Court Listener Website Crashes After Revealing Names Of Jeffrey Epstein Associates
A website that published 40 court documents naming associates of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein crashed within minutes of making them public.
A website that published 40 court documents naming associates of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein crashed within minutes of making them public.
The documents were part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager, against his former girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015.
The website, CourtListener, is run by the Free Law Project, a non-profit organization that provides free access to legal information. It was the first to show the documents, which were unsealed by Judge Loretta Preska in New York in December.
You can read the full documents here-
However, the website soon became inaccessible, displaying the message “This usually happens when we are doing maintenance or our server is overloaded.”
The documents were still available on the PACER system, which allows public access to federal court records, but requires a fee.
What are these records about?
The lawsuit between Giuffre and Maxwell was settled in 2017, but Maxwell’s lawyers had tried to keep the names of the people involved in the case secret. Their objection was overruled in 2022, a year after Maxwell was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for five counts of sex trafficking minor girls. She has appealed her conviction.
Giuffre had sued Maxwell in 2015 after a spokesperson for the British socialite called Giuffre’s allegations “obvious lies”.
The civil case helped build the criminal case against Maxwell, who was arrested in 2020 after Epstein’s death in prison in 2019.
Giuffre also sued Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, for sexual assault and infliction of emotional distress in 2021, claiming that he had sex with her when she was 17 at Epstein’s properties. The case was settled in 2022, with Prince Andrew paying an undisclosed amount to Giuffre. Prince Andrew has strongly denied the sexual abuse allegations.
However, the Giuffre v Maxwell lawsuit contained hundreds of names of other people who were allegedly involved in or aware of Epstein’s sex trafficking network. The Miami Herald, whose investigation into Epstein led to his arrest in 2019, had sued in 2018 for the release of all documents related to the lawsuit.
The unsealing of the documents could expose the identities and roles of many powerful and influential people who were connected to Epstein and Maxwell.