19 more documents unsealed from lawsuit connected to Jeffrey Epstein
Follows release of 40 documents a day earlier as part of suit connected to accused sex trafficker
A new batch of unsealed documents pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of teenage girls was released Thursday, adding several hundred pages to a trove of information detailing how the accused sex trafficker leveraged connections to the rich, powerful and famous to recruit his victims and cover up his crimes.
The 19 documents, or about 300 pages, were half as many as the over 40 released Wednesday.
The documents so far — with more to come — were sprinkled with names of celebrities and politicians who socialized with the disgraced financier or worked with him in the years before he was publicly accused nearly two decades ago of paying underage girls for sex.
CBC News is currently reviewing the newly unsealed documents. Those named in the documents are not necessarily accused of any wrongdoing; some of the people named are those making allegations or are potential witnesses.
Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
The documents being unsealed relate to a 2015 lawsuit brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former girlfriend, who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges. That lawsuit was settled in 2017, but documents in the case are still being released years later.
That lawsuit was filed by Virginia Giuffre, who is one of Epstein's victims. She's one of dozens of women who sued Epstein saying he had abused them.
Around 40 documents from the lawsuit were initially made public Wednesday.
Documents provide fresh details about abuse
The documents being unsealed largely contain material that had been released previously, or had been covered exhaustively in nearly two decades of newspaper stories, TV documentaries, interviews and books about Epstein.
The roughly 250 documents being unsealed, starting this week, mostly rehash what has long been known about a man who travelled in elite circles until his arrest.
But they have included a few fresh details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades and damaged dozens of teenage girls and young women.
The documents unsealed Thursday included an excerpt from the deposition of one those victims, a girl who was in high school when she went to his house, thinking she had been hired to give him a massage.
"I don't recall exactly how I was propositioned to get there. I was just there, and all of a sudden something horrible happened to me," she said, adding that Epstein removed her clothes without her consent the first time she met him.
She said she had worked "very, very hard" over the years to forget the details of her sexual encounters. The victim, whose name remained sealed, said that a high school classmate had suggested the job to her.
Victim spoke about bringing other girls to Epstein
Later, she learned that girls who referred other girls to Epstein were paid kickbacks. She herself brought other girls from her high school to Epstein's house.
None of them were her friends, she said.
"Sometimes I would go over and I would just swim and I would get paid, or I would take a nap and I'd get paid, or I would just hang out and I'd get paid," she said.
"It wasn't my assumption that they were coming over to do anything. I did not know, once the door was closed or once they went to another area of the home. I often just went over and did my own thing while they were doing whatever they were doing. It was none of my business."
Other documents released Thursday largely focused on legal squabbles over Giuffre's lawsuit and her connection to a British tabloid reporter whom Maxwell's lawyers accused of compelling her to fabricate some of her allegations.
Among the famous people in Epstein's orbit before he was exposed as a sexual predator were former U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, singer Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield, according to the accounts of his victims and other witnesses quoted in newly released documents. None of those men were accused of wrongdoing.
Though the documents didn't offer much new insight into individuals in Epstein and Maxwell's world, more are expected to be unsealed and released Friday and Monday.
With files from CBC News