Epstein Data Wiki

Audrey Strauss

Properties2
tagsperson, prosecutor, sdny, us-attorney, maxwell-prosecution, mcc, 2019-2021
aliasesAudrey Strauss, Strauss, Audrey, Acting United States Attorney Audrey Strauss, A. Strauss

15 min read

Named on the documents asAudrey Strauss, with the title Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and later United States Attorney; Strauss, Audrey in directory order; and as the Attorney for the United States, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515 in charging documents1
Size of the file837 documents on the exact phrase, 901 over the union of forms. ⚠ MOST OF IT IS NOT ABOUT EPSTEIN — she ran the largest federal prosecutor’s office in the country and the bulk of these documents are daily press digests about unrelated SDNY cases. 651 documents name both her and Ghislaine Maxwell12
The acts this page is built onFive days after Epstein died she was one of eight people from her office who went into the jail to see his cell, on terms her office set: only jail lawyers to escort them, and no conversation with any guard3 · She charged and announced the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell4 · Her own words from that press conference were quoted back at the government by Maxwell’s defence as trial evidence5
And the pattern that recursHer public statements became a repeated legal problem for her own office. Maxwell’s counsel cited them in moving for a gag order; Prince Andrew’s solicitors wrote to her office calling her commentary “improper”67
What no document read here showsAny role by her in the 2006-2008 Florida investigation; what she saw or said inside the jail; or any decision of hers about whom else to charge
Covered elsewhere on this wikiGhislaine Maxwell · Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor · Prosecution of the MCC officers

Audrey Strauss was Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from June 2020, and then United States Attorney, having previously been the office’s second in command. She is a career federal prosecutor acting in an official capacity throughout everything on this page, and nothing here is a suggestion of wrongdoing by her.

What the documents show is a prosecutor whose public voice kept becoming a fact in the case. Three separate sets of lawyers, for Ghislaine Maxwell and for the Duke of York, went on the record objecting to what she said in public, and one of her sentences was offered to a jury’s judge as evidence about the government’s own motives. That is the thread this page follows, along with one document that places her physically inside the jail where Epstein died.

Five days after the death, inside the cell

Jeffrey Epstein died in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on 10 August 2019. On 13 August, in the early afternoon, Assistant United States Attorney Rebekah Donaleski emailed the jail’s Supervisory Staff Attorney, Adam M. Johnson, to arrange a visit. The email gives the list of who was coming from the United States Attorney’s office:

Geoffrey Berman Audrey Strauss Laura Birger Craig Stewart ▮▮▮ Nicholas Roos3

⚠ The bar is on the sheet, and an earlier version of this page left it out and called this a list of five. It is not a list of five. The same list is set out in full elsewhere in the release at eight names, adding Russell Capone, Rebekah Donaleski, who sent the request and also went, and one name barred in both copies, which the desk has not sought.8

And then what they wanted to see, and on what terms:

As discussed, we would like to see the 2nd floor pscyh observation and suicide watch area; the 9th floor SHU, and Epstein’s cell, which we understand to still be cordoned off. As discussed, we would appreciate if only MCC legal would escort us, and we will not speak to any of the guards present given the ongoing investigations.3

The office asked, in advance and in writing, not to be put in contact with the officers on duty. The stated reason is the ongoing investigations, which is a normal and defensible precaution for prosecutors who may have to charge those officers, and two of them were in fact later charged. The email also asks whether it would be easier to enter by the third-floor bridge. The jail offered 10 a.m. on Thursday 15 August 2019. The cited sheet says only “I will try to arrange it for 10 am, but we may be subject to the US Attorney’s schedule”, and the time was confirmed in a later exchange in which the jail asked whether 10 a.m. suited Berman and was told it did.38

One more document travelled down the jail’s own chain of command that afternoon. A Bureau of Prisons official forwarding the request to a colleague added a single instruction:

Please ensure your area is presentable and all cells are clean.9

This page does not characterise that instruction. It is recorded because the request that produced it was an inspection by the prosecutors then investigating the same institution.

Charging Maxwell, and the words that followed her

Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2 July 2020. The announcement in Strauss’s name sets out the charges, including that Maxwell “made several false statements in sworn depositions in 2016”, and gives her own statement in full:

As alleged, Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated, aided, and participated in acts of sexual abuse of minors. Maxwell enticed minor girls, got them to trust her, and then delivered them into the trap that she and Jeffrey Epstein had set. She pretended to be a woman they could trust. All the while, she was setting them up to be abused sexually by Epstein and, in some cases, Maxwell herself. Today, after many years, Ghislaine Maxwell finally stands charged for her role in these crimes.4

She said something else at that press conference, and it came back. In a filing of 29 October 2021, Maxwell’s defence quoted it and built an argument on it:

in announcing the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell at a choreographed press conference on July 2, 2020, Acting United States Attorney Audrey Strauss boldly announced: “This case against Ghislaine Maxwell is the prequel to the earlier case we brought against Jeffrey Epstein.”5

The defence’s use of it was to argue that the government’s sequence was driven by publicity rather than evidence, that the New York investigation had focused on Epstein alone, that after his death the government “had to scramble to quickly build a case against his purported co-conspirators”, and that the defence was entitled to put the public outcry and the media scrutiny before the jury. The same filing notes that the New York FBI did not speak to a single one of the four accusers in that case until after Epstein’s death.5

This page takes no position on whether that argument was right. ⚠ It is a defence filing, written to win a motion. What is documented, and is the point here, is narrower and harder: her sentence at a press conference became an exhibit in the case she had brought.

Two sets of lawyers object to her talking

On 21 July 2020, three weeks after the arrest, Maxwell’s counsel Jeffrey Pagliuca asked the trial judge for a gag order, citing the public comments of Strauss, of the head of the New York FBI office, and of lawyers for Maxwell’s accusers, and arguing an order was needed to prevent “prejudicial pretrial publicity by the government, its agents, and lawyers for alleged witnesses.”6

Eight days earlier, a different set of lawyers had made the same complaint privately. On 13 July 2020, Gary Bloxsome, a partner at the English firm Blackfords LLP acting for the Duke of York, wrote to the Southern District of New York:

Geoffrey Berman and Audrey Strauss have persistently commented about the prospects and purpose of interviewing the Duke of York, prompting widespread media coverage. We regard that commentary as improper. Your offer to refrain from publicly commenting on the substance of any witness interview and general assurances about your standard practice are clearly insufficient to prevent the DoJ and the SDNY from encouraging a media circus around the process of arranging for and the Duke attending any interview.7

What he asked for was narrow: an undertaking of confidentiality about the dates and arrangements of any interview, which he described as “no more than would be good practice in the UK.”7 No document read for this page records the office’s reply, or whether any undertaking was given.

The report the Department sent her and would not publish

On 12 November 2020 the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility wrote to her, enclosing its Report of Investigation into the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida’s Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and Its Interactions with Victims during the Investigation.10

The covering letter is explicit that she and her office were not the subject of it, and explicit about why she was being given it anyway:

Although OPR’s investigation did not involve your Office, we are providing you with the Report because it may be relevant to ongoing litigation being handled by your Office.10

The same letter sets out what the Department intended to make public, and what it did not:

In addition, because this matter has received extraordinary public attention and has been the subject of Congressional inquiries, the Department of Justice is today publicly releasing the Executive Summary. The Department does not plan to publicly release the full report at this time, but will provide it to Congress upon its request. Congress may choose to release the full report to the public.10

The Department investigated its own handling of Epstein, published the summary, and decided against publishing the report. The letter adds that “it is possible that all or parts of the report may become public through the processing of Freedom of Information Act requests”, and copies the Chief of the Public Corruption Unit.10 What an institution declines to release is a fact about the institution, and this page records the decision without inferring a reason for it.

Identification, and why the file size is misleading

Union 901 documents, and it is a floor.

formdocumentsoutside the base set
"Audrey Strauss"837base
"Strauss, Audrey"4745
"A. Strauss"1919
"Audrey A. Strauss"00

⚠ THE COUNT IS NOT A MEASURE OF HER INVOLVEMENT, AND THIS PAGE SAYS SO RATHER THAN QUIETLY BENEFITING FROM IT. She was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and a large part of the file is daily press-clipping digests in which her name appears announcing prosecutions with no connection to this matter: an organised-crime sentencing, a material-support case, a bank chief executive charged over loans. A document that names her is not evidence about Epstein. The subset that names both her and Ghislaine Maxwell is 651, and everything on this page is drawn from documents read individually.2

Bounds: "Audrey A. Strauss" returns zero, which is recorded because a form that fails is evidence about the corpus. The surname alone was not used: Strauss also carries the unrelated Strauss-Kahn matter, which appears in these same documents and which a surname sweep would silently merge.2

Footnotes

  1. Counts on the authoritative pages_fts route, scoped text_content, each form run as an exact phrase, identifier sets compared by set difference against the "Audrey Strauss" base. Titles as the documents print them, including the § 515 formula used in charging documents. ↩ ↩2

  2. Same route. Base 837; union 901; intersection with "Ghislaine Maxwell" 651. The bare surname was not used as an identifier at any point, because Strauss-Kahn occurs in the same press digests and would contaminate it. "Audrey A. Strauss" returns 0. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00044963 p. 237, an email of 13 August 2019, 2:05 pm, from an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York to the Supervisory Staff Attorney at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, listing the visitors and the areas requested. ⚠ CORRECTED 2026-09-18: this footnote previously said “the five visitors”, contradicting the body two paragraphs above, which says in terms that it is not a list of five and gives eight. The body is right; the footnote was the stale half. A page that contradicts itself is wrong in one place and untrustworthy in both, and this is the second such self-contradiction found on a live page in as many days. The same email is reproduced at pp. 242, 283, 423, 499, 504, 513, 518 and 523 of the same compilation as it was forwarded through the jail; the tour was set for 10 a.m. on Thursday 15 August 2019 (p. 283). VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, including the redaction bar marked in the quotation above. ⚠ The sheet’s own Date field reads 14:06; the “2:05 PM” that appears in later forwarded copies is the quoted-line time. ⚠ The sender’s name is barred in the copy cited here. It is taken instead from https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00045963 p. 158. ⚠ The desk first measured that as the only copy of thirty-two printing the signature. That measurement was wrong, and it was wrong because of the desk’s own regular expression rather than the documents: the signature block appears on 27 pages of that document alone, and the email exists in at least 38 copies across two compilations. The desk names her because she is a federal prosecutor acting in her official capacity, a class this wiki names, and because she is not a withheld identity: she appears in 49 documents in the release under her full name. The text layer prints the jail’s own typing error, pscyh, reproduced here as it stands. ⚠ The email spells one visitor’s forename two different ways on the same sheet, Nicholas in the visitor list and Nicolas in the header; the release as a whole favours Nicolas by 71 documents to 7. Government office telephone numbers appear on these sheets and are not reproduced. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00010990, the announcement of the charges against Ghislaine Maxwell of 2 July 2020, carrying Strauss’s statement in full, together with statements by the FBI Assistant Director in Charge and the New York Police Commissioner. A further copy is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00016166. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, the statement confirmed verbatim. It is framed throughout, in its own words, as what was alleged. ⚠ The place of arrest is not named in this document; it is given in the press digest cited at 6. ↩ ↩2

  5. https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00005456, a defence filing in United States v. Maxwell, case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE, document 382, filed 29 October 2021, quoting the press conference and citing a video recording of it. A further copy is at https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00006418. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi: the quotation and the four-accusers sentence are verbatim in Document 382. Everything drawn from this document is the assertion of Maxwell’s defence in an advocacy filing and is presented as their claim. The desk has not seen the recording the filing cites and does not confirm the quotation against it; what is confirmed is that the filing attributes those words to her. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01658203 p. 17, a press digest of 22 July 2020 reporting the gag-order application of the previous day and quoting the letter’s characterisation of the comments at issue. Read from the text layer; not verified at the image. ⚠ This is a press report of a court filing, two removes from the filing itself, and the underlying letter has not been read. It is cited for the fact that the application was made and that her comments were among those cited. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00023791 p. 3, an email of 13 July 2020 from a partner at Blackfords LLP, acting for the Duke of York, to the Southern District of New York, under the subject line “Sensitive correspondence”. A further copy is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00023783. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, text and authorship confirmed. The addressee line and salutation are barred; two lawyers copied on it are not, and are not reproduced here because nothing on this page rests on them. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00045963 pp. 157-158, which sets out the visitor list at eight names and carries the exchange settling the time. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. Russell Capone reaches 21 documents in the release and Rebekah Donaleski 49; both are federal prosecutors named in their official capacity, which this wiki publishes. One name on the list is barred in every copy read and was not sought. ↩ ↩2

  9. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00044963 p. 417, a Bureau of Prisons forwarding message of 13 August 2019, 4:24 pm, carrying the instruction quoted. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. The sheet is a single message of 13 August 2019, 16:24, forwarding this tour request to one colleague, and the quoted sentence plus “Thank you” is its entire body. It carries none of the marks of a standing notice: no distribution list, no post-order or policy citation, no recurring subject line, no reference to sanitation rounds. ⚠ What the sheet cannot settle is whether the sender wrote such a line habitually, and for that reason it is quoted exactly and not interpreted. ↩

  10. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00028680 p. 1, the covering letter of 12 November 2020 from the Office of Professional Responsibility to the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, transmitting the OPR Report of Investigation and stating the Department’s publication intentions. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, including the report title and the cc line. The signature is barred. The enclosed report is not part of this document and has not been read for this page. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

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