Epstein victims’ lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards have written two New York federal judges overseeing the Epstein/Maxwell case to order the DOJ to shut down its website, citing the need to address the failure of the DOJ to redact information that would protect the sex-trafficked victims.
“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” Henderson and Edwards wrote to judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer.
Referring to the situation as an “unfolding emergency,” the lawyers contend that a widespread failure of the DOJ exposed names and identifying information of Epstein’s victims.
They cite examples of FBI documents with full names left unredacted, including those of victims who were minors at the time of their exploitation. Other victims, the letter says, have had their names, bank information, and addresses posted without redaction. One email listing 32 minor victims had just one of the names redacted, the letter says.
“It is no longer ethical, moral, or responsible to attempt to remedy these violations through DOJ’s torturously tedious game. This was never a complex undertaking. DOJ has possessed the names of victims that it promised to redact for months,” the attorneys wrote. “There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred.”