Epstein files

The Epstein files are a set of documents that record information about Jeffrey Epstein, his crimes, and his relationships with other people. It contains many parts, including a list of activities he has done for and against people, and efforts for him to improve his public image. These documents were released to the public on November 2025, as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (which the U.S. Senate unanimously approved). This includes over 300 gigabytes of data, plus other media, which is stored in the FBI's own fully digital case management system.

The Trump administration’s United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memo on July 7, 2025. The memo said that the list did not exist and that they found no evidence that Epstein blackmailed people. The memo was not believed by political commentators on both sides of the political spectrum, including Alex Jones and John Oliver.

In November 2025, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a set of emails involving Epstein. One email said that Trump had "spent hours" with one of Epstein's victims.

On January 30, 2026, an additional 3million pages were released, including 2,000videos and 180,000images. The Department of Justice stated that there are a total of 6million pages might qualify as files required to be released to the public. However, they stated that the January30 release would be the final public release of the Epstein files, because the amount of files already released have now met the legal obligations. The released files contain a lot of famous people.

 Background 
In 1996, Maria Farmer reported to the police that Epstein had stolen naked photos of her underage siblings. However, no investigation was done on Epstein. In 2005, a woman reported to Florida's Palm Beach Police Department that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been taken to Epstein's mansion and paid to strip and massage Epstein. 

After an investigation, Epstein was formally charged for his crimes in 2008, after committing multiple. Epstein accepted a plea deal in 2008. 

In 2019, he had again been charged for his crimes. However, he died in prison.

Epstein interacted with many public figures, some of which included politicians and celebrities. This had caused a spread of conspiracy theories that Epstein kept a list of clients of whom he provided trafficked young girls; the theories claim he would then blackmail those clients, and resultingly he was killed by them. These theories spread quickly and widely after his death in 2019; the president of the United States, Donald Trump, was aware of them. In 2025, these theories became widespread again.

Contents
The Epstein files recorded activity that Jeffery Epstein (and connected people) had done prior to his imprisonment in 2019. For example, his contact book, the flight logs of his planes, and court documents involving him are all now publicly available in the Epstein files as part of the release.  Many of the records and files relating to Epstein belong to his estate (currently run by lawyer Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn).

The first documentation of Epstein (2007)
The FBI began investigating Epstein in 2006. This happened after there were reports that Epstein was paying underage girls for sex in his Florida home. In 2007, federal prosecutors prepared a draft that collected information about Epstein's crimes. The draft contained counts of sexual offense, charging Epstein and his employees. Epstein received 32 counts of sexual offense. His employees got two counts of sexual offense for sex trafficking of minors and soliciting them to do sexual things. 

U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta signed off a deal with Epstein, preventing Epstein from getting federal prosecution. Epstein received a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18, so he only had to go to jail for 18 months. None of his employees received criminal charges because of this deal. 

The draft of Epstein's list of charges describes Epstein as a major threat to the community. He was described as "an extremely high flight risk," being considered too likely to flee a country before receiving a court trial in that country. From information that the prosecutors received at the time, Epstein was called "a continued danger to the community" based upon his behavior. The federal prosecutors believe that Epstein would still try to solicit underage girls to do sexual things. This draft described many crimes that were ultimately not prosecuted against Epstein.

Investigation of other associated people in 2019
There were emails from FBI agents that were made shortly after Epstein's arrest in 2019. Ghislaine Maxwell and 9 other people who were suspected of being associated with Epstein included Lesley Groff, Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn (Epstein's accountant), Jean-Luc Brunel, and Les Wexner. All of these people had to be served into the grand jury to be formally investigated by a judge. 

An FBI agent has found some of these suspects. The emails do not name some of these suspects, but they note the city or state that each of these people are in. The FBI agent noted in the emails that three of them are in Florida, where all of them have served in court to stop doing bad things. The same agent also says that one of these suspects are found in Boston, one of them is found in New York City, and one of them is found in Connecticut. All of these people were served in court.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York created an 86-page memo called "Investigation into Potential Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein". This memo was sent to US Attorney Geoffrey Berman on December 19, 2019. The memo contains statements of 24 women who report that they were abused by Epstein as minors, as well as 14 women who were reported to be abused by Epstein when these women were adults. 

One of the women told prosecutors that Epstein had told her to give massages to two men in 2011 or 2012. She also said that one of the men tried to sexually assault her, and the other man "forced her to touch his genitals and then raped [her]." The FBI has not commented about confirming its investigation of the two men.

Notable people

The files that were released on January 2026 contain many individuals in the public eye. Because of this, the public became suspicious of these people and their activities  – however people simply appearing in the documents and interacting with Epstein and his crimes does not mean they also partook in sex trafficking. , aside from Epstein himself and Ghislaine Maxwell, a former associate of his, no individual has been charged with a crime connected to Epstein or the information released in the files.

Ghislaine Maxwell is a British former socialite. Files related to her were released, revealing a list of crimes she helped for him, as well as a list of testimonies from accusers and civil claims against her.

Virginia Giuffre was one of the leading advocates against Epstein.


A notable person in this list is Donald Trump, because Donald Trump told the public during his 2024 presidential campaign that he would release the Epstein files if he was elected. Trump and Epstein were best friends from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s. In a 2002 interview with New York magazine, Trump called Epstein a "terrific guy" who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side". In the early 2000s, their relationships were reduced, most likely due to disputes over employees and Trump winning a bid against Epstein for an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida in 2004. In 2003, Trump helped write a letter to an album of birthday greetings that he gave to Epstein for Epstein's 50th birthday, though Trump denies writing anything suggestive to him. In October 2007, Trump has denied Epstein access to Mar-a-Lago.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had interacted with Jeffrey Epstein during the 2010s. He had emails with Epstein in 2010 to meet a 26-year-old Russian woman. He also had photos with other women, and was accused of sexual assault. The BBC noted the emails did not indicate that he is doing wrong things. On 16 November 2019, Mountbatten-Windsor was interviewed for the BBC television programme Newsnight. The interviewer talked about Mountbatten-Windsor's friendship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who he had met through Ghislaine Maxwell. The interview was very bad for the British royal family, because many people who saw the interview thought Mountbatten-Windsor was unsympathetic to Epstein's victims. He lost the title "Prince Andrew, Duke of York" and access to the Royal Family because of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ylk9r336zo

Stephen Hawking was also mentioned in the Epstein files. In these files, it is revealed that Epstein told Ghislaine Maxwell in a 2015 email to convince Virginia Giuffre's friends that Giurffre's claims against Epstein are false. Epstein also claimed that Giurffre had accused Hawking of doing an "underage orgy" at the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Other notable people include Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway, Woody Allen, Vladimir Putin, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Epstein's death
The released Epstein files also included emails between investigators regarding Epstein's death. This includes an investigator's observation that his final note did not appear to be a note for suicide. Multiple investigations have confirmed that Epstein's death was a suicide. 

Another record has revealed that the jail staff from Metropolitan Correctional Center had used a tactic to avoid media attention. When Epstein's body was removed, staff made a fake body with boxes and sheets, then they loaded it into a white van that was labeled as belonging to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Reporters followed the van when it drove away from the jail, not knowing that Epstein's actual body was actually loaded into a black vehicle, which left the location "unnoticed", according to the interview notes.

Other
Epstein was revealed to have associations with many notable people. The documents further proved that he remained a popular person to famous people, even though he was convicted as a sex offender in 2008. This resulted in contradicting or stopping years of his former associates trying to prove that he's a bad person.

The Epstein files also contain UK Government leaks. This contains information related to spreading secret information about the UK Government, including sensitive marketing information. This information appears to be sent to Epstein by Peter Mandelson. In one email sent to Epstein from a redacted address in August 2009, it appeared to reveal Prime Minister Gordon Brown's pseudonym (fake name), "John Pond", along with Brown's secure email address.

In a late 2010 email by Al Seckel to Epstein, he mentions Epstein's mug shot on Wikipedia, tried to replace it with a friendly picture of Epstein, and tried removing the term "sex offender" from Epstein's article on the English version of Wikipedia. He tried to edit Wikipedia with these changes. At the time, Epstein was trying to rebuild his public image after being released from jail in July 2009.

The Epstein files also reveal that Epstein signed a 32-page trust, which he signed two days before his death. The document for this trust names 40 beneficiaries (people who benefit from this trust), sharing his $600 million estate to these people. He left $100 million to his girlfriend, Belarussian dentist Karyna Shuliak. He also left $50 million to his personal lawyer, Darren Indyke, and $25 million to his accountant, Richard Kahn. Indyke and Kahn have become the two owners of Epstein's estate. Ghislaine Maxwell and his brother Mark Epstein were given $10 million each. He gave $5 million to Harvard math professor Martin Nowak. The actual money that each beneficiary in this trust had earned is not known, as the value of the estate has shrunk due to taxes and payments to victims of Epstein. One of the beneficiaries, Mark Epstein, didn't know he was going to own part of the estate.

Possibly unreleased files
Epstein list
Before being revealed in November 2025, people believed that there were documents that recorded a list of famous clients that he trafficked young girls to, which was named the Epstein list. It is said to be part of the bigger set of documents of the Epstein files. Epstein made a group of public figures that included politicians and celebrities. This caused conspiracy theories which suggest that he made a list of names to blackmail these people. The theory also says that his 2019 death was not a suicide, as the government said it was, but a murder to protect his clients.

Claims about the existence of the list first appeared after Epstein's death. They became the most prominent in 2025 because of a now-deleted tweet from Elon Musk. The tweet claimed that United States president Donald Trump was on the list. During Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, he said he would release the Epstein files. After he was elected, he instead said that they were a hoax made by the Democratic Party.

"Epstein's black book"

References

Category:Jeffrey Epstein
Category:2025 controversies