More Epstein documents released

so the long awaited release of court documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime business partner and girlfriend Ela Maxwell is finally over after 41 court filings were unsealed it unraveled a long list of names of well-known people some with a connection or to the disgrace financier those names actually included Michael Jackson Leonardo DiCaprio Steven Hawking Naomi Campbell the documents also reveal new details about an old groping accusation against prince Andrew and also an effort to depose former President Bill Clinton our senior investigative correspondent Erin kerki has been digging through all the documents um and looking at all the names mentioned also our legal contributor and trial attorney Brian buckmire joins us once again to sort of decipher all of this so Aaron we've been talking all day about the names of those listed in the documents uh but there's 16 individuals who actually challenged the court to have their names redacted right what more can you tell us about that some of them were minors when they were victimized by Jeffrey Epstein and allegedly by Galen Maxwell and the judge agreed that those names do not need to be released publicly because they've never gone public about the accusations and they've tried to protect their an anonymity uh there are others who are still petitioning the court including one identified as Jane Doe number 107 who says the country that she lives in would make it dangerous for her if her name were to be publicly associated with somebody like Jeffrey Epstein so uh the judge is considering her objection uh to to being outed in these documents but by and large Kira many of these names have been out there before maybe not in such a public way but they've been out there in court filings previously uh and and were subsequently redacted now that it's all sort of coming out the judge H has said that there's nothing lurid here there is no um uh accusation of wrongdoing by and large these documents and so there was no reason she said to keep them sealed any longer so Brian are you surprised that such a small number of people actually fought to have their names redacted um yes and no and the reason why I say yes is because I would have thought that these documents might have had more potential Jane do and I understand why Jane do are coming forward as Aaron outlined to say hey I don't want my name out there I don't want uh to be associated with Jeffrey up I'm a victim here and so don't bring up my name but in terms of the no when we look at the vast majority of the names here like Aaron said there's nothing really there and so so what if an attorney asked if hey did you see this person when you went to Jeffrey Epstein's Island and there's no criminal or civil liability from saying yes I saw that person I don't see a legal reason to say no and I don't see a reason why even in the court of public opinion you would say hey I I don't want people to know that I was asked about even though I didn't do anything wrong there being no legal basis to keep their name out I see no reason why they would fight it and so Aaron there's still more documents to be released what do you think we can expect from those we expect another trunch as soon as this afternoon and uh maybe more tonight or or the next day there are about 275 documents all told so hundreds and hundreds of of pages total and we're not sure what additional names there might be but again there are no accusations that these people did anything wrong they were perhaps just asked about in a deposition or or were mentioned as a potential witness as someone that had some kind of an association with Epstein that might know something about his sex trafficking because in the end Kira that's what the lawyers uh were were hoping to do was to expose Epstein's vast Global sex trafficking network uh and and have the public sort of question how he was able to get away with it for so long and part of the reason that the lawyers believe he was able to get away with it is because he had this network of of influential friends big Banks were were funding it and they've won a settlement from Big Banks so the accountability has started and they believe that the unsealing of all these documents is is is only going to further the justice that they say the victims deserve and I'm curious Brian for you I mean what questions do you still have surrounding these documents and also the names that have been mentioned I mean the major question I have is who's next I I mean last night we saw a number of these documents released I think around 6 6:30 and so I think for the most part we're all kind of looking around the same time today to say are we going to get a a similar situation as we did yesterday and in terms of the names who's going to be named what Association did they have was their name simply brought out because this was a an investigatory kind of questioning of who was there and who knew what or is it going to be uh was this person doing this or this person doing uh that but I think for the most part we can assume that if there was any kind of criminal or civil impropriety that law enforcement would have had the opportunity to subpoena those documents and we would have seen cases come forward uh but I know some people are saying like hey like what about prince Andrew why aren't we looking more into that and so I'm kind of curious about those things Aon Brian thanks so much stay tuned for the next uh stack of documents there hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching watching

Channel: ABC News

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Keywords: Clinton, Epstein, Hawking, Maxwell, abc, abcnl, island, list, news, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-106110170, unsealed

Id: Nygz9MjsuII

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024