Amid great hype, a new batch of previously secret court documents was unsealed late Wednesday, January 3, related to Jeffrey Epstein, the jet-setting financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
The new documents include a bunch of names from Hollywood. Stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Cameron Diaz, Bruce Willis and Kevin Spacey have been name dropped. However, simply their mention doesn’t not imply that they have been party to any wrongdoing. One of the witnesses claimed that Epstein “would be on the phone a lot at that time, and one time he said, ‘Oh, that was Leonardo, or that was Cate Blanchett or Bruce Willis. That kind of thing.” The person then added that they had indeed not even met Leonardo DiCaprio.
Social media has been rife in recent weeks with posts speculating the documents amounted to a list of rich and powerful men who were Epstein’s “clients” or “co-conspirators.” There was no such list. The first 40 documents in the court-ordered release largely consisted of already public material revealed through nearly two decades of newspaper stories, TV documentaries, interviews, legal cases and books about the Epstein scandal. Still, the records — including transcripts of interviews with some of Epstein’s victims and old police reports — contained reminders that the millionaire surrounded himself with famous and powerful figures, including a few who have also been accused of misconduct. The documents being unsealed are related to a lawsuit filed in 2015 by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre. She is one of dozens of women who sued Epstein for abusing them at his homes in Florida, New York, the U.S. Virgin Islands and New Mexico. This suit was against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is now serving a 20-year prison term for helping recruit and abuse his victims.
Even before the documents were released, misinformation about what was in them abounded. Social media users wrongly claimed that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s name might appear in the documents, spurred by a crack New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made Tuesday on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show. Kimmel said in a response on X that he had never met Epstein and that Rodgers’ “reckless words put my family in danger.”