Lawyers for one of the women had alerted judges in Manhattan to "an unfolding emergency" after the DOJ on Saturday published some 3 million documents on its website that exposed the names of nearly 100 victims.
They had asked the DOJ to redact the women’s identities or temporarily take the files down.
Yesterday, Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Berman, who presides over Epstein’s case, called off a hearing on the matter that was to take place today, after victims’ lawyers reported productive discussions with the government.
"We trust that the deficiencies will be corrected expeditiously and in a manner that meaningfully protects victims from further harm," attorney Brittany Henderson wrote yesterday to Judge Berman and Judge Paul Engelmayer, who presides over Ghislaine Maxwell’s case. Maxwell has been found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with Epstein.
The DOJ’s Saturday release came more than a month after an initial release of several thousand documents and the legal deadline to share the totality of its materials with the public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, barring information that could identify victims or hinder active investigations.
Trump officials had excused blowing the deadline by claiming they were focusing on redacting victims’ identities.
Nearly 100 women were identified "thousands" of times in the files released on Saturday, Henderson told the judges in a filing on Monday, "despite repeated representations that redaction was the sole reason for delayed release and DOJ’s acknowledgement that failure to redact would cause extraordinary harm to victims".
"There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task ordered by the court and repeatedly emphasised by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication."
Manhattan US attorney Jay Clayton’s office has been handling the redactions.
In a filing on Tuesday, Clayton told the court thousands of documents inadvertently naming victims had been removed, blaming the revelations on "technical or human error".
The documents would be posted back online after a more thorough redaction process, "ideally within 24 to 36 hours".
But some women who had complained were met by incompetence, according to the letter to the court from Henderson and attorney Brad Edwards.
One victim, who was a minor when Epstein abused her, was named 20 times in one document, the letter detailed.
She flagged the violation to the DOJ, which claimed it would remove the references, but only took down three instances. The other 17 remain online.
— TCA
