A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday denied a request by the Department of Justice to unseal grand jury records in Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s case — finding the Trump administration’s bid appeared not to be about public transparency but “the illusion of such.”
Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer, in his 31-page opinion, said the DOJ, facing growing turmoil over the decision not to release investigative materials on Epstein, portrayed the sealed records from Maxwell’s case as something they were not.
“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest. Far from it. It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents,” Engelmayer wrote, noting much of what was contained within the agents’ testimony was revealed at Maxwell’s 2021 trial.
The judge said that any members of the public who followed Maxwell’s trial, leading to her conviction on sex trafficking charges and a 20-year prison term, would “learn next to nothing new” from the materials. The records, his order notes, do not identify anyone other than Maxwell and Epstein as having sexually abused a minor.
“They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes. They do not reveal new venues at which their crimes occurred,” the judge wrote.
“They do not reveal new sources of their wealth. They do not explore the circumstances of Epstein’s death. They do not reveal the path of the Government’s investigation.”
Grand jury proceedings, in which prosecutors seek to secure an indictment, are confidential. In his blistering opinion, Engelmayer noted that the DOJ had failed to cite a single case in which “special circumstances” warranted the highly unusual step of unsealing grand jury records because “there is none,” going on to describe the government’s public explanations for trying to make the Maxwell materials public as “disingenuous.”
The government had acknowledged in filings last week that little information from the sealed proceedings would be new to the public.
“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” the judge wrote.
Spokespeople for the DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Berman, presiding over Epstein’s case, is still mulling a request from the DOJ to unseal the grand jury records in that matter. A judge in Florida last month shot down a similar request by the DOJ surrounding 2005 and 2007 grand jury proceedings relating to Epstein.
The Trump administration has failed to contain the growing Epstein scandal after the DOJ and the FBI last month released a joint memo saying they would not publicly release upwards of 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence recovered in Epstein investigations, the so-called “Epstein files.”
The decision led to an uproar from Trump’s MAGA supporters, given Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino had hyped up a supposed treasure trove of information on the mysterious money manager who was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 during Trump’s first term, around a month after his arrest on sweeping sex trafficking charges and more than a decade after he evaded meaningful accountability in a sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors in Florida.
Epstein’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide, but conspiracy theories have abounded on account of his connections to some of the world’s most powerful people.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before a falling out in the early 2000s, himself stoked conspiracy theories about the Brooklyn-born wealth manager, questioning whether he had actually killed himself in one 2020 interview. While running for reelection last year, Trump told Fox News he would likely declassify the Epstein files. The president has since pulled a 180, chiding his supporters who have called on him to make the records public and accusing Democrats of fabricating an Epstein “hoax.”
Trump’s about-face was followed by a set of bombshell exposés published last month by the Wall Street Journal that revealed he had recently learned his name featured multiple times in the Epstein files. The news outlet, owned by longtime Trump ally Rupert Murdoch, also reported that Trump had written a cryptic message to Epstein for the financier’s 50th birthday inside a drawing of a naked woman, including the line, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has denied the reports and is suing the newspaper.
Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, who could not immediately be reached for comment Monday, had opposed the government’s long-shot unsealing request. Last week, he told the court that while Epstein is dead, she is very much still alive and in the midst of asking the Supreme Court to review her appeal of her conviction on charges alleging she procured young girls for Epstein’s abuse. Maxwell has long claimed the feds scapegoated her after Epstein’s death.
Outraging Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, the Trump administration’s reaction to the scandal has also included Todd Blanche, the deputy Attorney General and Trump’s former personal lawyer, twice interviewing the British former socialite in jail. Since those sit-downs last month, Maxwell has been transferred from a Florida prison facility to a cushy dormitory-style prison in Bryan, Texas.
Women who were sexually exploited, serially raped, and abused in their youth by Epstein have criticized the Trump administration for putting any faith in Maxwell and accused Trump appointees of treating them as political pawns and sidelining them during the efforts to unseal grand jury materials.
In his scathing Monday order, Engelmayer noted the victims’ alarm and that none of the prosecutors who worked on the cases against Epstein and Maxwell, “presumably most familiar” with the materials, had joined in on the unsealing request, but that it was made by Blanche alone “under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation.”
The judge said that the entire premise of the government’s unsealing request — that making the records public would shine a light on Epstein and Maxwell’s depravity and the probes into the perverted duo — was “demonstrably false.”
“Insofar as the motion to unseal implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they definitively are not that,” the judge wrote, adding anyone deeply interested in the matter who expected to learn something new “would come away feeling disappointed and misled.”
“There is no ‘there’ there.”
Originally Published: August 11, 2025 at 9:39 AM EDT