Jeffrey Epstein survivors filed a class action against his estate, accusing the Justice Department of holding "large tranches" of child sexual abuse material without ever notifying the victims depicted in it.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in the Southern District of New York, names the co-executors of Epstein's estate — Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn — as defendants.
Marsh Law Firm and AWK Survivor Advocate Attorneys filed it on behalf of two women identified only as Jane Doe and "Amy," who allege they appear in the collection.
Without a court-ordered identification program, the women say, the children depicted in Epstein's collection may never know they appear in it.
Both the Justice Department and the Epstein estate hold "large tranches of the vast collection" of child sexual abuse material seized from Epstein following his 2019 arrest, the complaint says, citing more than 3.5 million pages of government files released under a federal transparency law in late 2025 and early 2026. The full contents have never been made available to the plaintiffs.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in July 2025 that the FBI was reviewing "tens of thousands of videos" possessed by Epstein that depicted "children or child porn," the Associated Press reported.
On July 6, 2025, the FBI and Justice Department issued a memorandum on the Epstein files.
"The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography," the memorandum stated.
Despite those confirmations, "few if any" of the survivors depicted in the collection have ever been told that Epstein had their images, the complaint says. Federal law requires authorities to notify victims each time their child sexual abuse material turns up in a federal case, according to the FBI.
Investigators reviewed 38,934 images from Epstein's devices in preparation for the prosecution of his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, the complaint alleges. Of those, only about 15 to 20 were flagged as matching entries in a forensic image database of known child sexual abuse series — leaving the vast majority of the collection unexamined for victim identification.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which runs the database used to identify children in abuse images, has not finished reviewing the Epstein collection, the complaint says. One of the plaintiffs, identified only as "Amy," is a survivor of a widely circulated abuse series and believes her images are among those in the collection.
Such identification, as did occur, was limited to a small number of images used during Maxwell's 2021 criminal trial, the complaint says. "Full review, reporting and notice" to child sexual abuse material survivors — referred to in legal filings as "CSAM" — "were not provided," it adds.
Under Masha's Law, a federal civil remedy for victims of child abuse images, each person depicted as a minor in the collection would be entitled to seek at least $150,000 in damages from the estate, the complaint says. Without knowing they appear in the collection, they cannot file — or join this lawsuit.
The suit asks a federal judge to order the estate to cooperate with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in a court-supervised identification program — and to produce a complete inventory of every image and video in the Epstein collection at the time of his death in 2019.