WASHINGTON, Feb 4 – The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has removed thousands of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein from its website after victims said their identities had been compromised.
Lawyers for Epstein’s victims said flawed redactions in the files released on Friday had “turned upside down” the lives of nearly 100 survivors.
Email addresses and nude photos in which the names and faces of potential victims could be identified were included in the release.
Survivors issued a statement calling the disclosure “outrageous” and said they should not be “named, scrutinized and retraumatized”.
The DOJ said it had taken down all the flagged files and that mistakes were due to “technical or human error”.
Several of Epstein’s victims added comments to the letter, including one who described the release as “life-threatening” and another who said she had received death threats after her private banking details were published.
Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Epstein survivor Annie Farmer said: “It’s hard to focus on the new information that has been brought to light because of how much damage the DOJ has done by exposing survivors in this way.”
Another of Epstein’s victims, Lisa Phillips, said that many of the survivors were “very unhappy with the outcome” of the release.
“The DOJ has violated all three of our requirements,” she told BBC’s Newsday on Tuesday. “Number one, many documents still haven’t been disclosed. Number two, the date set for release has long passed. And number three, DOJ released the names of many of the survivors.”
She added: “We feel like they’re playing some games with us but we’re not going to stop fighting.”
Gloria Allred, a women’s rights lawyer who has represented many of Epstein’s victims, previously told the BBC that numerous victims’ names had been disclosed in the latest release, including some who had not been identified publicly previously.
“In some cases… they have a line through the names but you can still read the names,” she said. “In other cases, they’ve shown photos of victims – survivors who have never done a public interview, never given their name publicly.”
A spokesperson for the DOJ told the BBC’s US news partner CBS that it “takes victim protection very seriously and has redacted thousands of victim names in the millions of published pages to protect the innocent”.
They added that the department was “working around the clock to fix the issue” and “to date 0.1% of released pages” had been found to have unredacted information that could identify victims.
Millions of files relating to Epstein have been released by the DOJ since a law mandated their release last year, including three million pages, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos last Friday.
That release came six weeks after the department missed a deadline signed into law by US President Donald Trump under bipartisan Congressional pressure that mandated all Epstein-related documents be shared with the public.
Epstein died in a New York prison cell on 10 August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
