Virginia Giuffre’s case files finally to be unsealed | Analysis

Success, finally.

Last week, a federal court in Manhattan ordered the release of the voluminous case files from Virginia’s Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.

The release of these files was in part the result of eight years of litigation by the Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, which have been fighting for the material since I published my series “Perversion of Justice” in 2018.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska rejected Maxwell’s final arguments to keep the files sealed, noting that the passage last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act superseded any earlier grand jury arguments that Maxwell was using to keep the records from the public.

What does this mean, and what new information will we learn?

First some history. Giuffre brought this defamation lawsuit against Maxwell back in 2015, after Maxwell publicly proclaimed that Giuffre was a liar who had made up her allegations of being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell and other powerful men (including Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the former Prince Andrew.)

Giuffre, represented by the Boies-Schiller firm, sued Maxwell for defamation, asserting that she faced “public ridicule, contempt, and disgrace” when Maxwell went public with her statements. As part of the lawsuit, the lawyers gathered tens of thousands of pages of discovery, including depositions by Giuffre, Maxwell and dozens of other people. Part of the effort also involved Dershowitz, who together with social media influencer Michael Chernovich, tried unsuccessfully to unseal portions of the Giuffre-Maxwell case while it was still being litigated.

The lawsuit was settled in early 2017. I had been told the discovery contained damning evidence against Epstein, Maxwell and other men, and that it was worth trying to get the courts to unseal the documents on the grounds that they were never properly sealed in the first place.

Judicial records by law are supposed to be open to the public. In this case, the former judge (Robert Sweet, now deceased) issued a blanket sealing on all the documents because they contained “sensitive” and “private” information. Sweet placed a protective order on massive amounts of material, including hearings and judicial decisions made in the case — and voluminous evidence that Giuffre presented to show that Epstein and Maxwell were operating an underage sex trafficking operation.

This is not the way sealing is supposed to happen, however. Each document that the lawyers want sealed has to be examined, and those requesting it be sealed must provide legal justification to the judge for doing so. This wasn’t done in this case.

Nearly all the evidence that Virginia’s lawyers uncovered about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking that came out during this civil case was kept secret.

Maxwell settled the case before it could go to trial, however — and paid Giuffre somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-5 million. By settling it, she thought that all the evidence about her involvement would remain under seal.

But I convinced my editors to ask our lawyers to file a motion to intervene in the case in order to unseal the files.

An appeals court eventually ruled in our favor, and on Aug. 9, 2019, thousands of pages were made public, including sworn statements by Giuffre in which she alleged she was trafficked to Dershowitz, who represented Epstein; former Prince Andrew; former Maine Sen. George Mitchell; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; hotel magnate Tom Pritzker; the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky. All of the men denied that they were involved with Giuffre.

Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell the following morning.

Epstein’s death was immediately ruled a suicide without any investigation, based on the word of one guard who was later charged with falsifying reports — a move which the public should still question to this day.

I don’t know whether the release of these files had anything to do with Epstein’s death, but the rolling release of these sealed files was nevertheless a watershed moment for the press. It established a legal and journalistic precedent in how courts weigh privacy interests against the public’s right to know information that is of critical importance, and the case is still cited to this day.

(Shout-out here to our lawyer, Sanford L. Bohrer, who argued the case.)

The Appeals court ruled that the documents were “judicial documents” inherently subject to a strong presumption of public access under the First Amendment and common law. The court rejected the argument that private civil lawsuits could remain entirely hidden, especially when they expose broader systemic failures or widespread criminal activity.

The framework reinforced by Brown v. Maxwell, 929 F.3d 41 (2d Cir. 2019) has profoundly changed the landscape for media organizations seeking to uncover sealed records in high-profile civil lawsuits. The “fixed at filing” principle and a strict three-step requirement for a line-by-line justification for sealing, journalists have a new legal tool to challenge civil cases that settle and seal their discovery.

Still, despite the victory, this was only a fraction of the material that was part of the lawsuit. Preska created a labyrinth process to decide what other documents should be made public. Each person named in the files was given a “J. Doe” number, and for years, hundreds of these files have been reviewed, with Preska acting as the arbiter of whose name is released and whose name is kept secret.

The Miami Herald continued to question this process, challenging the sealings piece by piece, document by document. For years.

In 2024, a new cache of material was released, but the judge allowed a few of the J. Does’ names remain sealed, reasoning that they were “classic outsiders peripheral to the events at issue” who are not associated with Epstein and Maxwell.

Our attorneys believe there will be some new material in these files — if and when the DOJ decides to release them.

The documents will not be released by the Court or the parties. Instead, they are documents in DOJ’s possession that it reviewed pursuant to the Epstein Transparency Act. The DOJ will likely need some time to redact, then will (hopefully) release on its own timeline.

I suspect there will likely be some new information in the material. As background, the court allowed Giuffre’s law firm (Boies Schiller) to provide to the Government (for grand jury purposes) documents that they received from Maxwell in discovery in this litigation. Boies Schiller would likely have provided all discovery to the government, which is a much larger bucket of documents than the ones that have been released thus far. We could see, for example, full deposition transcripts, responses to interrogatories, documents exchanged privately between the parties, etc.

Maxwell’s opposition to the Government’s motion claimed that Boies Schiller provided 90,000 pages of documents to the government, including both of Maxwell’s deposition transcripts (we’ve already seen at least one of the transcripts).

Up until now, we’ve only seen portions of the material. But then again, the DOJ’s redaction police could either withhold or redact large swaths of these court files.

Still, this is nevertheless a victory for transparency with the court ruling that these files should be made public.

There is no reason now to withhold them.

But then again, Attorney General Todd Blanche has yet to release the 3 million or so files still being kept secret by the Trump administration.

Journalist Katie Phang, who brought suit against Blanche and the DOJ for failing to comply with the Epstein Transparency Act, contends that the DOJ is intentionally covering up documents related to President Trump’s connections to Epstein.

The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan, is demanding that Blanche comply with his order to provide justification for failing to adhere to the requirements of the Act.

“The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case,” Sullivan said. “The victims have a right to know. The court has a right to know.”

This story was originally published August 19, 2026 at 4:30 AM.