The release of millions of files related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has roiled politics, business and academia in the United States and abroad, touching off a reckoning for some of the powerful figures who once associated with the disgraced financier.
It’s marked an inflection point in a decades-long saga that has stretched from Florida and New York City to New Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands — and continued despite Mr. Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
Here are key moments in the case of Mr. Epstein and the fallout that has followed:
Summer 1996: A New York artist who once worked for Mr. Epstein told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Epstein had stolen nude photographs of her sisters, ages 12 and 16, that she’d used as references for her paintings. She said she believed he had sold the pictures, that he had once asked her to photograph young girls at swimming pools and that he had threatened to burn her house down if she told anyone. The F.B.I. does not appear to have pursued the tip.
March 2005: The parents of a 14-year-old girl reported to the Palm Beach police that their daughter had received $300 to massage Mr. Epstein at his Florida home. Investigations by the police and the F.B.I. went on to identify dozens of underage victims who said Mr. Epstein had sexually abused them.
July 2006: A grand jury in the State Circuit Court in Palm Beach County indicted Mr. Epstein on a single count of felony solicitation of prostitution.
September 2007: The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, which had been conducting a sex-trafficking investigation into Mr. Epstein, negotiated an agreement not to prosecute him and some of his associates. The deal’s details were kept confidential. It required Mr. Epstein to plead guilty to the state indictment and to an additional state offense — procurement of a minor to engage in prostitution — that would force him to register as a sex offender.
June 2008: Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to the two charges and began serving what was to be an 18-month sentence in county jail.
July 2009: Mr. Epstein was released from jail after 13 months. Over the next 10 years, he continued to travel widely and associate with prominent people.
November 2018: The Miami Herald published articles bringing renewed attention to the unusual agreement Mr. Epstein had made with the federal prosecutors a decade earlier.
July 2019: Mr. Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Federal prosecutors accused him of abusing dozens of girls at his homes in New York and Florida and charged him with sex trafficking and other crimes.
August 2019: Mr. Epstein, 66, was found dead in his jail cell in Manhattan. His death was ruled a suicide.
June 2020: Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, was indicted in Federal District Court in Manhattan on charges of sex trafficking of minors and other offenses. After a lengthy trial, she was convicted of sex trafficking and other crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
September 2024: While campaigning for president, Donald J. Trump, a onetime friend of Mr. Epstein’s, said on a podcast that he would be inclined to make public the Justice Department’s files related to Mr. Epstein. That fanned interest among conspiracy theorists who believed that the government was concealing the true cause of Mr. Epstein’s death and the names of powerful men who had also abused some of the victims.
February 2025: Attorney General Pam Bondi released about 200 pages of flight logs and a contact list of Mr. Epstein’s, records that had already been made public, stoking criticism among Mr. Trump’s base for not making all the files public.
Spring 2025: Ms. Bondi and the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, told Mr. Trump that his name appeared in the files.
July 2025: The Justice Department and the F.B.I. issued a memo declaring that a review of the files found no client list, credible signs that Mr. Epstein had tried to blackmail prominent people or evidence that anyone else in his orbit had committed a crime besides Ms. Maxwell.
The same month, two representatives in Congress began a procedural maneuver to force a vote on legislation demanding the release of the files.
November 2025: After previously deriding supporters who were calling for the release of the Epstein files, Mr. Trump reversed course and said he would sign the legislation, which had passed the House and Senate.
December 2025 to January 2026: The Justice Department released five tranches of files containing millions of emails, photos, videos, law enforcement reports and other records related to Mr. Epstein.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
Michael LaForgia is an investigations editor at The Times, overseeing a team of reporters who hold powerful people and institutions in the New York area to account.
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