Judge Orders Release of 200 Redacted High-Profile Identities Linked With Jeffrey Epstein
By revealing over 200 contentious identities that had been previously withheld from a long-ago sex trafficking lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell, US District Judge Loretta Preska is poised to make history. 184 John and Jane Does who were connected in some way to the deceased sex offender will be revealed by the 51-page order, which was issued on December 18.
Since many had claimed they were being kept secret following the lawsuit's 2017 out-of-court settlement, the public's release has been eagerly awaited. As reported by The Guardian, the names were revealed in legal depositions after victim Virginia Giuffre filed a single defamation lawsuit against Maxwell, the late British press baron Robert Maxwell's daughter, in 2015. Almost nine years have passed since then, and there is still time to object to the names being unsealed.
Maxwell attempted to have the action dismissed in 2016, but US District Court Judge Robert Sweet denied it, citing Guiffre's "victimization of sustained underage sexual abuse between 1999 and 2002" and "the veracity of a contextual world of facts broader than the allegedly defamatory statements." In 2017, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement. Many of the names on the list will already be well-known to the public as colleagues, workers for Epstein and Maxwell, or pilots on his aircraft. It might also list the names of Epstein's purported victims who were brought to residences such as a ranch outside of Santa Fe, a house in New York, a villa in Palm Beach, and a private island in the US Virgin Islands.
As per a report by WSJ, the purportedly high-profile individuals mentioned in the list include billionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, former Harvard president and Obama's director of the National Economic Council Lawrence Summers, former president Bill Clinton, CIA director William Burns, and White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. The others were former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland, former Barclays chairman Jes Staley, and Woody Allen. “He was not a changed man,” a former friend of Epstein had exclusively told The Guardian last year. “But you need to understand that in his mind he thought he’d done nothing wrong and he was entitled to behave any way he wanted to if he had the money to pull it off.”
As per the Daily Mail, after entering a guilty plea, Epstein was swiftly given an 18-month prison sentence; but, as part of a covert agreement, the US attorney's office decided not to pursue charges against Epstein for federal offenses. 'I had several dinners with him, you know, hoping that what he said about getting billions of philanthropy for global health through contacts that he had might emerge,' billionaire tech Bill Gates said at the time. 'When it looked like that wasn’t a real thing, that relationship ended,' Gates asserted.
