- Epstein victims' lawyers urge judges to remove online files due to redaction failures.
- Lawyers cite thousands of redaction errors exposing victims' identities in released documents.
- Victims report distress threats; lawyers demand immediate judicial intervention to protect them.
WASHINGTON — Lawyers representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein are asking judges to force the Justice Department to take down the millions of Epstein-related documents it has posted online, saying in a letter dated Sunday that the failure to properly redact victims' information has triggered an "unfolding emergency."
The letter, written by prominent Epstein victims' lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards and addressed to two federal judges in New York who are overseeing Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's cases, requests an "immediate judicial intervention" to address the fact that victims' information was included in the millions of Epstein-related records that were released.
Henderson told CNN that the letter was sent to the judges. The letter is not yet available on the public court docket.
"Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ's latest release," Henderson and Edwards wrote to judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer.
"There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred —particularly where the sole task ordered by the court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication," they also wrote.
The lawyers list numerous examples of redaction errors that they've come across, such as one minor victim's name allegedly being "revealed 20 times in a single document." Once those mistakes were reported to the Justice Department, the department only fixed three of the errors, "leaving 17 instances still unpredicted as of this filing," the lawyers wrote.
Other examples included one email that allegedly lists 32 underage victims "with only one name redacted and 31 left visible," as well as FBI "302" forms with full first and last names of victims unredacted.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CNN reported on Friday that multiple survivors, including anonymous "Jane Doe" victims, were seeing their names and information throughout the files that were published.
Sunday's letter also includes testimony from various anonymous "Jane Doe" victims who described receiving death threats and harassment from the media since the publication of the files.
One Jane Doe is quoted as saying: "The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk."
"DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear," the lawyers wrote. "When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim's name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided."
In a separate statement to CNN, Henderson said: "With every second that passes, additional harm is being caused to these women. They are scared, they are devastated, and they are begging for our government to protect them from further harm."
Contributing: Kara Scannell
