Lawyers for survivors of Jeffrey Epstein say more than 100 women had their names made public when the Department of Justice released more than 3.5 million pages of documents Friday. A federal judge will hear their complaints on Wednesday.
Judge Richard Berman is urging the parties to work in good faith but holding a hearing because he says he recognizes the concern and the urgency of the issues.
The DOJ blamed various factors, including technical and human error, but lawyers and survivors alike say they believe this is an unfolding emergency. They say there have been thousands of instances where victims' identities were publicized. This includes full names, email addresses, home addresses, bank information and unredacted photographs. Nearly a third of the names left unredacted were minors.
In a scathing five-page letter, survivor lawyers say there's no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence to explain the scale, consistency and persistence of the failures that occurred. They call it the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.
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Survivors who have had their names outed say they're already receiving threats. Dozens of men were named for their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, but none have been named as abusers, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday the department doesn't expect to do so.
"When Todd Blanche mentioned that there were no other men involved, it was very — It just literally made my whole body shake because the whole, everybody knows, especially the survivors know, that the entire world of Epstein was about other men," said survivor Lisa Phillips. "It wasn't about himself with 1,200 victims. It was about how he groomed and manipulated girls and passed them along to other men. He was a trafficking king, and he was a master manipulator."
Survivors are requesting the entire DOJ website be taken down until the problems can be fixed, that they search all names using the victim list that they had been given and that a special independent master be appointed to oversee these fixes.
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