An agreement between the Justice Department and multiple Epstein survivors following the government’s failure to properly redact personal information appears to have fallen apart, days after multiple victims were identifiable in documents released last week.
Victims’ identities remained unredacted and publicly accessible Wednesday, attorney Brittany Henderson told NBC News. Henderson, who represents multiple survivors of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, said they had “trusted” the Justice Department to fix its redaction failures by noon Wednesday.
“For five days, the Department of Justice has left the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein publicly exposed — named and personally identified on the government’s own website — despite acknowledging that these disclosures were wrongful and agreeing to correct them immediately," she said.
The Epstein documents have since been "downloaded, copied, and preserved, rendering the harm permanent and impossible to correct," Henderson said. She added that "every additional hour that these records remain online compounds the danger to women who never chose publicity and who were entitled to protection under the law.”
"Our only focus is the complete removal of every document that identifies a survivor," she said. "We implore the press and the public to exercise restraint and refrain from republishing the names of vulnerable women, because the fact that a disclosure occurred does not make it ethical or just.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman canceled a hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday that would have addressed protections for Epstein survivors, saying he was “pleased but not surprised” that the parties were able to resolve the privacy issues.
In the order canceling the hearing, Berman included a letter to the court in which Henderson said the victims’ representatives had “extensive and constructive discussions” with the government about the “redaction failures in the recently posted Epstein materials.”
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, was President Donald Trump signed into law in November, required the government to release all of the Justice Department's files in relation to the Epstein case within 30 days. It also requires the Trump administration to explain any redactions to Congress.
More than 3.5 million pages were released, as well as thousands of photos and videos, on Friday after the government missed a December deadline to turn over all of the unclassified documents.
Inadequate redactions exposed the names and personal information of multiple survivors to the public despite the Justice Department's previous assurances it would protect their privacy.
The failure outed at least one woman who had not previously come forward with abuse allegations, her attorneys said.
Survivor Danielle Bensky said that what she thought were confidential conversations with FBI investigators about Epstein were in the latest document dump. Bensky, who was a teenage ballerina when, she said, Epstein abused her two decades ago, doesn’t believe that was an accident.
“I thought it was carelessness, and then I went to incompetence,” Bensky has told NBC News. “And now it feels, it feels a bit deliberate. It feels like a bit of an attack on survivors.”
