Court records unsealed in New York today name Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and dozens of others who came up in the litigation of a since-settled 2015 defamation suit filed by Virginia Giuffre, a victim of the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, against his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered the records unsealed last month, the culmination of years of efforts by the Miami Herald to put the material in the public record. At issue were the identities of 185 Jane and John Does whose identities a variety of parties had asked the court to reveal. Seven were victims who had been trafficked by Epstein; three involved duplicative records; two Preska described as “peripheral to the events at issue” and “neither a victim nor associated with Epstein or Maxwell”; and one is a person who was mistakenly described as an alleged perpetrator by a reporter.

These people, though many among them were witnesses to Epstein’s trafficking of women and girls, were not necessarily Epstein clients, or in fact accused of any wrongdoing, and the identities of many if not most were already known to the public due to the release of previous caches of documents or media reports. (Among the reasons that Preska cited for making the identities of various Does public were that one was a police officer, that one has been dead since 2018 and had been photographed on a private island where Epstein carried out abuses, and that “this individual has given multiple interviews to the media.”) https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d94...-of-jeffrey-epstein-associates