Jeffrey Epstein’s friends are facing a nervous wait after a judge in New York laid out a schedule for releasing court documents which mention “literally 1,000 people” by name. One unnamed man, known only as John Doe, wrote to the court in advance of Wednesday’s hearing begging the judge to keep his name out of the public domain. Jeffrey Pagliuca, a lawyer for Epstein’s long-term companion Ghislaine Maxwell, said the sealed documents include “hundreds of pages of investigative reports that mention hundreds of people.” They contain depositions taken from 29 people. “There are hundreds of other people who could be implicated” in the documents, he said. British heiress Ghislaine Maxwell was sued by Virginia Roberts-Giuffre in 2015, for defamation. The case was settled in 2017 and the documents in the case are now in the process of being released Judge Loretta Preska is overseeing the unsealing of the 10,000 pages relating to a slander case filed by Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, an alleged victim of Epstein, against Miss Maxwell, accused of being his “madam”. She has always denied any wrongdoing, and was not in court for Wednesday's hearing. The case was filed in September 2015 and settled in May 2017. On July 2 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered that the documents in the case be unsealed, owing to the overwhelming public interest. The first tranche of 2,000 pages was published on August 9, the day before Epstein killed himself in jail. The second set is due to be published in the coming months, when Judge Preska is satisfied. “In some of these documents there are literally 1,000 people named,” she said, presiding over the hearing. “It’s not going to be easy.” The case files are known to contain claims by Mrs Roberts-Giuffre that she was sexually abused by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister and other world leaders.” Virginia Roberts-Giuffre with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell in early 2001 Mrs Roberts-Giuffre has claimed that she was “lent out” by Epstein to Prince Andrew, and forced to have sex with him. He has always denied the claim, and all allegations against the Duke were struck from the court record in 2015 after being described as "immaterial and impertinent" by a judge. On the eve of the hearing the anonymous man wrote to Judge Preska and begged for his name not to be mentioned, arguing that his reputation would be destroyed. "Unsealing references to non-parties would throw those non-parties into the middle of this frenzy, and unfairly do irreparable harm to their privacy and reputational interests," the man's New York-based lawyers, Nicholas Lewin and Paul Krieger, wrote. “But it is clear that these materials implicate the privacy and reputational interests of many persons other than the two primary parties to this action, Giuffre and Maxwell.” Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, pictured in 2005 The letter goes on to say a prior judge overseeing the case summarised the still-secret documents as containing a “range of allegations of sexual acts involving Plaintiff and non-parties to this litigation, some famous, some not; the identities of non-parties who either allegedly engaged in sexual acts with Plaintiff or who allegedly facilitated such acts.” Doe’s lawyers do not say in the papers if he is famous, or what accusations he expects to face in the court papers. Judge Preska asked the lawyers for both Miss Maxwell and Mrs Giuffre-Roberts to begin the process of categorising the 10,000 pages, prior to unsealing them. She told the lawyers to spend the next two weeks dividing the documents into 10 categories, and then after that they would have a week to designate which group of documents should be unsealed first, with a rolling week-to-week process thereafter to evaluate the material and argue over how much or how little should be disclosed publicly. Mr Pagliuca urged the judge to delay the release of the documents, saying he wanted a month or so to determine which documents go in which categories. Judge Preska denied his request, adding: “You know we have got to get this done.”
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