A new batch of documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffery Epstein’s sexual abuse were released on Thursday.
The additional 19 documents, totaling approximately 300 pages, add to the more than 900 pages of documents already unsealed on Wednesday evening, the release of which prompted an online frenzy that crashed a website hosting the documents.
The unsealed papers do not appear to contain extensive additional information about Epstein’s trafficking of teenage girls and women. They include some discussion of Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s medical records and a portion of a deposition provided by a medical provider.
The documents also include an email exchange between Giuffre and the journalist Sharon Churcher, who had been assisting her pursuit of a book deal. In the 2011 exchange, Churcher tells Giuffre that she is correct to be concerned about “what side” Vanity Fair was taking in a story involving Epstein.
Giuffre responds with an unsubstantiated claim that Bill Clinton – who once associated with Epstein – stormed into Vanity Fair and threatened the magazine over the story.
“When i was doing some research into VF yesterday, it docs concern me what they could want to write about me considering that B.Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend J E,” Giuffre wrote.
In 2007, Page Six of the New York Post quoted the writer of the Vanity Fair story, John Connolly, rebuffing this claim, which had appeared on Gawker.com. “The site reported former President Bill Clinton had visited Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in his Times Square office to kill a John Connolly story about billionaire Jeffrey Epstein,” Page Six said.
“The story supposedly will mention one of Clinton’s friends,” Page Six reported. “Turns out, Clinton never visited Carter, and Connolly told us his story isn’t dead – he’s waiting for Epstein’s next court appearance – and it won’t even mention this high-powered friend.”
In a statement to the Telegraph, Carter denied the Clinton threat claim, saying: “This categorically did not happen.”
However, in 2019, Connolly told NPR that Epstein had threatened Carter years before when Vanity Fair had been considering covering allegations of sexual misconduct against the financier.
The journalist Vicky Ward, who wrote a 2003 piece for Vanity Fair on Epstein’s life and fortune, had claimed that she had spoken to two Epstein accusers on the record during her reporting.
Carter told NPR that the magazine had not withheld this information due to threats or fear but insisted that Ward’s sourcing had not been legally sufficient for publication.
But Connolly claimed that in 2006, when he had been investigating Epstein, a dead cat had been put outside Carter’s house. Connolly said that Carter had told him he was worried about his children’s safety, and the journalist said he decided to stop pursuing his investigation, according to NPR.
One document included a deposition excerpt from an unidentified Epstein accuser who, while in high school, had been recruited to provide him massages. “I worked very, very hard to not recall anything specific about my sexual encounters with this person as one of his victims,” she said in the deposition.
“I don’t recall exactly how I was propositioned to get there. I just was there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me.”
“Did you bring other girls to him?” the woman was asked. She answered yes: “I brought friends over.” They had been her peers, other high-school girls, she said.
She also said that Epstein had asked her to live with him when she was a teenager. “He wanted me to be emancipated,” she said.
The documents stem from Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and include excerpts of depositions and motions in that case. Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking and similar charges for procuring teen girls for Epstein.
Thousands of pages of documents in that lawsuit had been made public previously, but some sections had been blacked out because of privacy concerns.
Some of the high-profile names that have appeared in the court documents so far include Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson and David Copperfield, though many men named are not accused of any sexual misconduct.
While many of the details in the documents were already public, they shed new light on the sheer magnitude of Epstein’s rich and powerful orbit.
The documents so far – with more to come – were sprinkled with names of celebrities and politicians who socialized or worked with Epstein in the years before he was publicly accused of targeting underage girls for sex.
The documents also suggest that Epstein was so hungry for proximity to celebrity that he made spurious boasts about relationships with Hollywood A-listers.
Johanna Sjoberg, an accuser of the late sex offender and financier, claimed in a deposition that he liked to talk about knowing movie stars, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, and that these statements appeared to come across as flimsy braggadocio.
A lawyer asked Sjoberg: “I saw one press report that said you had met Cate Blanchett or Leonardo DiCaprio?”
“I did not meet them, no,” she replied.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 for sex trafficking and found dead in his jail cell on 10 August of that year; authorities determined that he hanged himself.
The documents have included repetitions of well-known stories about Prince Andrew, who was also sued by Giuffre, who said she had sexual encounters with the royal when she was 17. The prince, who denied the allegations, settled the lawsuit in 2022.
Associated Press contributed reporting
