It has long been known that the disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein operated at the center of a globe-spanning network of the rich, famous and powerful, but the documents released on Wednesday were nonetheless shocking in revealing the sheer magnitude of his elite circle.
Through the prism of a defamation lawsuit involving allegations against the Wall Street “estate planner” Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, the scale of their social network came into harsh focus.
The document released by the US judge Loretta Preska has been sought since 2016. It may be only the first to flesh out the extraordinary web Epstein and Maxwell spun as they hosted party after party at homes across the globe and as they created a horrifying sex-trafficking network that preyed on teen girls.
The names littered throughout the depositions and legal correspondence that came up in the lawsuit – filed by Prince Andrew accuser Victoria Giuffre in 2015 – range from Bill Clinton, the former US president who one Epstein victim claimed she was told by Epstein “likes them young”, to Britain’s Prince Andrew, singer Michael Jackson, French hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai, “model scout” Jean-Luc Brunel, magician David Copperfield and acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking.
While many men so far named in the documents are not accused of any sexual misconduct, any social approximation to Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking conspiracy charges, or to Maxwell, currently serving 20 years in federal prison after being convicted on similar charges in 2021, is potentially a reputational black hole.
One May 2016 document includes detail of testimony already taken by Johanna Sjoberg, who had been recruited on a college campus at the age of 21 to work as a massage therapist and has said she was forced to perform sex acts on Epstein. It was Sjoberg who made the comment that Epstein “said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls”.
Clinton has staunchly denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
The documents with the unredacted names of about 150 people have begun to be made public after a long legal fight. After Maxwell’s criminal conviction, she lifted her objection to the release of files from Giuffre’s defamation suit against her, setting in motion Wednesday’s document dump, which had been eagerly awaited by media and the general public across the world.
A lawsuit by the Miami Herald, which broke the first stories on Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls in Florida, then forced the release of the sealed court documents.
In an article soon before the release began, the outlet said that the names in Epstein’s orbit “could finally bring to rest years of speculation about who among the rich and powerful were participants in the Palm Beach resident’s sordid world of sexual abuse”.
The Herald also warned that the records “could fall flat”. So far, the documents do not appear to add much that is explicitly revelatory about the criminality at the heart of the sordid drama of Epstein’s rise and fall or add much to the already richly fashioned story of those in his orbit.
The documents released do shed some light on the circumstances of Epstein’s lifestyle, but they do not answer any of the pending questions about his financial arrangements with wealthy men, if any, and how he came to amass the $580m fortune at the time of his death.
Eighteen years since Epstein’s name surfaced on a Florida charge of soliciting a minor, the many questions still surrounding him have only been partially satisfied. Many mysteries remain and their answers perhaps may only be found behind bars with Maxwell or with Epstein in his grave.
• This article was amended on 4 January 2024. An earlier version incorrectly described the released court documents as amounting to 2,024 pages, rather than 900 pages.
