.” Once these errors have been reported to the Justice Department, the division solely mounted three of the errors, “leaving 17 instances still unpredicted as of this filing,” the lawyers wrote.
Other examples included one electronic mail that allegedly lists 32 underage victims “with only one name redacted and 31 left visible,” in addition to FBI “302” types with full first and final names of victims unredacted.
The Justice Department didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
NCS reported on Friday that a number of survivors, together with nameless “Jane Doe” victims, have been seeing their names and data all through the recordsdata that have been printed.
Sunday’s letter additionally consists of testimony from numerous nameless “Jane Doe” victims who described receiving dying threats and harassment from the media because the publication of the recordsdata.
One Jane Doe is quoted as saying: “The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk.”
“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear,” the lawyers wrote. “When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided”
In a separate assertion to NCS, Henderson stated: “With every second that passes, additional harm is being caused to these women. They are scared, they are devastated, and they are begging for our government to protect them from further harm.”
NCS’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report.