Justice department can release Ghislaine Maxwell court materials, judge says

The justice department can publicly release investigative materials from a sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, a federal judge said on Tuesday.Judge Paul A Engelmayer ruled after the justice department in November asked two judges in New York to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits from Maxwell and Epstein’s cases, along with investigative materials that could amount to hundreds or thousands of previously unreleased documents.The ruling, in the wake of the passage last month of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, means the records could be made public within 10 days. The law requires the justice department to provide Epstein-related records to the public in a searchable format by 19 December.Engelmayer is the second judge to allow the justice department to publicly disclose previously secret Epstein court records. Last week, a judge in Florida granted the department’s request to release transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into Epstein in the 2000s.A request to release records from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case is still pending.The justice department said Congress intended the unsealing when it passed the transparency act, which Donald Trump signed into law last month.Three judges – two in New York and one in Florida – had previously refused an unusual department request to unseal grand jury transcripts.The latest request, though, dramatically enlarged the files that the department said it planned to release to encompass 18 categories of investigative materials gathered in the vast sex-trafficking investigation.Epstein, a financier, was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, a month before he was found dead in a federal jail cell. The death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell was convicted of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence. Maxwell, a British socialite, was moved over the summer from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas as her criminal case generated renewed public attention.In response to a request by the New York judges for more specifics on what it would release, the department said in recent submissions in Manhattan federal court that the materials would include 18 categories including search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida.The government said it was conferring with survivors and their lawyers and planned to redact records to ensure protection of survivors’ identities and prevent the dissemination of sexualized images.Tens of thousands of pages of records pertaining to Epstein and Maxwell have already been released through lawsuits, public disclosures and Freedom of Information Act requests.Many of the materials the justice department plans to release stem from reports, photographs, videos and other materials gathered by police in Palm Beach, Florida, and the US attorney’s office there, both of which investigated Epstein in the mid-2000s.Last year, a Florida judge ordered the release of about 150 pages of transcripts from a state grand jury that investigated Epstein in 2006. On 5 December 2025, at the justice department’s request, a Florida judge ordered the unsealing of transcripts from a federal grand jury there that also investigated Epstein.That investigation ended in 2008 with a then-secret arrangement that allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to a state prostitution charge. He served 13 months in a jail work-release program.