WASHINGTON, D.C., United States — The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has withdrawn thousands of documents linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after victims warned that their identities had been exposed in a flawed public release.
Lawyers representing Epstein’s survivors said errors in the redaction process had compromised sensitive personal information, including email addresses and explicit images that revealed the names and faces of nearly 100 victims.
In a joint statement, survivors described the disclosure as “outrageous” and said they should not be “named, scrutinized and retraumatized” in the course of public transparency.
The DOJ acknowledged the failures, saying all flagged files had been removed from its website and attributed the errors to “technical or human error”. In a letter filed with a federal judge on Monday, the department stated:
“All documents requested by victims or counsel to be removed by yesterday evening have been removed for further redaction.”
The department added that it was continuing to assess additional requests and had independently identified and withdrawn a “substantial number” of documents that may also require further redaction.
The controversial release was mandated after both chambers of Congress passed legislation compelling the DOJ to publish Epstein-related files, under strict conditions that any information capable of identifying victims must be removed.
However, on Friday, two attorneys representing survivors petitioned a federal court in New York to order the DOJ to take down the entire database, calling the disclosure “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history”.
Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards warned of “an unfolding emergency that requires immediate judicial intervention”, accusing the DOJ of failing to redact victims’ names and personally identifying information “in thousands of instances”.
Several survivors appended personal statements to the court filing. One described the release as “life-threatening”, while another said she had received death threats after her private banking information was made public.
Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Epstein survivor Annie Farmer said:
“It’s hard to focus on the new information that has been brought to light because of how much damage the DOJ has done by exposing survivors in this way.”
Another survivor, Lisa Phillips, told BBC Newsday that many victims were “very unhappy with the outcome” of the release.
“The DOJ has violated all three of our requirements,” she said.
“Number one, many documents still haven’t been disclosed. Number two, the date set for release has long passed. And number three, DOJ released the names of many of the survivors.”
She added:
“We feel like they’re playing some games with us but we’re not going to stop fighting.”
Prominent women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who has represented several Epstein victims, previously told the BBC that the latest document dump exposed names of survivors who had never spoken publicly.
“In some cases… they have a line through the names but you can still read the names,” she said.
“In other cases, they’ve shown photos of victims – survivors who have never done a public interview, never given their name publicly.”
Also Read: US Justice Department releases millions of Epstein files, sparking scrutiny and backlash
A DOJ spokesperson told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that the department “takes victim protection very seriously” and had redacted thousands of names across millions of documents. The spokesperson added that the department was “working around the clock to fix the issue” and claimed that “to date 0.1% of released pages” contained identifying information.
The Epstein archive, released under a law passed last year, is among the largest disclosures in US judicial history. It includes more than three million pages of documents, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos, with the most recent batch published last Friday.
That release came six weeks after the DOJ missed a statutory deadline signed into law by President Donald Trump, following bipartisan pressure from Congress to make all Epstein-related materials public.
Jeffrey Epstein died in a New York jail on 10 August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, in a death officially ruled a suicide but which continues to fuel public controversy.
