As the DOJ releases the largest batch of files yet on the federal investigation into Epstein, we look at some of the most significant revelations with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who has spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator, his powerful associates and the impact of his crimes. Survivors have condemned the Department of Justice for not complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required all files to be released last Friday. “I mean, that was the first indication of the contemptuous, cavalier attitude that has gone on inside this Justice Department,” says Ward. “It’s heartbreaking, frankly, to see these files being dribbled out.”
AMY GOODMAN: Days after the December 19th deadline for the release of all files related to the late serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and under enormous pressure, the Justice Department has just released more than 11,000 files Tuesday, totaling nearly 30,000 pages of documents. This includes internal FBI emails from 2019 that mention 10 possible “co-conspirators” of Epstein, including one who’s described as a, quote, “wealthy business man in Ohio,” unquote. The emails also note that, quote, “three have been located in Florida and served [grand jury] subpoenas; 1 in Boston, 1 in New York City, and 1 in Connecticut were located and served,” unquote. Ghislaine Maxwell is the only Epstein accomplice to be charged criminally. She’s currently serving a 20-year sentence on federal sex trafficking charges.
This comes after the DOJ Monday briefly published thousands of additional documents related to Epstein. The second tranche of documents were available online for several hours, but then disappeared from the Justice Department’s website without explanation. The documents contain wide-ranging references to Donald Trump.
One email, written by an assistant U.S. attorney during Trump’s first term in early 2020, found Trump was a passenger aboard Epstein’s private jet on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996. On at least four of those flights, Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was also present. Trump has not been directly accused of criminal conduct and claims to have cut ties with Epstein decades ago.
In a joint statement, multiple survivors slammed the government’s recent document dump for failing to redact numerous victim identities, while also making, quote, “abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation,” like page upon page completely blacked out. This is Epstein survivor Sharlene Rochard speaking on NBC.
SHARLENE ROCHARD: I am very upset with the justice system, because there’s full pages that are totally blacked out. And I know — I don’t know about you, but my name is not a full page. We only asked that our names be redacted. That’s all we asked for. So, pages and pages and pages of black on black on black is just unacceptable.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, 18 survivors of Epstein wrote a joint letter condemning the Justice Department’s release of just a fraction of the files demanded by law, and called on Congress to hold hearings to ensure the Trump administration is fully complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
This is Epstein survivor Haley Robson, who voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, responding to the new files. She was speaking on CNN.
HALEY ROBSON: At the end of the day, I am no longer supporting this administration. I redact any support I’ve ever given to him, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel. I am so disgusted with this administration. I think that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel both need to resign, and I would love to see number 47 get impeached over this.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Democratic Congressmember Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is asking the DOJ’s inspector general to investigate why the FBI failed to act on a 1996 complaint by survivor Maria Farmer against Jeffrey Epstein that he and his associates were producing child sexual abuse material. Garcia wrote, quote, “For survivors like Maria Farmer, her family, and all the people Jeffrey Epstein abused in the decades that followed this unanswered complaint, this was not merely a missed investigative opportunity — it was a profound betrayal by their own government,” unquote.
Meanwhile, Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna and Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie, who sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, say Attorney General Pam Bondi should be held in contempt, could be fined for every day she fails to release the full Epstein files.
For more on all of this, we’re joined in our New York studio by Vicky Ward, longtime investigative journalist, host and co-producer of the podcast series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow, which also became a TV series by the same name.
Vicky, welcome back to Democracy Now! First of all, if you can respond to what has happened so far? December 19th was the deadline. That was Friday. Now the Justice Department, days later, after releasing thousands of documents, then erasing them from the website, now calling for U.S. — for attorneys in the United States to come to the Justice Department and help them redact. What has been redacted? What has not been redacted? Can you respond to all of this?
VICKY WARD: Yeah. I mean, I think right from the get-go — right? — right from when, months ago, Pam Bondi said in an interview, “Oh, I’ve got the Epstein files sitting on my desk,” I mean, that was the first indication, I think, of the contemptuous, cavalier attitude that has gone on inside this Justice Department.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. She said she was going to release the so-called client list.
VICKY WARD: She was — files, they were there on her desk. I don’t think that these thousands and thousands of pages were sitting on her desk. I mean, so, you know, and it’s heartbreaking, frankly, to see these files being dribbled out. It’s so against the spirit in which the victims went to Capitol Hill, asked for transparency, which a bipartisan Congress agreed with them that they are owed this transparency, so that crimes like this may never happen again.
And now to have this mishmash, which even I, who am not a victim of sexual abuse from Jeffrey Epstein, but I sat through Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, and I found it very, very upsetting — I think most of us journalists, you know, were hard-bitten. You know, we’ve seen some things. It was really difficult to hear the stories of abuse in that courtroom and really difficult to learn the scale of it. And these pages have that story writ large again and again and again. And given the chaos of this rollout, there’s no easy way for these survivors to quickly search what they’re looking for. I want to see —
AMY GOODMAN: That was part of the law, by the way.
VICKY WARD: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: That there had to be a working search function on these documents.
VICKY WARD: And there isn’t. And they have to wade through page after page after page of very, very difficult stuff. I think, just on a moral basis, it’s disgusting.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s really important to be talking to you today because, years ago, you wrote this piece in Vanity Fair. You’re the person who spoke to Maria Farmer. Now, that conversation did not appear in Vanity Fair. And if you can remind our viewers and listeners what happened? Because this has to do with the collusion of the press with Jeffrey Epstein. But you know her story very well.
VICKY WARD: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: This woman who, for decades, has tried to stop the abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
VICKY WARD: Yes. Well, I didn’t speak to Maria Farmer just once. You know, in the fall of 2002, when I was assigned to write this profile of Jeffrey Epstein, I met with Maria. I spoke to her many, many times. And she said exactly what has now appeared in the FBI’s files.
She said that in 1996 she had had a horrific night while up in a guest house of Jeffrey Epstein’s home on Les Wexner’s estate in Ohio. She’d been up there painting. She was an artist. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had come to visit her. There had followed some horrible sexual abuse, after which she had run out of the house, taken her dog, run —
AMY GOODMAN: The sexual abuse perpetrated by both Ghislaine —
VICKY WARD: By both.
AMY GOODMAN: — and Jeffrey Epstein.
VICKY WARD: By both. But in all of this, she had left behind a lock box of nude photographs of her sisters — not just Annie, there was another sister. And, you know, she was a figurative artist. You know, that’s the kind of work that she did. And she was terrified that Epstein was going to do — excuse me — you know, something terrible with these. And she got phone calls from both Epstein and Maxwell saying — threatening her.
So she phoned — in fact, she told me she phoned the police in New York first, and they said, “We can’t — this is not for us. This is, you know, going across state lines. You have to phone the FBI.” She did phone the FBI. Now, the FBI, back in the day — I phoned the FBI. They —
AMY GOODMAN: They threatened to burn her.
VICKY WARD: But she phoned the FBI about the lock box, and was worried, desperately worried, you know, what could they do with nude photographs of her sisters, who were babies, teenagers.
AMY GOODMAN: They were her younger sisters.
VICKY WARD: And, you know, when I was reporting this piece, you know, the FBI tend not to answer journalists like me, so I wasn’t able to get that record back then. I also phoned the police, and they didn’t — they didn’t produce their records, which I wish they had, because they had a record, too.
But, you know, as I think you know and a lot of journalists know how this tragic story ends, which was that when, towards the closing of the piece, I had to go to Jeffrey Epstein and to Ghislaine Maxwell with the allegations of both Maria Farmer as to what had happened, and her younger sister Annie, who had said very clearly on the record that she had been taken to New Mexico for a weekend and had —
AMY GOODMAN: To his estate there.
VICKY WARD: Yes, and, you know, at the age of 16, and had to have a topless massage from Ghislaine Maxwell. And then, Jeffrey Epstein, one morning, jumped into bed for, quote-unquote, a “cuddle” with her. Epstein went berserk when I put those allegations, as did Ghislaine Maxwell, absolutely berserk. He, you know, suddenly sent over a whole bunch of paperwork that he claimed were letters from their mother, letters from them, that showed that, no, you know, this could not be true.
And, you know, the next thing I knew was that as we were closing the piece, a fact-checker sent me a note saying, “You’re not going to believe who’s now in the office at Vanity Fair.” It was Jeffrey Epstein. You know, who knows what happened?
AMY GOODMAN: Meeting with?
VICKY WARD: Graydon Carter, the editor of the magazine. I do not know what was said in that meeting. I will say, Amy, that I did —
AMY GOODMAN: You were about to give birth to twins?
VICKY WARD: I was at home on bed rest. I thought we were done with this piece. I did find in these files that — in the first batch that was released, that there was a section in a binder containing photographs, that was called Vanity Fair. I did notice that the photographs in that binder, in that section, were the ones that were used accompanying my piece in the magazine, which is very unusual, because Vanity Fair normally prides itself on its photography as much as it does on its word. So, one has to assume they provided the photographs. One has to ask: What was the quid pro quo?
My piece finally ran. The Farmer sisters and their allegations were not in it. And the reason that is so, so, so terrible and devastating is that we had exposed them — I had exposed them — to Ghislaine Maxwell and to Graydon Carter.
And the story doesn’t end there. The FBI then phoned me about, I want to say, a year later, 2004, about the Farmer sisters. And I did tell them what had happened. So, I would like to see my interview notes somewhere in these files.
AMY GOODMAN: And you haven’t seen them yet.
VICKY WARD: No, I have not.
AMY GOODMAN: But that certainly is not classified information.
VICKY WARD: No.
AMY GOODMAN: That is proof, once again —
VICKY WARD: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — of all of the information that has not been released.
VICKY WARD: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. The other thing I think you see, it’s not just the rollout itself that’s shambles. The content in it kind of paints a picture of a shambolic FBI. You know, this is an FBI that seems to take its lead quite often from the press. I will say it’s interesting. You know, I learned that something I’d reported is kind of laid out on the page clearly, which is that were it not for David Boies, the lawyer who represented Virginia Giuffre in her civil litigation against Ghislaine Maxwell — Virginia sued for defamation.
AMY GOODMAN: Who brought down —
VICKY WARD: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — Andrew, the prince.
VICKY WARD: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: No longer.
VICKY WARD: Right. Virginia, as we know, tragically, died of suicide earlier this year. But you can see in these files, in that litigation, which was in 2016, you can see notes of conversations. David Boies went to the feds. He went to the Southern District, said, “You need to look at what is in these — this discovery, need to look at these depositions, because this shows the bigger crime.” You see the feds tracking this, but you don’t see them doing anything, until, again, you see them pass around links to the Miami Herald, links to Julie Brown’s story in — end of 2018. And it’s almost like they are having to follow, you know, almost like Inspector Clouseau, these breadcrumbs that are left for them by everybody else. And I’m sure the survivors find this really disheartening, in a way, to watch.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think President Trump has approached this the way he has? And what about the information and all that has come out around him — not necessarily criminal —
VICKY WARD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — but the removal of his name from so many different documents? And then you see his name once in a document that was redacted, and so you know that it’s actually him. He’s the one who campaigned on the release of the —
VICKY WARD: I know.
AMY GOODMAN: — Jeffrey Epstein documents. Now he had to sign this release into law, but the way they are dragging their feet. Talk, as we wrap up, about what you expect to see, the incredible power of the survivors banding together.
VICKY WARD: Well, you know, my — this is speculation, but my gut — and I do know President Trump — tells me that he doesn’t like a story in which there’s any sort of gray or nuance that he isn’t somehow the best, the absolute best. And, you know, this is a story which again and again and again brings up his past, and a past that presented a very different portrait of Donald Trump than the one he would like to portray now.
I will say that, you know, having sat in the Maxwell trial, we did see his name come up on the screen on the flight logs in that key period, when Maxwell and Epstein were grooming and recruiting one of their major victims up, who was attending Interlochen, a school for artistic gifted children. You did see flight’s name again and — Trump’s name again and again and again on the manifest. And it was a head scratcher, because it was really impossible at that time to put the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together.
AMY GOODMAN: Because he denied being on any flights —
VICKY WARD: No.
AMY GOODMAN: — and he denied being on the island.
VICKY WARD: Well, and I never saw any records of him being on the island. I don’t know if he denied being on any flights. But I think that, you know, you can see, if you’re Trump, this is all too close for comfort, and it’s not very comfortable to have these things out. And Trump being Trump, he’d rather not address it.
AMY GOODMAN: And where do you see this going for the survivors and for Pam Bondi? Could she be held in contempt?
VICKY WARD: Well, I really hope Congress does their job. I mean, you know, one of the things we need to see in the Trump administration is the different branches of government actually doing what they’re supposed to do and holding each other to account.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you are the expert on Ghislaine Maxwell. She is now in a minimum-security prison. No sex abuse — no sex perpetrator has been put in a prison camp like she has, after she had interviews with, what, the deputy attorney general, who was Trump’s former attorney. Could you see Trump pardoning her? And she has appealed for the reopening of the case.
VICKY WARD: Well, I think two of the people who come out absolutely appallingly from this latest document dump is Ghislaine Maxwell in her correspondence with the former Prince Andrew, arranging, quote-unquote, “inappropriate” girls for him. I think people will be sickened by that.
As regarding a pardon, never, never say “never.” But I think President Trump is a man who’s concerned at this point with legacy and with history. And I think if he were to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, that blot would stain all the other things he — accomplishments he likes to talk about that he’s done. So I personally would be shocked.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Vicky Ward. We’ll continue to follow this story. Longtime investigative journalist, host and co-producer of the podcast series Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow, which also became a TV series by the same name.