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Newly Unsealed Court Records Name Bill Clinton Among Jeffrey Epstein Associates

The records were released in New York today after a judge ordered them unsealed last month.
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Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Court records unsealed in New York today name Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and dozens of others who came up in the litigation of a since-settled 2015 defamation suit filed by Virginia Giuffre, a victim of the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, against his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell.

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U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered the records unsealed last month, the culmination of years of efforts by the Miami Herald to put the material in the public record. At issue were the identities of 185 Jane and John Does whose identities a variety of parties had asked the court to reveal. Seven were victims who had been trafficked by Epstein; three involved duplicative records; two Preska described as “peripheral to the events at issue” and “neither a victim nor associated with Epstein or Maxwell”; and one is a person who was mistakenly described as an alleged perpetrator by a reporter.

These people, though many among them were witnesses to Epstein’s trafficking of women and girls, were not necessarily Epstein clients, or in fact accused of any wrongdoing, and the identities of many if not most were already known to the public due to the release of previous caches of documents or media reports. (Among the reasons that Preska cited for making the identities of various Does public were that one was a police officer, that one has been dead since 2018 and had been photographed on a private island where Epstein carried out abuses, and that “this individual has given multiple interviews to the media.”)

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The unsealing of the records nonetheless adds considerably to the growing body of knowledge about Epstein, his crimes, and the powerful politicians, financiers, and entertainers connected to or implicated in them. While the release of records over the past several years has cleared up some lingering mysteries—a comprehensive report released last year by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, for instance, explained puzzling facts about the circumstances of Epstein’s death and affirmed that he died by suicide and was not murdered by his enemies, as conspiracy theorists have claimed—others, such as the exact nature of his relationship to technology tycoon Bill Gates, remain.

Clinton has confirmed previously he took four trips on Epstein’s airplane but said through a spokesperson he knew “nothing” about Epstein’s “terrible crimes.”

Clinton is not directly accused of any specific wrongdoing in the new documents. A witness in the documents testified in 2016 that Epstein claimed that the former president “likes them young, referring to girls.” The witness did not go into details about the allegation. Clinton had a sexual relationship with a 22-year-old White House intern while he was president.

In the newly released documents a woman said Prince Andrew groped her at Epstein’s Manhattan home in 2001. That allegation was previously reported and Prince Andrew has denied it.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.