Jeffrey Epstein Image by wikicommons

By Aiden Pink September 5, 2019

Court documents expected to be unsealed soon could implicate “hundreds of other people” in the sex trafficking allegations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, Maxwell’s attorney said during a hearing on Wednesday.

The criminal charges against Epstein were dismissed after he died by suicide in August, but a civil lawsuit filed against Maxwell by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers, is ongoing. A judge ruled in July that thousands of pages of documents in that civil case should be released to the public, and an appeals court agreed the following month, but Maxwell and Giuffre’s lawyers have yet to agree on how to release them while protecting the privacy rights of people named.

The judge in the civil case, Loretta A. Preska, was irritated that the two sides hadn’t yet come to a solution, CNBC reported. “Did you people not talk about this?” she asked the attorneys.

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The parties agreed to come up with a process in the next two weeks to determine how to categorize the documents, and then another week to agree on which should be released first and how much of them should be disclosed.

One of the documents is Epstein’s address book, which includes over 1,000 names, The New York Times reported. Some people listed in the address book have said that they never met Epstein. Other documents in the disputed tranche include 29 depositions and other investigation records.

On Tuesday, an anonymous man going by John Doe formally wrote to Preska asking that most of the records be kept sealed to protect the identities and reputations of those named in the documents.

Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink

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