JEFFREY EPSTEIN: Everything you should know

Explained: What do we know so far?

If you’re just joining us this morning, here’s a quick rundown of what happened late last night. 

Dozens of previously sealed court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein were made public by a US court. 

Although interest in the release appeared to crash the website at one point, much of the information within them has already been made public. 

Rumours had swirled of a list of “clients” or “co-conspirators” but this had not materialized.

However, there are more documents to be unsealed – with 40 out of 250 made public so far. 

What are the records about?

The unsealed documents are part of a 2015 lawsuit filed against Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. 

The victim, Virginia Giuffre, is among dozens of women who sued Epstein claiming he abused them at his homes in Florida, New York, the US Virgin Islands and Mexico. 

Ms Giuffre said she was lured away from a job as a spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to become a “masseuse” for Epstein when she was 17.

She alleged the job involved performing sexual acts and that she was pressured into having sex with men in Epstein’s social orbit, including Prince Andrew, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former US senator George Mitchell and billionaire Glenn Dubin, among others.

All men said her accounts were fabricated. 

Giuffre settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022. 

Her lawsuit against Maxwell was settled in 2017 but the Miami Herald went to court to access the court papers initially filed under seal. 

About 2,000 pages were unsealed by a court in 2019, and additional documents were released each year until 2022. 

The batch being released now includes about 250 records.

Some sections have been blacked out or sealed entirely due to concerns about the privacy rights of Epstein’s victims and other people whose names had come up but weren’t complicit.