Julie K. Brown, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting helped lead to Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in 2019, celebrated a “victory for transparency” Tuesday in the wake of a federal judge’s order to make a critical trove of Epstein-related files public, files that she suspected would hold “new material.”
Ghislane Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice who’s currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, was dealt a fatal blow last week after U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska rejected her “final arguments” in a failed bid to keep a trove of documents under seal related to a defamation lawsuit filed against her by Virginia Giuffre in 2015.
Giuffre filed the defamation suit against Maxwell in September 2015, alleging Maxwell defamed her by publicly branding her trafficking allegations “obvious lies.” The case ended in a confidential settlement in 2017, but discovery materials – depositions, exhibits and other records tied to Epstein’s network – remained largely under seal.
With Preska rejecting Maxwell’s final bid to keep said files out of the public eye last week, however, as many as 90,000 pages of new Epstein-related documents could soon be made public, Brown noted.
“I suspect there will likely be some new information in the material. As background, the court allowed Giuffre’s law firm (Boies Schiller) to provide to the Government (for grand jury purposes) documents that they received from Maxwell in discovery in this litigation. Boies Schiller would likely have provided all discovery to the government, which is a much larger bucket of documents than the ones that have been released thus far,” Brown wrote.
“We could see, for example, full deposition transcripts, responses to interrogatories, documents exchanged privately between the parties, etc. Maxwell’s opposition to the Government’s motion claimed that Boies Schiller provided 90,000 pages of documents to the government, including both of Maxwell’s deposition transcripts (we’ve already seen at least one of the transcripts).”
Despite the legal victory, Brown also urged caution given the recent history of the Trump administration’s Justice Department, which critics have accused of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by continuing to withhold around 3 million Epstein-related files.
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