A federal judge in New York has ordered the release of grand jury materials tied to Ghislaine Maxwell, while calling out the Justice Department over how it has handled the women at the center of the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued the ruling on Tuesday, granting a motion from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department to unseal a trove of records from Maxwell’s sex trafficking case. The request was filed last month as DOJ raced to meet a deadline under the new Epstein Files Transparency Act, which gives the department until December 19 to release Epstein related files in a searchable public format.
Engelmayer agreed that the law now requires disclosure, but not before reprimanding prosecutors over the way survivors have been treated in the process. In his order, he noted that victims had raised serious worries about their privacy and complained they were not adequately consulted before DOJ asked to unseal sensitive records. He directed the Manhattan U.S. attorney to personally certify that nothing released would expose victim identities and stressed that protecting those women must be a priority, not an afterthought.
The ruling covers grand jury transcripts and exhibits from Maxwell’s 2021 case, along with related investigative material such as search warrants, interview notes, financial records and electronic data gathered during the years long probe into Epstein’s trafficking network.
At the same time, Engelmayer tried to tamp down expectations that the documents will blow the lid off a hidden roster of powerful abusers. He wrote that the records “do not identify any individuals besides Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Maxwell as having sexual contact with minors” and do not reveal new “methods” or previously unknown clients. A separate order, described in other accounts, warned that there is unlikely to be “new information of any consequence” beyond what was already aired at Maxwell’s trial.
Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, was convicted in 2021 of helping recruit and groom underage girls for the financier’s abuse and is serving a 20 year sentence at a federal prison in Texas. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, in a death ruled a suicide, and the secrecy surrounding his records has fueled years of speculation about who else might be implicated.
For months, Bondi and DOJ lawyers had been stymied in their attempts to pry open grand jury files. Engelmayer himself rejected an earlier request in August, blasting the department’s claim that the transcripts might meaningfully expand the public record as “demonstrably false” and warning that casually unsealing grand jury material would chip away at long standing secrecy rules.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed almost unanimously and signed by President Donald Trump in November, effectively instructs the department to publish nearly all unclassified Epstein related material, and specifically references grand jury and discovery records in both the Florida and New York cases. Federal judges in Florida have already ordered the release of older grand jury transcripts linked to Epstein’s first prosecution.
Even with the new law in place, Tuesday’s ruling underlines a tension that is not going away. Survivors and their lawyers have pushed for sunlight but also warned that clumsy redactions or document dumps could expose names, emails or other details that identify victims and retraumatize them.
