Last summer, when President Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case, it kicked off months of speculation about what those records might show.
The answer is not much new.
Transcripts and other records from closed-door proceedings in the Epstein case, as well as that of his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, were made public in the past day as part of the Department of Justice’s release of material from its investigations of the pair. The documents added little to what has already been known.
The long-awaited transcripts, running about 270 pages, show that the grand juries, working in federal courthouses in Manhattan and White Plains, N.Y., did not hear directly from any of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell’s victims or witnesses to their crimes.
Instead, the grand juries heard testimony only from members of law enforcement — an F.B.I. special agent in Mr. Epstein’s case, and in Ms. Maxwell’s case, the same agent and a New York police detective who was a member of the F.B.I.’s child exploitation and human trafficking task force.
In their testimony, the agent and the detective talked about victims who had described sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell. Their accounts later surfaced publicly at Ms. Maxwell’s 2021 trial, where four victims took the witness stand, with only one testifying under her full name.
The grand jury testimony and evidence in Mr. Epstein’s case became the basis for the accounts of abuse contained in his indictment. Mr. Epstein was found hanged in jail weeks after his arrest in July 2019, and his death was ruled a suicide. Ms. Maxwell’s trial was widely seen as the courtroom reckoning that he never had.
Grand jury records are normally secret, but judges in New York agreed to unseal them after Congress passed a law in November ordering the release of the so-called Epstein files. The grand jury transcripts were lightly redacted to remove names and other personal identifying information about victims, as the law required. The names of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers were also blacked out.
The transcripts show that in Mr. Epstein’s case, the grand jury met one day each in June and July of 2019, hearing testimony from the F.B.I. agent.
And in Ms. Maxwell’s case, the grand jury met on one day each in June and July of 2020, when the F.B.I. agent testified, and met again in March of 2021, when the New York detective testified.
The fact that the grand jury transcripts offer little insight into the questions surrounding the Epstein case is not surprising. The judge in Ms. Maxwell’s case indicated as much in August when the government petitioned to unseal the records.
The judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, noted that the government had represented that the Maxwell grand jury materials were “critical pieces of an important moment in our nation’s history.”
But he criticized the government’s argument that they would lead to a new understanding of the case. “Its entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the government’s investigation into them — is demonstrably false.”
The transcripts do, however, offer an unusual window into the normally secret world of grand juries, where, like in public trials, prosecutors have to remind jurors not to be influenced by what they hear outside of the grand jury room.
On July 8, 2020, when the Maxwell grand jury met for the second time — just days after Ms. Maxwell had been arrested — a prosecutor, whose name was redacted, asked if any grand juror had heard or read about Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Epstein or anyone else related to the case.
“If you could just raise your hand?” the prosecutor said. “I see a number of hands — virtually every hand is in the air,” the prosecutor remarked.
The prosecutor reminded the jurors that they could only act based on evidence presented in the grand jury room and they must set aside anything else they learned about the case. The prosecutor asked if any grand juror could not follow those instructions. “I see no hands,” she said.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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