A New York federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered the unsealing of up to 2,000 pages of judicial documents that are expected to show evidence relating to whether New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, were recruiting underage girls and young women as part of an international sex trafficking operation.
The decision comes two days after the Miami Herald urged the court to issue a ruling in the civil case in the wake of last week’s Justice Department announcement in the federal criminal case that it would not void Epstein’s controversial 2008 non-prosecution agreement.
Using others as recruiters, Epstein lured underage girls to his waterfront estate in Palm Beach from 1997 to 2006 under the guise that he was hiring them to give him massages. He sexually abused them, the girls told authorities, then paid them to recruit other girls, mostly 13 to 16 years old. Epstein, now 66, was never federally prosecuted, having received immunity in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges in state court in 2008.
Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.
